February – March 1994 · UT Austin
February started the way it always did in Austin—sun showing up like it meant something, cold still sitting in the shade like it had rights.
Stephen ran anyway.
Six a.m. had a particular emptiness on campus. The sidewalks were damp from overnight rain. The Tower cut through the gray sky, all edges and no warmth. His shoes hit the same cracks in the pavement because his stride never drifted unless he let it. He didn't let it.
He came back to the dorm with sweat cooling fast under his shirt, breath steady, pulse already down where it belonged. He showered, changed, and was in lecture before most of the floor had decided to wake up.
Paige found him outside Dr. Li's hall, coffee in hand, notebook under her arm. She didn't wave. She just fell into step beside him like she'd always been there.
"You look… calibrated," she said.
"Still measuring," Stephen replied.
Paige's mouth tilted. "That's not an answer."
"It is," he said, and reached for the door.
She didn't stop him, but she did follow close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed in the doorway.
Dr. Li's lecture that morning was clean and sharp—no wasted chalk, no indulgent detours. She moved through the material like she was cutting stone. When she dismissed them early, most of the room looked confused, like they'd been released without earning it.
Stephen didn't stand up right away. He waited. He already knew what was coming.
"Mr. Cooper," Dr. Li said, looking over the rim of her glasses. "Stay."
The room emptied with the scrape of chairs and the thud of backpacks. Paige paused at the door and glanced back. Stephen gave her a small nod—go. She left, but she left slowly.
Dr. Li's office smelled like chalk dust and jasmine tea. Her shelves were neat in a way that made Stephen's hands want to align everything he touched. She didn't bother with small talk, not with him.
"You intend to apply to MIT," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"I suspected as much." She opened a drawer and slid a small bound notebook across her desk. It was plain—dark cover, thick paper. It looked heavier than it should've.
"Write your statement of purpose in this," she said. "No computers."
Stephen's fingers landed on the cover. He didn't pull it toward himself yet. "Why."
"Because you move too fast when you type," Dr. Li said. "You hide behind speed. You'll write what is correct and forget to write what is true."
Stephen held her gaze. "They want correctness."
"They want a person," Dr. Li replied. "A mind. A direction. Precision has served you well, Stephen. Now learn persuasion."
"I will try."
Dr. Li's expression softened by a fraction. "Try slower than usual."
Stephen nodded once, accepted the notebook, and stood to leave.
As he turned it over in his hands, he saw the first page. Dr. Li had written in pencil already, centered and spare:
Feedback is data.
Stephen didn't smile. But he didn't argue either.
That evening, the study hall felt like an extension of their bodies—same table, same uneven lamp, the same carved initials on the edge that somebody had scratched in years ago like it mattered. The air smelled like paper and old carpet. Someone two tables away kept tapping a pencil in a rhythm that didn't settle.
Paige dropped into the chair across from him and slid a stack of pages forward.
"Trade," she said.
Stephen set Dr. Li's notebook in front of him, then placed his own typed draft beside it. "Mutual assurance editing."
Paige snorted. "You're allergic to saying normal things."
"It's efficient."
"Yeah," she said, already reading. "That's your problem."
Stephen picked up Paige's essay. The first paragraph had a hook. Not a cheap one—just a sentence that grabbed and pulled. Her voice was on the page the way it was in the room: sure, sharp, and a little too honest for comfort.
He read fast. He couldn't help it. But he made himself stop at the end of each page and actually sit with what she'd said, like Dr. Li's notebook was still in his hands.
Paige, on the other side of the table, was reading his draft with a red pen. She made a sound in the back of her throat that wasn't quite a laugh.
"What," Stephen said without looking up.
Paige tapped the paper once. "Yours sounds like you're hiring yourself."
He blinked and lifted his head. "It's an application."
"It's not a job posting," Paige said. "You've got bullet-point energy."
"I didn't use bullets."
"You did emotionally," she said, and kept reading.
Stephen looked back down at her essay. "Yours reads like you're confessing to a telescope."
Paige's laugh came out too loud, sharp enough to pull a glare from the librarian's direction.
"Keep it down," someone hissed.
Paige mouthed sorry without meaning it, then leaned forward, elbows on the table.
"Okay," she said, quieter now. "You're not wrong. I'm trying to sound like I care."
"You do care," Stephen said, and it came out flat, like a fact he hadn't meant to say out loud.
Paige froze for half a beat. Her eyes flicked up, then away, then back to his paper like she needed the ink to save her from the moment.
"Yeah," she said, voice softer. "I do."
Stephen slid Dr. Li's notebook closer and opened it. The first page stared up at him. Feedback is data.
Paige pointed at a paragraph on his draft. "This part. You talk about math like it's a weapon."
"It can be."
"It can also be a language," she said. "Say that."
Stephen's pen hovered over the paper. "It's implied."
Paige's eyes narrowed. "Do you want them to read you or do you want them to choose you."
Stephen stared at her. He didn't like being cornered. He liked being correct.
