The laptop fan screamed like it was being murdered.
Noah Reeves cracked one eye open and stared at the ceiling, counting the seconds between each death rattle. Three. Two. One. There it was again—a sound like a tiny robot choking on a hairball.
"Shut up," he mumbled, reaching blindly toward his desk without leaving the warmth of his blanket. His fingers found the side of his laptop and tapped it gently. "Don't die on me. Not today."
The fan responded with an even more agonized shriek.
"Fine. Therapy session it is."
The alarm on his phone buzzed: 6:47 AM. Noah groaned. Another day in the glamorous life of a seventeen-year-old nobody with dreams bigger than his bank account.
He rolled out of bed, feet hitting the cold floor of his bedroom—a space roughly the size of a prison cell, minus the charm. The walls had once been blue, now a faded gray with peeling corners where posters of tech pioneers had been hastily taped and removed as his idols fell from grace. Only Ada Lovelace remained, immortalized in a public domain print he'd blown up at the library. She couldn't disappoint him. She'd been dead for 170 years.
Noah shuffled to his desk—an IKEA special that wobbled with the structural integrity of wet cardboard. The laptop sitting on it looked like it had survived the apocalypse, or at least a few dozen system rebuilds. It was a seven-year-old Thinkpad he'd bought for eighty bucks from a college dropout, the chassis held together with electrical tape and optimism.
"Good morning, you piece of junk," he said, flipping it open. "Let's see what's killing you today."
The laptop's screen flickered to life, the boot sequence moving through its paces with all the urgency of a snail on Xanax. Noah scratched at his disheveled brown hair, making it stick up even worse than his night on a flat pillow had. His reflection in the black screen showed skinny shoulders poking through a worn-out t-shirt with some obscure programming joke that had been funny three compiler versions ago.
The fan made one final desperate wail, then settled into a lower-pitched whine as the system finished booting into his Linux distro. Not Ubuntu or Mint—something much more obscure and customized, patched together from forum posts and late-night coding sessions.
Noah immediately opened his terminal. Not to play games. Not to check social media. But to continue the puzzle that had kept him up until 3 AM: a snippet of code he'd found on a Russian forum about intercepting process IDs.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard as the terminal blinked its empty promise. He'd been working on this for days—a way to monitor system calls without triggering anticheat detection. Not because he wanted to cheat—cheaters were losers who couldn't git gud—but because understanding security meant breaking it first.
"One day they'll call me a genius," he muttered to himself, typing rapidly as the system sluggishly responded. "For now, I'm just that weird kid who smells like solder and failure."
The script threw three errors in quick succession. Noah squinted at them, mouth moving silently as he parsed the cryptic messages.
"Piece of garbage," he whispered, but there was no real malice in it. This was the dance—break, fix, break again, fix better. He'd rather solve these puzzles than breathe.
A knock at his door derailed his train of thought.
"Noah? Are you up?" His mom's voice was gentle but tired, the way it always sounded after a twelve-hour night shift at Mercy General.
"Yeah, just dealing with a kernel panic. The usual Tuesday morning existential crisis."
The door cracked open, revealing Sarah Reeves in scrubs with little cartoon bandages on them, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun. There were new lines around her eyes that made Noah's chest tighten. Night shifts were killing her, but the pay differential meant the difference between making rent and not.
"There's toast downstairs. Emily made it before she left for her study group." His mom yawned, leaning against the doorframe. "Don't forget you have school."
Noah grimaced. "School. Right. That place where they teach us how to use Microsoft Excel from 2007."
"It's important, Noah."
"I know, Mom." His voice softened. She didn't need his attitude on top of everything else. "I'm going. Just need to finish this debug first."
She gave him a tired smile. "Fifteen minutes, then shoes on, backpack ready."
"Yes, Commander Reeves. Will comply."
After she left, Noah turned back to his laptop, saving his work and pulling up system diagnostics. The fan's death rattle had a cause: the heat sink was clogged with dust again. He popped the back panel off with practiced ease, grabbing a can of compressed air from his drawer. The sight inside would have given any IT professional nightmares—heat sink paste applied with all the precision of a toddler finger-painting, a RAM stick secured with what might have been bubble gum in a previous life, and a wireless card held in place partly by hope.
"You beautiful disaster," Noah whispered, blasting dust bunnies out of the fan. "Don't give up on me yet."
