I used to believe that hard work could solve anything. Equations. Funding. Even grief.
Back then, I was a Third-year PhD student in applied quantum computing, stationed in a windowless lab on the seventh floor of the physics building. I worked from ten in the morning to ten at night—seven days a week. No vacations. No weekends. No exceptions.
People said I was a genius. I wasn't. I was desperate.
Desperate to finish the experiment before the grant ran out. Desperate to publish before the postdoc "accidentally" scooped me again. Desperate to make enough progress that I could send my father—barely surviving on dialysis—some money to pay for better treatment.
That night was a Thursday, or maybe Monday. I didn't know anymore. The clocks in the lab had lost meaning. My body was running on black coffee, instant noodles, and raw adrenaline.
At 3:42 a.m., the data stream stabilized. My pulse quickened. The coherence time on the qubit array had finally crossed the critical threshold. After months of tuning noise filters and wrangling control pulses, I had a working prototype. I had done it.
I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
My fingers trembled as I saved the data. I should have screamed in triumph. Instead, I just… sat there. Exhausted. Numb. Quietly proud.
I glanced at the security feed. The building was dark. I decided to head out and grab something—anything—to eat. I hadn't eaten in fourteen hours.
The shortest way to the stairwell was past Professor Tanaka's office. I didn't intend to stop. I didn't care if he was still there. But as I walked past, I heard it.
A soft laugh. Female.
Then a moan.
My breath caught.
The office door was ajar. Just an inch.
I knew I should have kept walking.
I didn't.
Peering through that narrow opening, I saw something I wasn't meant to see: my advisor, Professor Hiroshi Tanaka—head of the Quantum Interface Lab, senior IEEE fellow, and my thesis supervisor—was pressed against the wall, entangled with our lab's postdoc, Dr. Jessica Han.
It wasn't just a kiss. It was… desperate. Intimate. Frantic. Her fingers clutched at the fabric of his dress shirt, tugging at the collar like she was drowning and he was air. His hand was buried in her hair, pulling her close, anchoring her as if he feared she'd vanish. Their silhouettes moved in rhythm—raw, silent, and full of something unspoken yet unmistakably familiar. Not love. Not lust. Something darker. Complicity? Panic?
I held my breath. My body frozen in place. I had no idea what to do next.
A half-second later, the door creaked. Jessica turned her head. Our eyes met. Then the door slammed shut. My blood went cold.
I had made a terrible mistake.
Three Days Later
I kept telling myself it was nothing. Maybe they didn't realize I saw. Maybe they'd pretend nothing had happened. Maybe—just maybe—it would all blow over, and we'd go back to pretending we were just a normal research group chasing elusive qubits and struggling with bad coffee and underpowered cryostats.
But the silence in the lab shifted—something visceral, almost physical. It wasn't the usual quiet of intense focus or exhaustion; it was the kind that made your skin tighten and your breath catch. No one spoke to me unless absolutely necessary. The undergrads stopped asking me questions. Jessica would leave the room the moment I entered. When I passed Tanaka in the hallway, he didn't even nod—he looked through me, as if I had turned into an inconvenient shadow.
At first, I kept sending emails. Not about what I'd seen—never that. Just regular updates. Progress logs. Technical questions about the experiment I'd been running. I wrote them the way I always did: concise, polite, full of deference. And I waited for replies that never came.
Then, on a Wednesday afternoon, the blow landed.
It arrived in the form of a plain-text email. No preamble. No explanation.
Subject: Funding Update
Dear Jae-Min,
Due to a recent reallocation of departmental funds, we regret to inform you that your research stipend has been suspended, effective immediately.
—Admin Office, Department of Physics
No signature. No contact person. Just a bureaucratic dagger.
I read it once. Then again. The words didn't change. My chest tightened.
I sat there in the empty office, blinking at the screen, unmoving for what must've been five full minutes. The hum of the fridge down the hall buzzed faintly, indifferent to my unraveling.
No funding meant no more cleanroom access. No more measurement time. No reagents. No fabrication slots. No graduate assistant role. No paycheck.
No research.
No research meant no thesis.
No thesis meant no graduation.
