It was well past midnight.
Dorm room 215 was quiet.
Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, the fountain pen in his hand tracing a smooth curve across the paper.
He paused, picked up the glass of water beside him, and took a sip.
The noise from the other side of the wall was getting louder.
"Dayong."
Chen Zhuo put down his glass and glanced at Wang Dayong, who was still on the floor tinkering with some computer hardware.
"Does Chu Ge always slam his keyboard like this?"
Wang Dayong was wiping down his old motherboard with a cloth, his head still lowered.
"Normally, that kid Chu Ge just sounds like a typewriter. At this rate, though, it sounds more like a demolition. He’s probably stuck on his code and losing his cool."
Chen Zhuo shook his head with a helpless sigh.
He looked down at the formula on his paper, but his mind was on the laser printer he hadn’t bought yet.
「Dorm Room 216.」
The main light was off.
Only the monitor on Chu Ge’s desk was lit.
The light from the screen flickered across Chu Ge’s face.
Several thick computer textbooks lay open in a mess on the desk. An empty Red Bull can was pinned under the cover of C Primer Plus.
Chu Ge had a lollipop sticking out of his mouth, his eyes glued to the dense code on the screen.
White characters on a black background.
He pressed the F9 key.
A small window instantly popped up at the bottom of the screen, followed by a long string of glaring red error messages.
Time Limit Exceeded
A timeout.
Another timeout.
Annoyed, Chu Ge spat the mangled lollipop stick from his mouth into a nearby soda can.
The gig he’d taken on was optimizing the backend search for a new commercial stock photo website.
The bounty posted on the forum was fifteen hundred yuan.
The requirement was simple: double the existing concurrent search speed.
At first, Chu Ge thought it would be easy money.
The code written by the startup’s programmers was full of redundancies; he figured he could just trim the logic tree a bit and be done with it.
But once he started working on it, he discovered the data’s underlying architecture was a complete mess.
Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels.
To solve a data collision, he added a nested loop.
The result was that as soon as the data was processed, it would get stuck in a deadlock in the third logic layer.
Countless variables were deadlocking each other in that narrow channel, and none could get out.
Chu Ge’s hands flew across the keyboard.
He deleted the entire section he had just written and tried a different approach using a stack.
He finished typing, compiled, and ran it.
The fan began to speed up.
The screen froze for three seconds.
Then, the familiar red text popped up again.
Chu Ge swore.
He ran a hand through his already messy hair and leaned back, his chair letting out a dull groan.
On the opposite bed, Lu Jia lay under a thin blanket.
Two foam earplugs were stuffed in his ears.
But he could still hear the noise.
The clacking of the mechanical keyboard was like a dull saw, dragging back and forth across his already frayed nerves.
Lu Jia’s eyes were closed.
Waves of nausea rolled in his stomach, and his temples throbbed with a pulsing pain.
The memory of writing the wrong symbol in his advanced math class earlier that day replayed in his mind like a movie.
His memory was blurring.
His reactions were slowing.
This feeling of losing control sent a primal wave of panic through him.
He needed to sleep.
If he could just get some sleep, let his brain reboot, everything would go back to normal.
But the noise from below just wouldn’t stop.
The keyboard clatter grew frantic again.
Then came Chu Ge’s frustrated muttering and the harsh scrape of chair legs against the floor.
Lu Jia’s breathing grew ragged.
He rolled over to face the wall.
He tried pulling the blanket over his head to cover his ears.
It was no use.
The humming resonance of the computer case seemed to be seeping through the very walls.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
The keyboard noise grew louder, the force of Chu Ge’s strikes a clear release of his uncontrolled frustration.
Lu Jia’s eyes snapped open.
In the darkness, the rims of his eyes were alarmingly red.
He ripped the foam earplugs from his ears and threw them onto his pillow.
He threw off the blanket.
Sat up.
The cold air seeped through his thin cotton pajamas, but he didn’t even notice.
Lu Jia moved to the edge of the bed. He didn’t look for his slippers.
Barefoot, he placed his feet on the ladder of the metal-frame bed and climbed down, step by step.
Chu Ge was in front of his screen, scratching his head in frustration.
He had just tried a fourth algorithm, and it was still getting stuck in an infinite loop.
He picked up the candy box on his desk and shook it. It was empty.
Annoyed, Chu Ge crushed the box in his hand and threw it on the floor.
He was about to delete the erroneous code and rewrite it.
Suddenly, a figure appeared behind him.
In the reflection on his monitor, Chu Ge saw Lu Jia standing there.
He jumped and turned his head.
He saw Lu Jia standing barefoot, his face deathly pale, with dark circles under his eyes.
Chu Ge opened his mouth.
His frustration was replaced by a twinge of guilt.
He knew he had been too loud tonight. He took his hands off the keyboard, his voice a little awkward.
"Did I wake you?"
Chu Ge pointed at the screen.
"I’m stuck on a bug here. It’ll be just a minute, if you can just bear with me..."
Lu Jia didn’t even look at him.
His gaze was locked on the hundreds of lines of scrolling code on the screen.
He couldn’t understand the syntax pieced together from English words, didn’t know what a pointer was, and had no idea about memory allocation.
But he could understand the logic symbols and variable substitutions mixed within.
He stared for a full minute.
His eyes darted, following the cursor on the screen.
Suddenly, Lu Jia moved.
He reached out and snatched the crumpled notebook from Chu Ge’s desk.

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