(AN: Hardest part of creation names so many characters and I dont want to do the gobone,gobtwo,gobthree but I might lol.)
January – February 1993 · UT Austin
Austin doesn't really do winter. It pauses, pretends for a week, then remembers it's supposed to be warm. By the time I got back to campus, the trees along Speedway were already confused, bare branches with a few new leaves testing optimism.
The dorm hallway smelled faintly of dust and coffee. Paige's door was already open; she'd beaten me back, of course. Two mugs sat on her desk, one labeled in permanent marker: mine, the other unlabeled, clearly for me.
"New semester, same chaos," she said without turning from her screen.
"Second order chaos," I said, dropping my bag onto the chair. "Derivative of the original."
She swiveled toward me, grinning. "And you said you don't do small talk."
"I upgraded."
She handed me the unmarked mug. The coffee was strong and slightly bitter, the kind she claimed was "character building."
Dr. Li started the new term the same way she ended the last: with precision and a piece of chalk. On the board she wrote:
Second order systems: motion that remembers itself.
She underlined remembers. "A system's present depends not just on where it is, but how it got there," she said. "That's what separates the living from the linear."
Around me, notebooks opened. I'd already written the sentence.
Paige leaned in and whispered, "You're writing that down again, aren't you?"
"Habit."
"It's becoming a brand."
She was right. Li's lectures had turned into something between math and philosophy, and I found myself listening for both.
When class ended, Li called me over. "Mr. Cooper," she said, tapping her notes. "Professor Kim tells me you're being assigned a freshman for tutoring this semester."
I nodded. "He mentioned it."
"Teaching is an advanced form of thinking," she said. "It forces structure where intuition hides."
I wasn't sure if it was encouragement or warning, but I accepted either.
The freshman arrived the next week. Nervous. Wore a backpack large enough to be a hiding place. They called me sir twice in one sentence, and I had to remind them I was technically still a student.
We sat in one of the smaller computer labs, fluorescent lights humming like anxious insects. They stumbled through an assignment, loops, variables, logic gates. I stopped halfway through their explanation.
"Show me what you understand," I said, pushing the keyboard toward them.
Their hands shook on the first few keystrokes. But the logic wasn't wrong; it was just tangled. They'd been trying too hard to sound like the textbook.
"Talk less, think slower," I said. "The compiler isn't impressed by anxiety."
They smiled nervously, but their next attempt worked.
I realized then how much explaining clarified my own process. Each line I broke down for them built something in me, too. I wasn't just solving problems anymore. I was refining the echo of how I learned them.
Paige stopped by halfway through one session, balancing her coffee on the back of a chair. She didn't interrupt, just listened. When the student left, she raised an eyebrow.
"Didn't think you had a patient mode."
"It's under development," I said.
She laughed. "Looks like it compiled fine to me."
The semester unfolded with less noise than the first. Maybe that's what experience is, a quieter version of effort.
Paige and I reclaimed our table in the library. The edges of her notebooks were frayed from overuse; mine were filled with smaller handwriting than before. We'd both stopped pretending we needed conversation to fill space.
Sometimes she worked on architecture diagrams for her CS elective, boxes, arrows, logic flows, and I'd watch her pencil hover over a blank square until something clicked.
Other times she'd glance over my shoulder at equations and say, "That one looks angry."
"Differential," I'd answer.
"Explains it."
Once she caught me smirking and threw an eraser that hit the exact midpoint of my notebook. "You're impossible," she said.
"Statistically consistent," I said.
February blurred into midterms, and the city turned from cold to just bright. The freshman I tutored stopped saying sir and started asking questions without apology. Watching them learn reminded me of something I'd forgotten, that progress isn't a straight line, it's a waveform. Peaks and recoveries.
One afternoon, Paige found me in the lab after hours. The room was mostly dark except for the glow of a few monitors left running simulations. She leaned against the doorframe, watching me debug.
"You know," she said, "most people take breaks when their code works."
"I'm testing stability," I said.
"Translation: you don't trust success."
She walked closer, reading lines over my shoulder. "You're so calm when you work," she said. "It's unnerving."
"It's focus."
"No," she said. "It's something else. You get quiet when things make sense."
I didn't know how to answer that.
She tapped the edge of the monitor. "I like seeing that version of you."
Then she left before I could respond.
A week later, she came to me frustrated. Her project group had ignored her optimization notes. She'd been right, but the program still ran, just slower.
"I don't need you to fix it," she said, pacing outside the lab. "Just needed to be mad about it for a second."
"I wasn't going to fix it," I said. "Not unless you asked."
She stopped pacing. "That's new."
"Iteration," I said.
She smiled, shaking her head. "You really are learning."
"Second order," I said. "Motion with memory."
By mid-February, Austin's air had that strange balance of humidity and wind that felt like indecision. The trees looked confused again, half bare, half green, like they couldn't decide who they were.
I started running early in the mornings before class. The campus was quiet then, just the sound of shoes on pavement and the hum of the city waking up. It reminded me of how the semester had begun, same place, same person, different derivative.
Paige joined me once, unannounced, jogging beside me with that smirk that always sounded like you didn't think I'd keep up. She did.
Afterward, she stretched beside the fountain and said, "You're easier to talk to when you're out of breath."
"Less processing power," I said.
"Good. I like you on low power mode."
I threw her a look; she grinned wider.
The tutoring sessions ended in late February. The freshman thanked me in a voice that still sounded surprised. They said, "You made it make sense."
I told them, "You already understood it. I just organized the signal."
After they left, I stayed behind in the empty lab. The air smelled faintly of dust and warm circuitry. I thought about Dr. Li's first lecture of the term, motion that remembers itself. Maybe that's what learning was. Each version of you builds on the last. The variables stay, but the coefficients change.
That night I met Paige at the café near the library. We took our usual table in the corner, the one under the flickering light.
She was sketching out ideas for a side project, lines crisscrossing on her page. "I think I'm getting better at not overexplaining," she said.
"Me too," I said.
"Then don't prove it."
I didn't.
We worked side by side for an hour. Outside, the city lights blurred through the glass like slow-moving constellations.
Back in my dorm, I opened my notebook. The first page of the semester held Li's quote, underlined twice. The last page now held my own:
Second order: motion with memory.
Learning isn't solving once, it's refining the echo.
The pen Paige had given me still wrote clean, smooth. I turned it in my hand, thinking about the freshman, about Li's voice, about Paige laughing at my bad jokes and catching them anyway.
Outside, the campus hummed, a steady signal in the background, same as always. For once, I didn't feel like I was just analyzing the pattern.
I was part of it.
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