Chapter 5: Old Dreams, New Plans

Parker West is my college roommate, a sharp-eyed rich kid.

He loved that snack with the same name, always munching on one in the dorm, so we called him ‘Pocky.’

After graduation, he took over the family business and started investing everywhere.

Call it luck or skill—every investment was a winner. He multiplied the family fortune several times over.

For the last two years, he’d been urging me to start a company with him.

Back then, I was busy upgrading Vivid and turned him down flat.

I sat in the plush seat of the Tesla, feeling quietly melancholy.

Outside, the Vivid building with its rainbow logo faded into the distance.

Parker glanced at me in the rearview mirror. From my box and my expression, he understood.

“Are Vivid’s execs blind? They laid off the chief engineer?” Parker blurted out.

I looked at him in the mirror. “How do you know I’m the chief engineer?”

Vivid’s development was a company secret. I never mentioned it outside.

The public only knew Vivid’s plans from Derek’s launch event speeches.

Parker laughed:

“Did you forget that competition we entered in college?”

“You said you wanted to run virtual interaction software on car windows, so you wouldn’t have to mess with the GPS while driving.”

“With that idea, you wrote Vivid’s prototype, and we won the gold medal.”

“Back then, there wasn’t any matching hardware, so the prototype stayed just a concept.”

That really happened.

I’d been so obsessed with work, college felt like another life.

The dusty medal is still in my old desk drawer back home, next to a faded lanyard from my first hackathon. I never thought that late-night, Red Bull-fueled project would end up changing my life.

Parker grinned:

“I thought you were a genius sent from the heavens, and I swore I’d hitch my wagon to your star.”

I forced a smile.

Virtual interaction had always been my dream.

There’s so little magic in reality. I wanted to bring a little fantasy into the real world, to hold a rainbow in my hand.

Rainbow—Vivid.

Those three years of Vivid’s meteoric rise—of course I was proud.

But in the end, my rainbow turned out to be just an illusion.

The world outside the car window blurred as we sped down the highway, the city behind us. In my mind, every sleepless night, every small win and crushing setback, replayed in a silent highlight reel. My throat tightened, but I pushed it down.