But Paige wasn't asking him to lie. She was asking him to stop hiding.
He rewrote the sentence.
Paige read it again, then nodded once. "Better."
He looked down at her essay. "This line. You're romanticizing struggle."
"It's not romanticizing," Paige said quickly. "It's—"
"It's making it sound pretty," Stephen replied. "And it wasn't."
Paige's jaw tightened. For a second, Stephen thought she might snap. Instead she exhaled and took her own red pen and crossed the line out, hard enough to dent the page.
"Fine," she said. "Then help me say it without making it ugly."
Stephen looked at her for a moment, then wrote two options in the margin—shorter, cleaner, less theatrical. Paige read them, then picked one and rewrote her paragraph in her own handwriting like she needed to feel the words change.
They worked like that for hours—Paige pulling him toward honesty, Stephen pulling her toward clarity. Not cancelling each other. Reinforcing. Their loop tightened, sharpened, steadied.
A week later, Professor Kim assigned the final project like it was a personal insult to everyone in the room.
He leaned back against the edge of his desk in the computer science lecture hall, eyes tired, voice dry. Kim looked like sleep was something he negotiated with occasionally and lost. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the forearms. There was a faint smudge of marker ink on the side of his hand like he'd forgotten it was there.
"Compiler optimization," he said. "Your job is to make it faster without breaking it."
A low groan rippled through the class.
Paige muttered, just loud enough for Stephen to hear, "He says that every semester."
Kim's head turned like a sensor had tripped. "And it remains true every semester."
Paige didn't flinch. She met his stare and lifted her coffee cup in a tiny salute, like yes, fair.
Stephen didn't mind the project. He minded the way everyone treated it like a punishment. It was a system with rules. Systems could be understood.
When he brought his proposal to Kim's office hours, Kim read it without looking up at first. He tapped the paper once with the tip of his pen.
"Efficiency is not elegance, Mr. Cooper," Kim said. "Prove you can do both."
Stephen didn't argue. He nodded once, took his paper back, and went straight to the lab.
He built a test harness before he touched the compiler—because feedback needed structure. He set up timed runs, baseline outputs, verification checks that would scream the second something changed that wasn't supposed to. Then he started making changes one at a time, small enough to measure, reversible enough to undo.
Paige showed up on the third night with her hair tied back and a bag of vending machine snacks like she was preparing for a siege.
"You've been down here a while," she said, stopping behind him. The lab fluorescents made her look paler than usual, like the light was stealing color out of everything.
Stephen didn't turn. "I'm close."
Paige leaned over his shoulder, close enough that he could smell her shampoo—something clean, not floral. She watched the code scroll.
"What does that do," she asked, pointing at a function name.
Stephen answered automatically. "It reduces redundant passes in the optimizer stage by caching—"
Paige held up a hand. "No. Not the summary. Explain it like I'm not you."
Stephen stopped. His fingers hovered over the keys.
He tried again, slower. "It… keeps the compiler from doing the same work twice when it doesn't need to."
Paige nodded. "Good. Now make the code read like that."
Stephen stared at the screen. It was correct. It was fast. It was his.
It was also unreadable unless you lived inside his head.
He exhaled through his nose, then started renaming variables. Adding comments. Breaking one long function into smaller ones that each did one thing. The runtime stayed clean. The logic stayed intact.
Paige stayed behind him without speaking for a while. When he finished, she leaned in and read the file again.
"That's better," she said. "It sounds like you're trying to be understood."
Stephen didn't look at her. "I am."
Paige paused. "You ever get tired of being the smartest person in the room."
Stephen's answer came fast. "I would prefer better rooms."
Paige laughed quietly, but then her face changed—less amused, more direct. "I'm not joking."
Stephen's hands stopped moving.
The lab hummed around them: fans, hard drives, fluorescent buzz. Somewhere down the hall a door closed and the sound snapped sharp, then disappeared.
Paige asked again, softer. "Do you ever worry that being good at everything makes it hard to know what you actually want?"
Stephen opened his mouth. The practiced answer was there. The correct answer. The safe one.
But the question had landed in a place that wasn't about grades.
"Yes," he said.
The word surprised him as soon as it left his mouth.
Paige didn't pounce. She just nodded once like she'd been waiting for him to stop dodging himself.
"Good," she said. "That means you're finally listening."
Stephen stared at the screen, then down at his hands.
He opened Dr. Li's notebook later that night and wrote in the margin beneath her pencil line:
Listening is data too.
Saturday night, he called home.
The dorm phone had a long cord that twisted on itself no matter how carefully you hung it back up. The receiver was warm and slightly sticky like too many people had held it after eating something.
Mom answered on the second ring.
"Stephen! You sound busy."
"Trying to be," he said.
"Well don't forget to eat. And sleep. Preferably both on the same day."
He heard Dad in the background, then Dad's voice closer to the receiver. "Hey, buddy."
"Hey, Dad."
"You working that brain of yours hard enough for both of us?"
"It's keeping me occupied."
Dad chuckled. "Free ride or not, they're getting their money's worth out of you."