Ten minutes later, the laptop was reassembled and breathing easier. Noah himself was still in his sleep shirt and boxers. He pulled on a pair of jeans that hung off his lanky frame and grabbed the least wrinkled hoodie from his "clean enough" pile. His bedroom looked like what would happen if a RadioShack had a baby with a tornado—cables snaking everywhere, half-built circuit boards pinned to a corkboard, a soldering station that had definitely violated fire codes at least twice this month.
He stuffed his resuscitated laptop into his backpack along with a notebook that was more code than English, three pens (because one would inevitably die mid-thought), and a power bank he'd modified to deliver extra juice at the cost of possibly exploding someday.
Downstairs, the kitchen was empty except for a plate with two pieces of toast, one with a bite already taken out of the corner. Noah stared at it.
"We don't even own a cat," he muttered, picking up the untouched piece. He crunched into it dry—no time for butter—and washed it down with orange juice straight from the carton.
The house was small but clean, a rental in a neighborhood that real estate agents optimistically called "up and coming" for the last decade with no evidence to support the claim. Photos lined the wall in the hallway—Noah and his sister Emily as kids, their dad still in the pictures until Noah was ten, then just the three of them after the divorce. Noah never looked directly at those photos.
He was checking his backpack one last time when the front door opened, and his sister Emily breezed in. At twenty-one, she was everything Noah wasn't—organized, socially adept, and pursing a "practical" business degree that their mom could brag about to coworkers.
"Thought you had study group," Noah said through a mouthful of toast.
Emily dropped her bag on the counter. "Canceled. Professor has the flu." She looked him up and down. "Nice outfit. Going for the 'I live in my parents' basement coding manifestos' aesthetic?"
"It's called efficient dressing. And we don't have a basement."
"Details." She grabbed the bitten toast. "This was mine, by the way."
"Who takes one bite of toast and abandons it? That's chaotic evil behavior."
Emily shrugged, taking another bite. "I got a call. Unlike you, my social life doesn't revolve around Discord servers."
Noah rolled his eyes. "How's business school? Still learning how to make PowerPoints that say nothing with lots of words?"
"How's your tech empire coming along? Still trying to build the next Facebook from our kitchen table?"
"You know Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, right?" Noah shouldered his backpack. "I haven't even dropped into class this week."
Emily smirked. "Zuck sold privacy. You're building something less evil. Probably."
It was their routine—barbed comments hiding the weird respect they had for each other. Emily thought Noah was smarter than most of her college classmates. Noah knew Emily worked harder than he ever would. Neither would admit it out loud.
"Don't be late for school, genius," she called as he headed for the door. "Can't change the world from detention."
"Watch me," Noah shot back, but he picked up his pace.
The walk to Roosevelt High School took eighteen minutes, or fifteen if Noah cut through the community garden that old Mr. Petrosky guarded like it contained the nuclear codes instead of some sad tomatoes. Today, Noah took the long route, pulling his hoodie up against the October chill and mentally stepping through the code he'd been debugging.
The process ID trap is triggering too early. Maybe if I delay the hook until after initialization...
Roosevelt High School loomed ahead, a blocky brick building erected in the era when schools were designed to resemble minimum-security prisons. Noah joined the stream of students funneling through metal detectors, nodding absent-mindedly to a few people who might count as friends if you used a very generous definition.
"Reeves!" A voice boomed down the hallway. Mr. Patterson, computer science teacher and the only adult at Roosevelt who seemed to understand that Noah wasn't just screwing around on his laptop all day. "You coming to Coding Club this afternoon?"
"It's just me and Darius, Mr. P."
"Quality over quantity." The bearded teacher grinned. "Besides, I figured out what was wrong with the server config. No more random crashes."
Noah brightened slightly. "You fixed the memory leak?"
"Nope. I bought more RAM out of my own pocket because the school budget is imaginary. But same difference."
"That's... actually kind of sad."
"Welcome to public education, kid." Patterson clapped him on the shoulder. "See you in seventh period."
First period was Calculus, which Noah could have taught better than Mrs. Bryant, who pronounced "logarithm" like it was an exotic disease. He sank into his seat at the back, booting up his laptop while she wrote problems on the board that he'd already solved mentally.
Two rows ahead, Marcus Hale held court with his usual entourage—three guys from the baseball team who thought following Marcus around might give them proximity to his father's wealth. Marcus himself was tall, confident, and constantly broadcasting his status as a "tech entrepreneur" despite his sole achievement being an Instagram account where he posed with mining rigs his dad had purchased.
