"One more tweak," Leo whispered, his eyes bloodshot. "The thermal throttle is kicking in too early."

Leo sat hunched over a circuit board that looked more like a plate of copper spaghetti. Beside him, his laptop screen glowed with a directory of despair. He scrolled past hot-alarm-clock-v1 , hot-alarm-clock-v2-STABLE , and the ironically named hot-alarm-clock-THIS-IS-THE-ONE .

In the coding environment, he opened the main script. He had been debugging for twelve hours. The logic was sound, but the hardware kept overshooting the "comfortably warm" threshold and heading straight for "medium-rare human."