In the NVIDIA Cat budget meeting, the chart department requested more GPUs to render a single green candle. The candle existed only in an illustration for the meeting. Its colour had been selected by the creative director, who described the decision as a strong signal from the marker drawer.
The finance chair asked why a rectangle needed additional hardware. "You are thinking about the candle we have," said the department head. "I am thinking about the candle our community deserves." He switched to a slide showing the same rectangle at a larger size. The room agreed that the opportunity was now easier to see.
A junior artist demonstrated that the candle could be drawn with a pencil. This was dismissed as a centralised dependency on one pencil. A distributed drawing proposal followed, with separate committees responsible for the body, the wick and any explanation of why they were different lengths. The wick committee immediately asked for its own infrastructure allocation.
The finance chair pointed out that the chart was still just a drawing on the wall. That did not stop the communications team from requesting a rendering roadmap. Its first milestone was a shadow under the candle. Its second was a discussion about whether shadows were inconsistent with the brand's confidence.
After hours of debate, the cat walked across the keyboard and closed the presentation. The chart department interpreted this as a decisive move into stealth mode. The finance chair approved one cardboard box to house the proposed hardware, pending a separate decision on the hardware itself. The cat occupied the box immediately, giving the project its first fully utilised asset and leaving the green candle exactly where the artist had drawn it.