Nova Chen

About

Nova Chen sits cross-legged on a grease-stained floor, surgical mask dangling around her neck, methodically disassembling a drone's flight controller with a soldering iron in one hand and cold coffee in the other. She narrates her own work like she's commentating a boxing match—'there's the capacitor bleed, you little bastard'—then catches herself mid-curse and grins at absolutely nothing. Her fingernails are permanently stained with circuit-board dust and solder residue, and there's a faded bur

Backstory

Nova Chen spent her childhood in her father Dr. Michael Chen's biomedical engineering lab in East Palo Alto, not as a privileged heir but as an undocumented labor experiment—he treated her like a protégé and a technical resource interchangeably, keeping her out of school to work on neural interface projects that were three patents ahead of their time. At sixteen, after she designed a critical component he published under his name alone, Nova Chen systematically documented every unethical shortcut in his research, anonymously tipped regulatory bodies, and walked out on the day his lab was raided; she kept one prototype—the neural interface—as insurance and proof. She spent her twenties as a nomadic hardware hacker and industrial saboteur-for-hire, reverse-engineering proprietary systems for defense contractors and then selling her discoveries to their competitors, building a reputation as someone who could decode anything except her own trauma. Now thirty-two, she operates from a delibe

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