Stephen leaned against the wall, eyes on the cinderblock like it had anything new to offer. "Everything good at home?"
"Same as always," Dad said. "Georgie's still pretending he knows what he's doing. Mandy's doing most of it. Baby's loud."
Stephen's mouth lifted slightly. "CeeCee?"
"Yep," Dad replied. "She's crawling now. Getting into everything. You blink and she's somewhere else."
Stephen didn't comment on the phrasing. He let it sit.
"And Missy's trying out for track," Dad added. "She's taking it serious."
"Good," Stephen said. "She needs something that's hers."
Dad coughed once. Dry. Short. "Allergies acting up early."
Mom came back on like she'd taken the phone by force. "He's fine. Don't let him fool you."
Stephen could hear movement behind her—dishes, voices, the small chaos of home.
Then Meemaw's voice cut through everything, loud and sharp from somewhere off to the side.
"Tell my boy not to outgrow his britches before I see him again!"
Stephen smiled into the receiver. "Yes, ma'am."
"Love you," Mom said, softer now.
"Love you too," Stephen replied.
He hung up and stood there a moment with the receiver still in his hand before he put it back. The room didn't feel bigger. It just felt quieter in a way he could tolerate.
The compiler project ate the rest of February.
They camped in the lab past midnight more nights than Stephen admitted out loud. Paige got good at reading his face for when he was about to bulldoze through a problem instead of listening to it. Stephen got good at recognizing when Paige was tired enough that her sarcasm started missing its target.
One night, the compiler kept looping on a pass that shouldn't have repeated.
Paige leaned over his shoulder, hair falling forward. "Why is it still doing that."
"Because it refuses to learn," Stephen said.
Paige snorted. "So you and it have that in common tonight."
Stephen didn't answer. He adjusted one line—one condition buried too deep in the logic, one flag not being cleared when it should. He reran the harness.
The cursor blinked once.
Then printed: Process Resolved.
Paige's hand hit his shoulder—light, quick, like she needed to touch something real to believe it.
"You did it," she said.
"It listened," Stephen replied.
Paige's grin came sharp. "Feedback loop complete."
They left the lab near two a.m. The campus sprinklers had run earlier and the grass smelled wet and clean. Their shoes made quiet sounds on the sidewalk. The Tower lights were dim, like the campus itself was finally powering down.
Paige walked with her hands in her jacket pockets. "Li finish your recommendation letter yet?"
"Almost," Stephen said. "She wants the final draft of my statement in her notebook first."
Paige made a face. "Kim said he'll write one if I finish without complaining."
"That is affection," Stephen said.
Paige laughed under her breath. "From him, yeah."
They walked in silence for half a block, then Paige said, too casually, "I'm scared about the MIT results."
Stephen looked at her. She wasn't looking at him. She was watching the sidewalk ahead like it could answer.
"If it doesn't work," Stephen said, "we iterate."
Paige exhaled. "That sounds like you."
"It's also true," he said.
By March, the trees along Guadalupe started going green again like the season had flipped a switch. The campus woke up in small ways—more people outside, more noise, more movement that wasn't stressed.
Stephen sat at his desk with Dr. Li's notebook open. Half the pages were filled now—not just with drafts and edits, but fragments he'd written down because they mattered: a sentence Paige said, a warning Kim gave, a note he'd scribbled after a call home.
Feedback is data.
He wrote his final version by hand, slower than he wanted to, forcing each sentence to carry a person and not just a resume.
When he finished, he copied it clean onto the format he'd submit, but he didn't tear the notebook pages out. Dr. Li had told him not to treat it like a disposable tool. He understood why now.
He pinned the MIT flyer above his desk. The paper was thin. The ink was bold. Mind and Hand sat under the seal like a dare.
Paige came by that evening with her red pen tucked behind her ear. She didn't knock. She never did anymore. She just leaned in the doorway and held out his essay with two fingers like she was returning evidence.
"Better," she said.
Stephen took it. "Final version?"
Paige's mouth tilted. "Final until the next iteration."
He nodded like that made sense, because it did.
Paige stepped closer, eyes on him instead of the paper. "You don't have to optimize yourself every day."
Stephen didn't answer right away. He capped his pen. Set it down. Looked at her.
"Force of habit," he said.
Paige held his gaze. "Try debugging happiness for once."
Stephen's mouth twitched. "That sounds inefficient."
"It's worth the runtime," Paige said, and the way she said it wasn't a joke. Not really.
She turned to leave, then paused at the door like she'd remembered something.
"And Stephen?"
He looked up.
She tapped his essay once with the tip of her red pen. "You sound like a person in this one."
He swallowed, small and quiet, and nodded.
When she left, the room didn't feel empty. It felt like it had space to breathe.
Stephen opened Dr. Li's notebook one more time and wrote, plain and small at the bottom of the last page:
Feedback complete. System stable.
For now.
Outside, campus noise ran low—doors closing, distant laughter, someone's radio muffled through a wall. A system that never truly shut off, just changed states.
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