Lin Mei pushed her heavy black-framed glasses up the bridge of her nose with a chalk-dusted thumb.
Her slide rule clicked as she tucked it into her vest pocket. Her notebook lay open on the heavy steel workbench in the corner of Studio B, its ruled pages covered in calculus equations, circuit diagrams, and timing trees.
Beside her, Clara wheeled her chair up to the mastering bay.
“Twenty-nine minutes until two-fourteen,” Clara said, her voice dropping into that quiet, sharp cadence. “The clock on the wall doesn’t care about our feelings.”
“Time is a linear scalar,” Lin Mei muttered, her hands moving over the equipment rack. “And right now, the vector is pointing straight down our throats.”
In the corner of the room stood the centerpiece of the editing bay: an Ampex ATR-102 two-track mastering tape deck.
The machine was a masterpiece of 1970s audio engineering. It sat mounted in a heavy steel rolling console, its massive die-cast aluminum top plate tilted at a forty-five-degree angle toward the operator. Two large, ribbed aluminum reels--ten and a half inches across--were locked onto the heavy brass hubs.
Between the reels ran a precision tape transport system: two massive dynamically balanced flywheel capstans, a sapphire tape guide, and a cast-iron head assembly containing three massive permalloy heads--Erase, Record, and Repro.
