Chapter 1What Came With the Stolen Code

The day before the President's Fellowship defense, I was standing outside the lab when I heard Garrett talking to the department sweetheart. "I copied all of his data. You can use it directly tomorrow."

I stood in the hallway, frozen for three seconds.

Then I pulled out my phone and checked the local Git logs. Last push: three months ago.

I slid my phone back into my pocket. That version had three hundred and twenty-seven bugs. And the comments were absolutely loaded with my warmest regards for Garrett.

Tomorrow's defense was going to be a masterpiece.

* * *

November 15th, 9:40 PM.

I grabbed a bottle of iced tea from the vending machine, planning to head back to the lab to run one last batch of data.

The lab was at the far end of the seventh floor of the Science Hall. Two of the hallway lights were dead, casting fractured, ghostly pools of pale white light across the floor. I unscrewed the cap and took a sip, my footsteps swallowed by the quiet corridor.

As I neared Room 706, I noticed the door was cracked open. The lights were on. I figured it was empty, since I was usually the only one in the lab at this hour.

Just as I reached out to push the door, Garrett's voice drifted through the gap.

"Don't worry, he won't even make it onto the stage tomorrow."

My hand froze in midair.

A second later, Gina's voice followed. "Are you sure? What if he finds out?"

Garrett let out a laugh, that condescending, smug chuckle of his.

"So what if he does? I copied everything off his machine, the raw data, the modeling scripts, the lab logs. I wiped his local drive clean, too."

I pulled my hand back and took half a step away from the door.

"Tomorrow, you just walk up there and present it as yours. The committee will just think he tried to piggyback on your project at the last second, got rejected, and threw a temper tantrum."

"But what if he has a backup?"

"A backup?" Garrett scoffed. "I've seen how he works. He only runs things on that one lab desktop. A slob like him probably doesn't even own a second USB drive."

The sliver of light from the doorway fell across my slippers. I looked down, left foot blue, right foot black. Okay, fair point, I was a bit of a slob. Normally, hearing someone trash me like that might have rubbed me the wrong way. But right now, only one thought consumed my mind: Which computer did this idiot actually rob?

I pulled out my phone and accessed my private server dashboard. Project folder: "Fellowship_v2.7". Last modified: today at 3:14 PM. Status: normal. Thirty-seven source files, completely intact.

I scrolled down. The last time my local Git repository had pushed anything to that lab desktop was August 23rd, eleven weeks ago. The version back then was v0.3.

I remembered v0.3 vividly. It was a steaming pile of garbage that could compile but couldn't produce a single correct result. The convergence conditions in the core algorithm were reversed, the feature extraction module leaked memory like a sieve, and the data preprocessing was a caveman-era workaround that I eventually scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.

Worse yet, I had treated that version's code comments as my personal diary, filling them with my deepest thoughts.

What kind of thoughts?

For instance, line 47: // If you don't understand this code, don't worry. I wrote it, and I don't understand it either.

Line 128: // TODO: There is a bug here, but it's Friday. Even bugs deserve a weekend.

Line 203: // If Garrett is peeking at my screen again, please raise your eyes by three centimeters and look at this line. What are you looking at? Go write your own.

I added that line in September because he kept making excuses to walk by and sneak glances at my screen. I hadn't thought much of it then, assuming he was just curious. Looking back, he was scouting his target.

I tightened the cap on my iced tea and quietly backed down the hallway. On the walk back to the dorms, the crisp night air cleared my head. Should I report him? Yes, but the paper trail wasn't solid enough yet; it would be my word against theirs. Should I confront them right now? I could, but where was the fun in that? I pondered it for about ten seconds, then sent a text to my roommate, Wyatt.

Are you coming to the fellowship defense tomorrow?

Wyatt replied instantly. Is there drama?

Massive drama. Bring popcorn.

On it.

I locked my phone and stepped into the dorm building. The faint sounds of someone screaming at their gaming teammates echoed down the hall. What a beautiful world. Tomorrow was going to be even better.