Noah kept his head down, fingers tapping quietly as he opened his code editor instead of the calculus worksheet. School was a glorified waiting room—a place to mark time until he could build something that mattered.
The morning dragged through English (currently massacring Hamlet), History (whitewashing colonialism), and Chemistry (where Noah had been banned from "improvising" after The Incident last semester).
By lunch, his laptop fan was crying for help again, but this time it was because he'd been running a particularly intense compilation in the background. Noah set up camp at his usual table—the one with the wobbly leg that no one else wanted—and pulled out the peanut butter sandwich he'd hastily made between classes.
"Hey, computer guy."
Noah looked up to see Priya Sharma sliding onto the bench across from him, her dark hair pulled into a practical ponytail, rectangular glasses framing sharp eyes. She wasn't exactly a friend—more like the only other person who took AP Computer Science seriously.
"Hey, future Google employee," he replied.
Priya snorted. "Please. Those tech behemoths are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor. I'm aiming for my own startup."
"What's your pitch? Let me guess—blockchain-enabled sustainable fashion marketplace with AR try-on?"
"Close. I'm building a distributed computing platform for climate modeling." She unwrapped her lunch—some kind of homemade curry that smelled infinitely better than Noah's sad sandwich. "What about you? Still trying to reverse-engineer game anti-cheat systems?"
Noah narrowed his eyes. "How did you—"
"You literally talk to yourself when you code. In the computer lab yesterday, you were muttering about process hooking for like thirty minutes."
"It's not about cheating," he said defensively. "It's about understanding security architecture. Anti-cheat systems are basically rootkits with permission."
"Uh-huh." Priya didn't sound convinced. "Anyway, have you seen the latest from Nexus Tech? They just announced quantum-resistant encryption for their cloud service."
Noah felt a familiar pang of envy. Nexus Tech was the holy grail—a company that had gone from dorm room to domination in five years, pioneering bleeding-edge tech that Noah could only dream of working with.
"Their founder started coding when he was our age," Priya continued, scrolling through the news on her phone. "Now he's worth like twelve billion."
"Good for him," Noah muttered, taking an aggressive bite of his sandwich.
"You could probably work there someday," she said, with the casualness of someone who didn't understand how much the suggestion both thrilled and terrified him.
Noah shrugged. "Maybe I'll build something better."
Priya looked at him for a long moment, then smiled slightly. "You know what? You just might."
The moment of camaraderie was shattered by laughter from the center of the cafeteria. Marcus Hale was holding court, his voice carrying deliberately in Noah's direction.
"—so then this guy tries to tell me his little hobby project is 'disruptive tech'! Like, my dad's company just acquired a quantum computing startup for eight figures, but sure, your JavaScript calculator is totally going to change the world—"
Noah felt his face heat up. Last week, he'd made the mistake of mentioning a tool he was building during a presentation. Marcus had spent the rest of the class period explaining why it was "cute" but "not commercially viable."
"Ignore him," Priya said, noticing Noah's expression. "He thinks putting 'AI-powered' on his homework makes it a startup."
Noah snorted despite himself. "That's exactly what I—" He stopped, realizing he'd been about to quote his own interior monologue.
"What?"
"Nothing." Noah closed his laptop. "I should get to Physics. We're doing electricity today, and last time Johnson nearly electrocuted himself demonstrating circuits."
"That man should not be allowed near copper wire," Priya agreed, packing up her lunch.
As Noah stood, Marcus's voice rose again: "—still building stuff nobody wants!"
Noah kept his face carefully blank as he walked past Marcus's table. Inside, though, a familiar mantra repeated: One day. One day they'll see.
The afternoon passed in a blur of classes Noah could have taught himself better from YouTube. Only Coding Club offered any relief—though calling it a "club" was generous. Today it was just Noah and Mr. Patterson in the computer lab, Darius having texted that he couldn't make it.
"So it's just you today," Mr. Patterson said, leaning back in his chair. "What are we working on?"
Noah pulled up a Unity project—a simple game he'd been tinkering with between his more complex endeavors. "I've been trying to optimize the camera script, but it keeps throwing null references when the player moves too quickly."
Patterson peered at the screen. "Show me the error."
For the next hour, Noah actually enjoyed himself, debugging with someone who understood what he was trying to accomplish. The game was nothing special—a basic platformer with physics puzzles—but it was his, built from scratch without tutorials.
