Chapter 3 — The Machine of Dreams

That Wednesday, Bảo Châu arrived at the factory fifteen minutes earlier than planned, partly out of curiosity, partly because she didn't want to leave the impression of someone who just came for show. The workshop door was open, but inside there was only a thin, middle-aged man wearing black-rimmed glasses, busy rearranging the pile of documents on the teacher's desk in the corner of the room.

"Hello," he looked up when he heard footsteps, a gentle smile appeared on his face, which had a few wrinkles due to age. "Are you a new member? I heard Hoàng Nam mention you. Teacher Vinh, Physics teacher, club advisor."

"Yes, hello teacher," Bảo Châu bowed her head, a bit surprised because she didn't think the club had a teacher advisor regularly present. "I'm Bảo Châu, class 12A2."

"Ah, Bảo Châu," Mr. Vinh nodded, motioning for her to sit in the chair opposite. "Hoàng Nam said you were in charge of the exterior design. I'm very happy, because our team has been lacking someone with an eye for aesthetics for a long time. The boys here are only good at calculating, but looking at what their robot did..." he shook his head slightly, his eyes filled with humor. "Let's just say it looks more like a crawling iron box than a machine worth showing off in competition."

Bảo Châu laughed at the teacher's straightforward analogy, the initial feeling of tension gradually disappeared. "I'll try to make it less like an iron box."

"I believe you can do it," Mr. Vinh said, his voice becoming a bit more serious. "But I also want to tell you one thing in advance — the work here is not as simple as drawing a picture on paper. All of your designs must comply with technical limits: maximum weight, size specified by the organizers, material durability. That is the hardest part of working in a technical team — beauty must serve what is right, not go against it."

That advice was deeply imprinted in Bảo Châu's mind, and she soon realized that what Mr. Vinh said was not wrong at all. That afternoon, when she brought the latest design - a shell with soft curves surrounding the entire robot frame, inspired by the shape of a eagle spreading its wings - to Hoàng Nam's desk to ask for opinions, the first reaction she received was not praise.

"Nice design," Hoàng Nam said, rotating the drawing under the desk lamp, his tone cautious. "But if made of this material, the total weight would exceed the tournament's allowable limit by at least half a kilogram."

"Just half a kilo?" Bảo Châu asked again, unable to hide her disappointment. "Can't you be a little more flexible?"

"The judges weigh the robot right before each match," Hoàng Nam explained, his voice still patient although somewhat dry. "Exceeding even one gram results in direct elimination, no exceptions. Last year, a team was eliminated in the first round simply because they forgot to calculate the weight of the coating."

Bảo Châu was silent, looking down at her drawing, a feeling of disappointment rising in her throat. It had taken her nearly three evenings to perfect those curves, meticulously calculating each angle so that it was both beautiful and in harmony with the chassis below. Now everything might have to be thrown away just because of a number she had never thought of.

"So what should I do now?" she asked, her voice quiet, wondering if her abilities were really suitable for this job.

Hoàng Nam looked at her for a moment, seemingly realizing the frustration rising in her eyes. “It's not like giving up design completely,” he said, his voice softening a bit. "Just find a way to reduce the amount of material without losing the overall shape. For example..." he took the pencil and carefully drew a few more thin lines on her drawing, creating tiny honeycomb-shaped spaces along the wing. "If you cut away the material in places that do not bear direct force, following this honeycomb structure, you can still maintain the necessary stiffness and significantly reduce the weight."

Bảo Châu stared at the new contours, a feeling of both surprise and excitement welling up in her heart. Not just a purely technical solution, but those honeycomb-shaped gaps, as she visualized them with a painter's eye, add a layer of delicate pattern, making the design look even more sophisticated than the original.

"Oh..." she exclaimed, picking up her own pencil and starting to sketch again in the suggested direction, adding a few small decorative details along the edges of the holes to make them look more intentional than simply cutting material. "This... is actually more beautiful than my original idea."

