The tinny speakers of Orangeside Community College crackled to life, the voice of Dean Joshua Starmer echoing across the quad like a benevolent, slightly confused ghost.
“Good afternoon, Orangeside. I am your Dean with a few corrections to the fall class catalog. Cosmology should be Cosmetology. Astrology should be Astronomy. The students on the cover should be smiling not crying, but I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. Also, whoever is growing a small patch of cannabis behind the gymnasium—congratulations, you have won a Playstation 5 Pro! Report to security to claim your new game console.”
Inside the library, the study group sat in their usual semi-circle of mismatched chairs. Chase’s seat was notably empty.
“That dude makes a lot of announcements,” Tyrone muttered, leaning back in his chair.
“I like it,” Elvis said, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if reading invisible credits. “It makes every ten minutes feel like a new chapter in a book. The illusion lasts until someone says something they never say in a book, like how much life is like a book. Then… poof. It’s gone.”
Amelia adjusted her cardigan, looking at the clock. “I guess Chase is running late again. Maybe we should get started? When he gets here, we could talk to him as a group about his tardiness.”
“Don’t use that word around Elvis,” Wilson warned sharply, then looked at the group, as they looked back at him confused. “If you want me to have a chat with him, I’ll do it. We’ve got a bond going. Sort of like brothers.”
“Hope your mom didn’t make you take baths together,” Tyrone quipped. “Because one of you would have been like twenty.”
WIlson retorted,”Well, I bet he’s always late to avoid your tardiness Tyrone.”
Amelia chimed in, “Anyway, he probably comes late just to avoid the awkwardness.”
Christina let out a short, sharp laugh. “So being late makes him later? You guys are obsessing over someone who doesn’t give you a second thought.” She leaned forward, her expression shifting to something more somber. “Meanwhile, in Venezuela, journalists are being murdered by their own government for speaking out. Real stories, with real people.”
“Wait, journalists are being murdered?” Amelia asked, her eyes widening.
“Every day,” Christina said, her voice dropping an octave. “And the worst part is, when it’s over, it’s as if it never happened. And nobody finds out because nobody reports it.”
The heavy library doors swung open. Chase sauntered in, looking like he’d just stepped off a yacht, despite the humid September heat. He flashed a grin that was eighty percent teeth and twenty percent condescension.
“My lady. My lord,” Chase said, nodding to Amelia and Elvis.
“You smell nice,” Sharon noted.
“Thank you” Chase replied smoothly. Turning his attention to Wilson he joked, “Fire or Stone, which is it today?”
“Morning, Chase,” Wilson Firestone chimed in, leaning forward eagerly. “Stoned with the help of fire.”
Chase ignored him, sliding into his chair. “Who’s ready to study up on the thing that will eventually enslave humanity.”
Christina stared at him. “Chase, if you’re going to study with people, it would be cool of you to show up on time.”
“Oh. Were you waiting?” Chase asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
“No,” Amelia and Tyrone said in unison.
“You guys spend the first twenty minutes talking about your interesting lives,” Chase said, opening his empty binder with a flourish. “I feel like I never have anything to offer. My life is emptier than the folder I have dedicated to this class on my cloud drive. Amelia, do you have any Computer Science notes that might make its way to my mailbox?”
Amelia joyfully whips out her phone and feverishly starts an email. “What’s your email, Chase.”
“ChaseWright at Orangside dot edu. Thank you, for being you Amelia.”
He then sat at the table and leaned back, “So, what’s a guy gotta do to satisfy an arbitrary system?”
Computer Science 101
The classroom was cold, lit by the flickering hum of overhead fluorescents and the blue glow of outdated monitors. At the front of the room stood Pablo S. Cabar. He was a small man with a nervous, electric energy that made him look like he was constantly expecting an explosion.
“Every once in a while,” Cabar began, his voice a low growl, “a student will ask: ‘Professor S. Cabar, why do you teach Computer Science?’” He chuckled darkly. “They say it just like that. Why didn’t you invest in nVidia? Why not bitcoin or ethereum? Surely somebody into computers and tech is ahead of the curve and knows what the next big thing is?”
