She stared at the blue progress bar on her screen. Estimated time: 6 hours. She did the math. 6 hours from now would be 5:47 AM. Her final-year engineering project was due at 8:00 AM.

She had just wiped her hard drive. A clean install of Windows. “For optimal performance ,” she’d told herself smugly six hours ago. Now, optimal performance meant watching a download crawl at 800 KB/s because her hostel’s Wi-Fi had decided to take a nap.

“No,” Maya whispered, eyes wide. “This is going to take one forever. And then I’ll have it forever .”

She sat up. Fingers flying, she typed into her search bar: .

At 7:58 AM, she opened Visual Studio 2022, built her project, and submitted it with two minutes to spare.