And no money meant… no way to send the $3,200 my father needed by the end of the month for his dialysis upgrade. The hospital in Daegu had warned us: without the better unit, he might not make it through another infection.
I stared at the budget spreadsheet I'd kept open in the background. I had exactly $472 left in my account. Rent and food would eat half of that.
I called him that night, using the old IDD minutes card he had mailed me last winter.
"Appa," I said, forcing brightness into my voice. "There's been some delay in the university disbursement. It's just a paperwork thing. I'll send the money next week."
He didn't ask questions. He never did.
He simply said, "괜찮아, 재민아. I'm proud of you. You work so hard."
There was a long pause. I heard the gentle beeping of a monitor on his end, a nurse speaking faintly in the background. The smell of disinfectant filled my imagination, even from half a world away.
"I'll be okay," he said. "Don't worry about me. Just focus on your research."
I said I would.
I lied.
Four days later, the hospital called. His voice never returned.
Six Weeks Later
I tried to keep going.
Some mornings I woke up convinced it had all been a mistake. That maybe there'd be an email, an apology, a correction. But those hopes died quickly. The university didn't care about what was fair. Only what was clean. And I no longer had a place in their version of clean.
So I stripped my project of everything bold, everything personal. No real-time interface stabilization. No novel gate noise suppression. I deleted the lab records, rewrote every section, rebranded it as a "comparative simulation analysis of near-term quantum interface protocols." A title that said nothing, promised less, and required no original data.
I wrote the thesis in three days.
No charts from the dilution fridge. No logs from the pulse generators I'd configured by hand. Just simulated curves and citations. The work was shallow and hollow. But it passed formatting review. That was enough.
The department gave me a date for my defense. A Thursday morning in late May. Room B103.
I didn't care anymore.
I didn't sleep the night before. I didn't shave. My hair was too long, but I couldn't bring myself to cut it. I showed up in a crumpled suit that didn't quite fit anymore. My shirt was wrinkled, my tie borrowed from a friend who'd already left the program.
The conference room felt too bright. The fluorescent lights reflected off the glossy screen, washing out my title slide. The air conditioning was too cold, humming just loud enough to make you notice it every few seconds. Someone had opened the blinds, and sunlight poured in through the east windows, making it hard to see anything beyond the glare.
A few faculty I barely knew sat on the side wall, murmuring. McAllister, the external examiner from Columbia, was reviewing a thick stack of printed documents. Jessica was already seated beside Tanaka, perfectly composed. Lipstick flawless. Legs crossed. Her fingers tapped idly against the table in a rhythm I didn't recognize.
Tanaka sat at the head, calm as ever. His face unreadable. Pale grey suit, blue tie, polished shoes. His posture perfect. His expression impossible to read. He looked like a man about to sign a business deal, not a professor about to ruin a student's future.
"Let's begin," he said, without even glancing in my direction.
I nodded and stepped forward. My hands were shaking slightly, so I tucked them behind the podium.
Slide one: Title. Slide two: Background. Slide three: Problem statement. I was on autopilot, the words spilling out of me in a low monotone. I knew the project was weak. I knew it didn't matter. The defense was a formality—an exit ritual. Just another box to check before I left.
Slide four: simulation parameters.
Slide five: expected output range.
I felt my voice crack slightly, but I pushed through it. I saw Jessica glance at her phone, bored. One of the junior professors was scrolling something under the table. McAllister flipped through her printouts, pen tapping against the desk.
Then she stopped.
She raised her hand.
"Excuse me, Mr. Lee," she said, voice clipped but polite. "Before you continue, may I ask a question?"
I froze. "Of course."
She turned a page toward me. "These results—specifically Figures 4 through 6. Are you aware that a version of these figures was uploaded to the OpenQ Research Repository approximately four weeks ago?"
I blinked. "What?"
She tapped the paper. "Same structure, same curve morphology, same axis labels. Even the formatting is nearly identical. The paper is titled Preliminary Demonstration of Quantum-Guided Interface Tuning via Cognitive Algorithms."
She clicked something on her tablet. The screen flashed. A browser window opened.
There it was.
A preprint page.
Title: exactly as she'd said.
Authors: Han, J.; Tanaka, H.
Posted: April 8th.
