His Lies, My Unbreakable Heart

ll of old books and ozone in the libraries, the way you could start a conversation with a stranger about quantum computing and the

, who could code circles around anyone I knew, and Ben, a robotics genius with a dry sense of humor. We spent hours in the lab, fueled by cheap pizza and a sha

er than I ever could have imagined. With the university's resources and the feedback from my professo

up. The sender was an address I didn' t recognize, but

-pity and blame. He wrote about how hard his classes were, how much pressure he was under, how I had "o

I just dragged the email into the trash and then emptied the trash fol

xer. "You need to network, Sarah," she'd insisted. "All the big s

trendy warehouse space downtown, buzzing with ambitious energy. I was starting to enjo

CIT was just a short train ride away. They looked the part-Jake in a slick blazer, Emily in a sharp, expen

I'm not hiding. This i

t of fate, my team ended up competing directly against the one Jake and Emily were on. The questi

estion: "Explain the core limitation of the backpropagation algorithm in dee

a confident smirk on her face. "The limitation is unstable gradients," she

sorry, that's incorrect. Tea

"That's your s

ropagates back in time, making it impossible for the network to learn long-range dependencies. You can mitigate it using techniques like Long Short-T

at is absolutely cor

room. Her face was a mask of furious humiliation.

a glass of water, he c

didn't you?" he hissed, h

Jake," I said, not backin

t you're at your fancy school," he sneered. "You overreacte

to steal my future and pass it off as your own. That's not a mistake. It's

arnished silver keychain-a circuit board I had given him for his sixteenth birthday. A pathetic, clinging remna

was from a private student forum at CIT. The post

as she seems. Steals ideas and stabs her friends in the back. Word is, her w

gle reply, from Emily C

a user and a snake. Someone

ren't just haunting me. They wer