"Technology and aesthetics don't have to be at odds," Hoàng Nam said, a hint of pride in his voice, as if he had just proven something important to himself. "It's just that sometimes it's necessary to find the intersection between those two things."

From the other corner of the room, Lâm Tấn Phát sitting in front of the computer suddenly raised his head, his hands still typing on the keyboard non-stop. "Hey, are you two really working there or are you holding private drawing classes?" he asked, his voice familiarly joking.

"We're solving the problem of the weight of the shell," Hoàng Nam replied, not bothering to look up from the drawing.

"Ah, so it's a serious matter," Tấn Phát nodded and chuckled. "I thought you two were going to draw couple pictures for each other."

"Tấn Phát," Hoàng Nam warned harshly, but this time Bảo Châu noticed that his ears were slightly pink, a small detail that she found more interesting than annoying.

That afternoon passed with a busy working atmosphere but much more comfortable than the first day. Bảo Châu gradually got used to the rhythm of the factory - the sound of a drill mixed with the sound of typing on a keyboard, the smell of burning plastic mixed with the smell of instant coffee that someone had prepared in an old thermos placed on a common shelf. She realized that each member of the team had their own working angle, their own rhythm, but they all revolved around a common goal that she had never fully felt before — not just completing a task, but creating something together, little by little, from two hands and hours of hard work.

When it was dusk, Bảo Châu neatly packed the newly completed drawing into her briefcase and prepared to leave. Before passing by Hoàng Nam's table, she stopped for a moment.

"Thank you, about earlier," she said, her voice sincere. "If it weren't for your suggestion, I probably would have given up and started over in a safer direction."

Hoàng Nam looked up at her, a bit confused by that unexpected thank you. "Nothing," he replied, his voice a bit awkward. "That's what a team does — complementing what others lack."

That sentence, simple but sincere, stayed in Bảo Châu's mind all the way home. She realized that, perhaps for the first time since entering this factory, she no longer felt like an outsider forced to be present, but began to feel something akin to belonging.

That evening, sitting in her private room, Bảo Châu opened her sketchbook, not to continue drawing the robot design, but to jot down a few small thoughts like a habit she has kept since childhood. She wrote: "It turns out that a beautiful thing is not necessarily useless, and a useful thing is not necessarily ugly. Maybe I was wrong in always thinking those two worlds — the world of soft lines and the world of dry numbers — could never touch each other." She stopped writing, looked back at the words she had just written, then smiled to herself, somewhat embarrassed at her sudden cheesiness.

The phone vibrated on the table, it was a text message from Thục Hiền, accompanied by a series of questions that kept her from breathing: "So what's going on? Is there anything fun at the club today? How are you and that cold homeroom manager? Tell me quickly, I've been waiting all this time."

Bảo Châu laughed, quickly typed a few lines of response, recounting the story of teacher Vinh comparing the team's robot to a crawling iron box, the story of her having to redraw the design because it exceeded the allowed weight, and the small detail of Hoàng Nam's pink ears when teased by Tấn Phát. She deliberately omitted to mention the strange feeling that rose in her heart every time she met the club president's focused eyes bending over their shared drawing, partly because she wasn't sure what to call that feeling, partly because she was afraid that if she said it out loud, it would become more real than she was willing to face.

"It sounds like you're starting to like that club," Thục Hiền texted back, along with a meaningful winking emoticon. "Or is it more like liking someone in that club?"

"Don't talk nonsense," Bảo Châu typed hastily, even though the corner of her mouth had automatically turned up into a smile without her even realizing it. She put down the phone, turned off the desk lamp, lay down on the bed with the image of the delicate honeycomb lines on the drawing still lingering in her mind, and Hoàng Nam's simple words were still echoing somewhere: that is the work of a team - complementing what others lack. Perhaps, she thought before falling asleep, it wasn't just the robot that was gradually being supplemented to become more perfect day by day.