"You know," Patterson said as they fixed the last bug, "you could turn this into a portfolio piece for college applications."
Noah tensed slightly. "I'm not sure college is my path."
"Because of money? There are scholarships—"
"Because I don't want to spend four years learning outdated frameworks when I could be building real things." Noah closed the project. "No offense."
Patterson sighed. "None taken. But the world runs on credentials, Noah. Fair or not."
"The world runs on results," Noah countered. "No one cares where you went to school if you build something revolutionary."
"Fair enough." Patterson checked his watch. "I need to head out—parent-teacher conferences tonight. Lock up when you leave?"
Noah nodded, already reopening his terminal as the teacher gathered his things.
"And Noah?" Patterson paused at the door. "For what it's worth, I think you've got what it takes. Just... don't be in such a hurry to skip steps."
After Patterson left, Noah spent another hour in the empty computer lab, the light outside fading as he alternated between his game project and the process hooking code. Neither was going well. The game crashed when he added a new feature, and the hooking script kept triggering security exceptions.
"Okay," he muttered to himself. "Let's isolate the bug. Null ref on frame draw... probably the camera script again. God, I hate my past self."
By the time he packed up to leave, the school was mostly empty. He walked home in the gathering darkness, mentally retracing his code, searching for the flaw that kept eluding him. The streetlights flickered on one by one, casting pools of yellow light on cracked sidewalks.
Home was quiet when he arrived. His mom had left a note on the fridge: Working double shift. Dinner in microwave. Love you.
Emily wasn't home either—probably at her part-time job or actually studying, unlike him. Noah heated up the lasagna his mom had left and carried it to his room, setting it on his desk beside his laptop.
It was 9:17 PM. In the normal world, people might be watching TV or hanging out with friends. In Noah's world, this was prime coding time—the quiet hours when his brain worked best and distractions vanished.
He opened his laptop, which greeted him with the fan's familiar death-rattle, and settled in for what he knew would be hours of work. Not because anyone was making him, but because the problems in his head wouldn't let him rest until he'd at least tried to solve them.
11:03 PM found him still at his desk, now in a worn hoodie with the lights off, spooning cold rice (the lasagna long forgotten) into his mouth while watching a video on syscall manipulation. On screen, a programmer with a thick accent was explaining a technique that might—might—be the key to what Noah had been struggling with.
"So the hook needs to be delayed until after the process verifies itself," Noah murmured, taking notes in a physical notebook—some things were still better on paper. "That makes sense..."
He wasn't trying to break a game. He wasn't even planning to use this knowledge on any actual software. It was curiosity, pure and intellectual—the same drive that made him take apart his first computer at age nine, much to his mother's horror when she found circuit boards spread across his bedroom floor.
Noah paused the video and leaned back, stretching arms that had gone stiff from hunching over the keyboard. His room was dark except for the blue glow of his screen, casting shadows that danced as he moved. His eyes burned from strain.
Next to his laptop, his notebook was filled with diagrams, code snippets, and half-formed ideas. In the margin of the current page, he'd doodled what looked like a skill tree from an RPG, with branches labeled "Kernel Mastery," "Network Protocol," and "UI Systems."
He stared at the doodle, then wrote beside it: "Could you build a skill tree for real life?"
The thought made him smirk. Wouldn't that be convenient? A clear path of progression instead of the chaotic mess of trial and error that was teaching yourself advanced computing concepts from sketchy forums and YouTube.
Noah turned back to his screen, but instead of restarting the video, he opened a browser and navigated to a programming forum he frequented. A thread about performance optimization was active, programmers around the world sharing tips and tricks.
He typed a comment almost without thinking: "What if life had patch notes?"
His finger hovered over the "Post" button. It was the kind of weird midnight thought that would probably get ignored or mocked, but—what the hell. He clicked.
The comment appeared in the thread, looking small and strange among the technical discussions. Noah stared at it for a moment, then closed the browser. Enough philosophy. Back to code.
He reopened his terminal and began typing, testing a new approach to the problem that had been plaguing him for days. Outside his window, the city had gone quiet, most normal people long since asleep. But Noah was wide awake, alive in the glow of his screen, fingers dancing across keys with purpose if not grace.
In this moment—just him and the code—he felt something like peace. No Marcus Hale to remind him of his economic limitations. No well-meaning adults suggesting safer paths. Just problems waiting to be solved by a brain that wouldn't quit.
"One more try," he whispered to his laptop as the fan whined in protest. "Let's see if this works."