DOI: valid. Archive: verified.
My name wasn't there.
The figures… were mine.
Copied exactly from the early version I had generated in February, before the lockout. Before the betrayal. Before I had given up.
My throat closed. The color drained from my face. I couldn't breathe.
Tanaka remained still, his eyes resting on the table as if nothing of interest had happened. Jessica's lips curled, the faintest smirk playing at the corners. She didn't need to say anything—her posture did all the talking.
"So," McAllister said, looking up again, "can you explain the provenance of these figures?"
I stared at her, then at the screen. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. My ears were ringing.
"I… they're… mine," I said finally, voice hoarse. "They were generated in our lab. I ran the base sequence in February. I saved the raw files. I logged the timestamps."
"But they're already online," Tanaka interjected smoothly, his voice almost paternal. "Perhaps there's a misunderstanding about originality. It's a common issue with junior researchers."
"You—" My voice cracked again. I turned to him, eyes burning. "You know you stole them. You locked me out. You deleted my access. You used my data."
Jessica tilted her head, expression feigning confusion. "Jae-Min, I think you're under a lot of stress. You might be misremembering how collaborative projects work."
A wave of murmurs passed through the room.
"Plagiarism?"
"Did he really think he could get away with it?"
"Candidate seems unstable…"
McAllister's brow furrowed. "Mr. Lee, without a clear documentation trail, I'm afraid we'll need to investigate. But for now…"
Tanaka raised his hand gently. "I suggest we terminate this session. The candidate appears unprepared and emotionally compromised."
I opened my mouth again, but no words came. My tongue felt heavy. My lungs wouldn't move. I saw the whole room shift slightly, the edges of my vision beginning to blur.
Someone stood up. Someone else walked toward the door. McAllister was saying something, but I couldn't hear it anymore. My heart was hammering so loud I thought it would crack my ribs.
The next few minutes vanished from my memory.
I don't remember leaving the room or exiting the building.
But I do remember standing on the rooftop.
That Evening
Building B, Level 7
The air was wet with mist and the taste of impending summer rain. It hadn't started yet, but the clouds had gathered in heavy silence, a gray curtain pressing down on the skyline. Lights from the city pulsed faintly in the distance—red, orange, white—like fireflies trapped behind glass.
I stood near the edge, fingers curled tight around the cold railing. My suit jacket was soaked with sweat. My hair clung to my face.
Cars moved below, tiny as toys. Somewhere, a siren echoed. A window opened in a building across the street. Laughter spilled out, warm and oblivious.
I was invisible again.
And this time, I couldn't pretend it didn't matter.
Everything—everything—I had worked for had been taken. My research. My reputation. My graduation. My father. My name. It was all gone. And the people who stole it were being rewarded, applauded, cited. Their names would live in the journals, in the patents, in the conference halls.
Mine would vanish.
I thought of my father again. The last time we spoke. His voice, worn but gentle. His quiet pride. His body cooling in a hospital bed while I sat 7,000 miles away, rewriting a fake thesis and pretending it mattered.
A drop of rain hit my knuckle.
I closed my eyes.
For a moment, I imagined what it might feel like—the fall. The wind. The silence.
I leaned forward slightly. And then the world began to blur.
The Fall and Return
I didn't scream.
I just stepped forward.
The edge welcomed me like an old friend. The wind wrapped around my body, cold fingers tugging at my clothes, urging me down. For a moment, it felt like flying—liberating, strangely serene.
Then the world shifted.
Colors exploded in my vision—deep crimson, ultraviolet arcs, pulses of green and gold like neural signals bursting across a screen. A high-frequency ringing filled my ears, then dropped into silence.
And in that silence, a door opened.
It wasn't real. Couldn't be.
But I saw it: a tall, seamless panel of white light, suspended in the void, glowing from within like an invitation or a memory.
Then, I awoke with a gasp, lungs straining like I had been drowning for hours. My heart pounded against my ribs like a war drum, each beat sharp and furious, as if trying to remind me I was still alive.
But the world around me…
Wasn't the same.
I had returned. Six months before everything fell apart.
The funding was still intact.
My father was still alive.
The data was still mine.
This time, I wouldn't lose anything.
This time, I'd take it all.