On the day she was fired, Cheng Jian returned the company’s spare key. She also gave back thirty-seven night shifts no one had ever recorded.

“Your position is easy to replace,” her manager said, as a second alarm sounded in the server room upstairs. Cheng Jian slid her handover sheet across the desk. At the top, she had written: 8:00 p.m. tonight: manual monitoring of the old console ends.

He did not look. He was busy sending invitations to clients for the launch of the new system. In its demonstration video, every streetlight in the city came on exactly when it should, and hospitals had backup power during outages. The video looked wonderful. What had kept the real system alive through three storms, though, were temporary patches Cheng Jian and four colleagues had written through the night. Those patches existed only on the old console. The new system had never passed a live switchover.

She had warned them eleven times. The emails were on record. She was not going to warn them a twelfth.

At 7:59, she ordered five bowls of noodles for her team at a little shop by the road. At eight, festival lights came on across the city and Launch successful appeared on the enormous conference screen. At 8:02, the screen went black.

Her manager called at once. “Where are you? Come back and hold things together tonight. We’ll talk about your situation tomorrow.”

Cheng Jian glanced at her phone, then out the window. The row of lights at the hospital was still on. Before leaving, she had handed the independent backup circuit to the municipal duty officer, complete with schematics. She had never gambled with patients’ lives to make a point.

“Follow the fault manual I left,” she said. “The municipal hotline is on page three.”

Silence on the other end. Page three contained something else: the contract to maintain the system belonged to the small team she had just registered.

The noodles arrived. Then the city office called. The caller did not ask her to return to her old company. There was only one question: “Engineer Cheng, could we hire your team directly?”