1992
Age 13
The campus changed in ways you could measure without instruments. Grass thickened. Air turned heavier. The walk from dorm to lecture hall gained two extra degrees of heat and the smell of dust before rain. People moved slower, as if the semester's weight had distributed itself across the sidewalks. Even the vending machines seemed to hum at half-speed.
Spring at UT always looks like freedom from far away and fatigue up close. Paige called it "the slope before equilibrium." I liked that. Everything flattening out, velocity giving way to potential.
Dr. Li began the new unit with a fresh board and a single word written in wide chalk: Flux. She underlined it once, then drew a rectangle with arrows passing through the sides.
"What enters and what leaves," she said. "That's flux. Boundaries change what they contain by what passes through."
Her chalk squeaked, the sound sharp enough to cut through the drowsy hum of ceiling fans. She paused just long enough for everyone to copy the diagram. "Mathematics," she said, "and life. Neither stays still."
Paige looked up from her notes and met my eyes for a fraction of a second, the rare kind of moment where no translation is needed. I wrote Flux, boundary, transfer, change in my margin.
After class we walked toward the library under a sky that looked bleached rather than blue. She said, "It's funny, Li always sounds like she's talking about people, not fields."
"She probably is."
"Maybe we should tell her she's teaching philosophy."
"She'd deny it," I said. "And then assign homework."
Paige grinned, the sort of grin that had been missing for weeks. "You might be right."
Professor Kim handed out our final CS project on Monday. A thin stapled packet, ten pages, one line of mercy at the top: Build a compiler for Mini-Lang. The rest was specification and warnings.
Kim said, "You are translating a language into another language. Every bug is a mistranslation. Every assumption is an accent. Fix both."
Paige groaned quietly. "He's been waiting all semester to say that."
"Probably rehearsed it," I said.
She elbowed me, but without force.
We divided tasks automatically, she took the grammar and parser rules, I handled optimization and code generation. It felt like breathing, alternating, automatic. Kim called it "a language that builds itself." I wrote that down, too. It matched something forming in my other elective.
Linguistics had just shifted to ambiguity, sentences that change meaning when punctuation shifts, tone bends, context leaks. Visiting relatives can be annoying. Are they visiting, or being visited? Two truths occupying the same grammar. I liked that kind of uncertainty; it felt honest. Proofs pretend the world has one path; language admits several.
That week I found myself listening differently, hearing double meanings in normal speech. Paige asked once, "Are you debugging me?" and I told her no, just noticing syntax.
By late April, the library air smelled like paper and heat. We camped at our usual table, cables and notes sprawled across the wood like topographical maps. Paige read aloud pieces of the grammar while I typed. The click of keys kept tempo with the ceiling fan's wobble.
"Your optimizer is over-aggressive," she said. "It's stripping null rules we need."
"It's trimming fat."
"It's removing arteries."
"Temporary arteries."
She gave me the smallest glare, then sighed. "Fine. Leave the arteries."
We worked through sunset. At nine the light turned orange and then blue through the tall windows. Outside, fireflies blinked at random intervals like corrupted data packets. The compiler produced its first successful translation at 9:48 p.m., a meaningless program that printed done. Paige clapped once, quietly, as if to keep the moment contained.
We didn't leave until the intercom announced closing time. On the walk back she said, "I think I'm starting to like endings."
"They're just points in the middle," I said.
"You always say things like that."
"They're usually true."
The next day's math lecture returned to flux, this time in vector form. Dr. Li drew arrows spilling out of a curve and said, "Positive flux means expansion. Negative means contraction. Systems inhale and exhale." She drew the divergence symbol and added, "When the total flow is zero, the system is steady. But steady doesn't mean still."
Steady doesn't mean still. I wrote it twice. Paige added it to her margin without noticing that I was doing the same.
By the weekend, the heat settled in like static. The dorm's air unit rattled but refused to cool anything except the three inches in front of the vent. I went running at dusk to escape it and ended up at the rec center.
The boxing room smelled like leather and effort. The coach nodded when I entered, said nothing else. He rarely spoke unless correction was needed. I wrapped my hands, set the timer, and started slow combinations. Jab-cross, jab-cross-hook, step back, reset. The bag swung in small arcs that lined up with my breathing.
