There's a coffee ring on the desk I keep tracing with my thumb.
Didn't notice I was doing it until my jaw started hurting.
Book wasn't violent. Just… leaning. Enough that my first size felt greedy in hindsight. I nudged it down. Mid-window. Same leader. Still time.
Cursor halfway across the ladder when the PoH tick rolled.
I didn't see it roll. I saw the slot boundary move after, like a receipt printing.
Leader window rotated without a sound. On Fogo low latency layer-1's sub-40ms block time, it never does. The Fogo SVM runtime didn't pause. Parallel execution kept draining. Banking stage sealed what it had.
My original size went through.
The resize didn't.
I stared at the log like it might confess to a stall.
It didn't.
Account locks resolved for the version of me that acted earlier. The deterministic inclusion path walked forward as if I never touched the slider.
My new packet landed clean.
Just in the next window.
Fogo's Firedancer client was already producing inside the next leader schedule. Vote stage scrollingm.. tight, low variance. Tower lockout extending. Turbine propagation fanning blocks through racks that don't know my cursor was still moving. Active zone compact, everything close enough to feel rude.
#
For a second I tried to call it latency.
Then I checked the timestamp.
Packet left the NIC nine milliseconds after the bank froze.
Nine.
Not slow. Just… after. Like arriving while elevator doors are kissing shut. You can still press the button. The building doesn't care.
The resize cleared at the next slot boundary like it had done everything right. Perfect timing for a state that no longer matched the book I thought I was adjusting against.
Liquidity shifted in between. Thin where it had looked thick. Fogo Partial execution first, then the rest at a worse level. Inventory skewed, FOGO exposure off, hedge firing wrong.
$FOGO I didn't have. Gone in the skew.
I exhaled through my nose too hard. Didn't mean to.
I leaned back. Chair creaked on the rail. NIC light kept blinking like a metronome I didn't agree to. Vote pipeline steady. Canonical client behavior identical across racks on Fogo L1. No jitter. No drift. Just state sealing itself on schedule under the canonical client while my hand tries to negotiate woth a boundary that doesn't negotiate.
Another slot boundary ticked over.
I kept my thumb off the trackpad.
For once.
Coffee cold. Fan hum steady. Leader window open.
Cursor sitting right over the size field.
And I can feel my jaw trying to lock again, like my body wants to click "submit" before my brain does.. anyways