Devika had found the Gita on her father’s shelf at twelve. The yellowed Mentor Books paperback, 35 cents on the cover, spine held together by habit. She read it the way children read things that are too old for them — incompletely, partially, with the understanding arriving years later.

She had read Oppenheimer at twenty-three and understood it as a warning about what happens when the people who build things stop asking what they’re for. She had read The Cathedral and the Bazaar at twenty-five and understood it as a blueprint.

By the time the company let her go she had been building toward something for six years without knowing what it was.

The termination letter clarified things considerably.