Chapter 6 – The Name in the Margin

The boardroom on the twenty-first floor, usually sober, neat, and rigorous like a corporate operating theater, was plunged into a perfectly contained but dense chaos.

It felt as if something vital were on the verge of collapse—without anyone daring to name it.

The automatic blinds, barely ajar, allowed narrow blades of light to cut across the central table. The screens flickered with truncated graphs and lines of code flashing persistent errors.

Biomedical eng