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墨書 Inktalez
The neon lights outside the glass curtain wall blurred into patches of color in the rain. I loosened my tie and leaned against the cold wall of the fire escape. The phone screen displayed two seventeen in the morning, and the last report from the marketing department was stuck at ninety-eight percent on the loading bar.
"The password has been decrypted!" Li Ya's voice, wrapped in the aroma of coffee, burst through the security door. Her light gray suit jacket was damp with rain, and a few strands of hair from her ponytail clung to her neck. "They embedded a mirror protocol in the third layer of the data packet. I used decompilation..."
I reached out to brush away the droplets from her shoulder, my fingertips grazing the damp wool fabric. "You should change into dry clothes first."
"There's no time." She pulled a laptop from her canvas bag, the blue light of the screen illuminating the rain between us. "In fifteen minutes, they will activate the self-destruct program. Looking at this code structure..." She suddenly fell silent as we both noticed a timer hidden within the protocol stack counting down at double speed.
I ripped off my tie and wrapped it around my palm, the metal cufflinks clattering against the keyboard with a sharp sound. "Give me three minutes." Sweat trickled down my spine into my waistband, and the wailing sirens from twelve floors below grew louder and then faded away. As the last character successfully jumped during the final ten seconds, Li Ya suddenly pressed down on my trembling fingertip. The silver ring on her ring finger brushed against the enter key, and cold light erupted into a starry sky of encrypted symbols.
That night at the celebration party, champagne sparkled with tiny bubbles as Li Ya set her glass on the terrace railing, neon lights casting dancing shadows on her eyelashes. "You know?" she said with a light laugh while swirling her glass, "The way you pound on the keyboard looks like you're playing Chopin's Funeral March."
I gazed at the fluorescent marker stains on her wrist, remnants of our three sleepless nights marking vulnerability maps. "I thought you would say I looked like a cornered beast." The evening breeze lifted the hem of her chiffon shirt, revealing a silver USB drive tucked at her waist—holding our core algorithm that we fought to protect.
Three months later, during the plum rain season, we discovered abnormal data flows in the server room. Li Ya climbed up a ladder to check the server in her ten-centimeter heels, jasmine scent wafting down as her skirt brushed against my shoulder. "Don't look up," she said playfully. "I don't want you to see how clumsy I am stealing a backup power supply." In a sudden spark from an electrical cable, I caught her as she lost her balance; her warmth seeped through her silk shirt into my palm.
That night we squatted under a convenience store awning waiting for the rain to stop. She drew code structures in the fogged-up glass with her finger. "When I was young, I always thought love was roses and love letters," she suddenly said, water streaks winding into binary rivers under neon lights. "Now I think... someone who can understand Quantum Encryption Protocol with me..." She turned her head, and I kissed away a raindrop lingering on her nose, mingling salty droplets with remnants of mocha foam on her lips.
On the day my resignation letter was printed, Li Ya was negotiating with venture capital representatives in the conference room. I caught a glimpse through the door crack as she pushed back a contract; her diamond watch reflected cold light in the projector beam. "What we want is not just funding," she tapped our handwritten business plan on the table with her index finger, "but white phosphorus bombs that can burn through the old world."
On opening night for our new company, we lay on the weathered wooden floor of the rooftop terrace. Li Ya tossed a USB drive necklace into the starry sky; galaxies flowed like torrents of data in her pupils. "Do you know why I chose you back then?" As she turned over, her hair brushed against my throat. "That day when your eyes were bloodshot yet you were still modifying firewalls—it reminded me so much of Prometheus refusing to give up."
I held tightly onto her hand adorned with a silver ring as distant blue indicator lights in the server room flickered on and off. The wind carried hints of early snow past our intertwined fingers, where seeds capable of reconstructing an entire digital world were beginning to grow.
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