Chapter 11 — The Machine of Dreams

Part III — Regional Qualifiers

The last ten days before the regional qualifiers passed in a breathtaking rush. The regular class schedule had not slowed down—the mid-semester exam was approaching, forcing Bảo Châu to divide her time between studying, doing homework, and working hard in the evenings in the factory, sometimes lasting until nearly ten o'clock at night even though Mr. Vinh had repeatedly reminded the team to take care of their health.

"The final checklist," Hoàng Nam announced during Monday night's meeting, taping a large sheet of paper to the whiteboard, listing dozens of items that needed to be completed before game day. "We also have to check all the wiring, test the control program at least twenty times to ensure stability, and complete the technical presentation for the judges."

"Twenty times?" Đức exclaimed, unable to hide his tiredness. "We've done more than thirty test runs in the past two weeks."

"The more the better," Hoàng Nam replied, his voice decisive and without any mercy. "One small missed mistake is enough to cause the whole team to lose their opportunity. We cannot take any risks."

Bảo Châu noticed the tension in Hoàng Nam's voice becoming more and more obvious with each passing day, a tension that was no longer simply the normal competition pressure she had witnessed before. He began to show clear signs of fatigue — darker circles under his eyes, shorter, more curt answers than usual, and sudden moments of absent-mindedness in the middle of a conversation, as if his mind was being pulled somewhere else.

"Are you okay?" she asked quietly one evening, when they were both staying late to make a final check of the connection between the outer shell and the chassis.

"It's okay," Hoàng Nam replied quickly, a little too quickly than usual, without raising his head from what he was doing. "There's just a lot of work to be done."

Bảo Châu did not ask further, but she noticed that Hoàng Nam's phone kept lighting up in his pocket throughout that evening, and each time, he quickly turned off the screen without looking at it, his expression flashed with a bit of indescribable tension before returning to focus on work as if nothing had happened.

That tense atmosphere gradually spread to the whole team. Tấn Phát, who always maintained an optimistic and humorous spirit to lighten the atmosphere, also began to become more irritable when he constantly had to edit the programming code over and over again according to Hoàng Nam's detailed editing requests.

"Do you know that I've edited this code five times in the last two days?" Tấn Phát rebounded one afternoon, his voice rarely so harsh. "If we keep changing the requirements like this, we'll never finish it in time."

"I just want to make sure everything is as perfect as possible," Hoàng Nam replied, his voice equally tense.

"Nothing is perfect, Hoàng Nam," Tấn Phát said, his voice beginning to tremble with accumulated frustration. "If you keep demanding absolute perfection like that, you'll only end up exhausting the whole team before the match actually starts."

The whole workshop fell into an oppressive silence after those words. Bảo Châu looked at two close friends who had always gotten along well and were now facing each other in a rare argument, feeling the need to do something to reconcile before things got worse.

"Maybe," she said, trying to keep her voice calm, "we should take a fifteen-minute break. Everyone's tired, and being tired often makes people more likely to say insincere things."

Teacher Vinh, who just passed by and heard the debate, also nodded in agreement. "Bảo Châu is right. Everyone, please rest for a bit. I'll make hot tea for the whole team."

During that short break, the whole group sat around the small table, sipping hot tea in silence. Teacher Vinh, sitting opposite Hoàng Nam, looked at his student with eyes full of concern.

"Hoàng Nam," he said gently, "I know you want everything to be perfect, and I understand why you put such great pressure on yourself and the team. But do you know, sometimes the perfection you pursue is what makes your team weaker, not stronger?"

Hoàng Nam was silent, bowed his head and looked at the cup of tea in his hand, not responding immediately.

"A good machine requires more than just individual perfect parts," Mr. Vinh continued, sounding like a teacher imparting a lesson more important than robotics. "It needs those parts to work together. The same goes for your team. If you keep pushing everyone to the limit because of your own fear of failure, eventually the bond between members will break before the robot has a chance to prove its worth."

Those words seemed touch something deep in Hoàng Nam's heart. He looked up and looked around at the group - Tấn Phát still had a bit of frustration on his face, Đức silently observed, and Bảo Châu was looking at him with worried but sympathetic eyes.

"Sorry," he said, turning to Tấn Phát first. "You're right. I asked for too much in such a short time. I just... I'm just so scared if we fail again."

"We know," Tấn Phát replied, his voice softening, placing a sympathetic hand on his best friend's shoulder. "But you don't have to bear all that fear alone. We're here with you."

The tense atmosphere gradually disappeared after that sincere conversation, replaced by a new, more solid consensus. The whole team returned to work with a much more relaxed spirit, although the amount of work ahead had not decreased.

But Bảo Châu still couldn't completely shake off the feeling of anxiety that lingered in her heart throughout that evening—the feeling that the fear of failure Hoàng Nam had just admitted to the team, although sincere, was not all that weighed on his shoulders. There was another, deeper burden that he was not ready to share, hidden behind the phone calls he always hastily interrupted and the messages he secretly read and then hid.

Nearly nine o'clock at night, when the group ended the meeting and everyone packed their things to leave, Bảo Châu deliberately stayed behind to wait for Hoàng Nam, using the excuse that he needed to complete a few small decorative details on the robot's head. When there were only two people left in the workshop, she noticed that his phone lit up again, and this time, instead of turning off the screen immediately like usual, Hoàng Nam stood silently looking at it for a long time, his face flashed with a complex expression that she couldn't fully read - not quite sadness, not quite anger, but more like a long-familiar tired resignation.

"Who called?" she asked, trying to keep her voice light, not wanting to create the impression of scrutiny.

"Nothing important," Hoàng Nam replied, stuffing the phone into his pocket, his tone so calm that it sounded somewhat forced. "Just an advertising message."

Bảo Châu knew it wasn't true — she watched long enough to realize the caller's name appearing on the screen began with the word "Mom," but she chose not to inquire further, sensing the fragile line that Hoàng Nam was trying to maintain. Instead, she just quietly continued her work, letting him have his own space if needed.

"Thank you for staying longer," Hoàng Nam said after a moment of silence, his voice returning to more normal. "And thank you for helping to reconcile what happened earlier with Tấn Phát. I know sometimes I get too upset."

"You're not upset," Bảo Châu replied, smiling reassuringly. "It's just that you care so much that sometimes you forget to take care of yourself."

Hoàng Nam looked at her for a moment, his eyes softening, as if those words had just touched on something he had never thought about in this way before. "I'll try to remember that," he said softly.

On the bike ride home that night, Bảo Châu kept thinking about the word "Mother" flashing across the phone screen, about the way Hoàng Nam always avoided all questions related to his future major, and about the invisible burden that she felt more clearly each day but still could not name exactly. She told herself she would wait patiently, believing that when he was ready, Hoàng Nam would open up and share himself, just as he had gradually learned to trust the team more each day. But a certain part of her—the sharp, intuitive part of someone who always observed the world through the lens of an artist—vaguely sensed that the real storm was still ahead and had not yet begun.