Between rounds he tightened the tape on another student's wrist and looked at me once, the way a mechanic checks a machine's alignment. He stepped over, pressed a finger against my right shoulder blade, nudged it half an inch. "Stay square," he said, and walked away.
That was all. But the adjustment changed everything, angles, rhythm, the way balance carried through the strike. Improvement lives in silence. I kept the new stance until it felt natural.
By the time I left, sweat had cooled into salt lines on my shirt. The sky outside was violet, thin clouds trailing west. The world smelled like ozone and cut grass.
The following week dissolved into loops of study, code, and sleep. Days blurred. I noticed the small shifts that mark the end of a term, notebooks thinning, pencils shortened, professors smiling for the first time since January. Paige had her hair tied up most days now, not for style but survival. She hummed when she worked.
We spent one long evening compiling and re-compiling, searching for a bug that only appeared when you didn't look directly at it. At 2 a.m. the output finally ran clean. She leaned back in her chair and let out a breath that sounded like laughter.
"I think we're done," she said.
"For now."
She rolled her eyes. "You ruin closure."
"Closure's unstable," I said.
"Flux again?"
"Always."
A few mornings later, linguistics met under an open window. The professor was talking about language drift, how words erode and meanings slide over generations. I wrote semantic flux in the margin. It fit Li's diagrams and Kim's compilers just as well. Everything translates into something else eventually, even people.
That night I found Paige outside the library with her feet up on the bench, eyes closed, headphones in. She pulled one earbud out when I sat down.
"You look tired," I said.
"So do you."
"Mutual flux."
She smirked. "That doesn't mean anything."
"It might someday."
We stayed like that, quiet, listening to the building exhale through the vents. Finals were close, but the pressure felt different now, weight without anxiety, purpose without panic.
The day Kim checked our final compiler, he didn't say much. He ran three test files, watched the output appear line by line, then closed the terminal.
"Efficient," he said. "You trimmed too much error reporting, but the translator works. Acceptable."
In Kim's dialect, acceptable meant impressive enough to hide pride.
Paige grinned as we left his office. "He likes us."
"He tolerates accuracy," I said.
"Same thing."
We crossed the quad where the breeze smelled like rain but hadn't committed yet. Students were scattered across the grass, celebrating early freedom. Eugene Strange waved vaguely from under a tree, surrounded by open notebooks. I waved back once. Paige asked, "Who's that?"
"Friend from Kim's lab."
She nodded. "Looks half-asleep."
"Probably debugging dreams again."
She laughed quietly, the sound blending into the wind.
The semester thinned down to days. I found myself cataloging moments instead of minutes, Li's chalk dust catching sunlight, Kim's office light bleeding under the door at odd hours, Paige's handwriting leaning sharper when she was tired. I noticed the way people started saying see you next year instead of see you tomorrow.
On the last Friday before finals, Li ended class early. She erased the board clean and said, "Everything we've done this term exists inside larger systems. Keep your boundaries open." Then she left without waiting for applause.
Paige and I walked out into light that looked new again. She asked, "So what's next?"
"Same variables," I said. "Different equations."
"You're impossible."
"I'm consistent."
She shook her head, smiling, and headed toward the dorms. I took the long way around.
The rec center was empty except for the low whir of ceiling fans. I wrapped my hands slowly, not to fight but to think. The bag hung perfectly still until I touched it, then swung just enough to remind me of cause and effect. Each punch traced the shape of a thought, force applied, reaction measured, return to center. The air moved around me in small, repeatable cycles.
When the timer beeped, I let the bag settle on its chain. The silence after motion felt earned. Outside, the world glowed faintly with late light, edges softening like graphs approaching asymptotes.
Back in my room, I opened my notebook to the last clean page. Margins already filled the previous ones, fragments of Li's lectures, Kim's commands, linguistics notes that looked like poetry by accident. I wrote one final line under them all:
Everything that moves through a system leaves something behind.
Then I closed the book. The fan hummed above, steady as flux through an open boundary. Tomorrow would start the equations again.
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