He slammed his hand on the desk, making Amelia jump.
“Well, I’ll tell you why I teach Computer Science! It is none of your God damn business! I am a coding genius. In the dark web, my nickname is The Wolverine. Because my hacking skills will DOX every bit of your past!” He made a snapping motion with his jaws. “So don’t question Pablo S. Cabar, or you’ll get your past BIT.”
Chase leaned over to Christina. “I think he’s stable.”
“Friday morning,” Cabar continued, “we will be having hardware presentations related to a provided image and word. You will partner up in binary. Under your desk, you will find a card with an icon. If you have the image of a ‘Motherboard,’ you find the person with the word ‘Motherboard.’ capish?”
Chase reached under his desk and pulled out a card. It was the picture of a RAM stick. He peered over to Christina, she was holding a card with the words ‘Graphics Card’, then looked at Elvis, who was holding a card with a picture of a Geforce GTX 1080-Ti.
“Elvis,” Chase whispered. “Trade cards.”
“No. The Geforce GTX 1080-Ti is a legendary graphics card”
“I mean the card with the picture on it.”
Elvis looked at the card and back at Chase, “Still no.”
“Fifty bucks.”
“I don’t want money,” Elvis said, his eyes drifting to Chase’s designer button-down. “I want that shirt. I’ve had my eye on it since last week.”
Chase hesitated, then began unbuttoning it right there in the middle of the lecture. “Fine. Let’s trade shirts. Give me the card.”
A minute later, Chase, now in a graphic of Master Chief wearing a chef’s hat, approached Christina as class ended. “What are the odds? Looks like we’re partners.”
Christina looked at the card, then back at Chase’s hope-filled face. “Are you sure you didn’t adjust the odds? I know Elvis has been eyeing that shirt for weeks.”
“I gave him the shirt because I’m into sharing my style,” Chase lied. “Tomorrow night? Dinner, drinks? We can ‘map out our hardware presentations .’”
“I think that’s something we should discuss with our partners,” Christina said, a small, knowing smirk playing on her lips.
Chase began, but he stopped when Christina continued;”Oh, see, I switched cards too.” He saw Christina holding a card that definitely didn’t match his.
“Can you believe this?” a voice boomed behind him.
Chase turned. Wilson Firestone waving a card with the words ‘Graphics Card’. “What are the odds? Heh, heh. I like the robot chef shirt, Chase. Wanna sell it?”
The Vigil
While Chase was trapped in the study room with Wilson—who was currently explaining that his “hyper-virile” sperm shot through eggs like bullets—Amelia and Sharon were busy outside.
Inspired by Christina’s talk of Venezuala, they organized a protest. They had cookies, candles, and a piñata shaped like the journalist Paylos Dwellez.
“Raise the truth!” Sharon cheered.
Christina walked up, looking at the scene with growing horror. There was upbeat pop music playing, and people were laughing. “This is… tacky and lame,” she muttered.
“Are you saying we’re not allowed to protest?” Amelia asked, her lip quivering. “Christina, you sound like Venezuala right now.”
Sharon added, “Someone has a case of ‘using fringe politics to make themselves feel special but never actually doing anything…itis.’”
The words hit Christina like a physical blow. She realized Amelia was right. She talked the talk, but she had no idea how to actually lead. “What can I do?” she asked quietly.
“You can hang the Paylos Dwellez piñata,” Sharon said, handing her a rope.
“You realize he was beaten to death, right?” Christina asked, looking at the colorful papier-mâché figure.
“That’s where we got the idea,” Sharon said.
“Poignant.” Amelia added.
The Buffer Overflow
The library table was buried under a landslide of glossy tech magazines from 2004 and Wilson’s handwritten diagrams that looked more like crop circles than circuit boards.
“See, Chase, the thing about Voodoo is that it’s a dangerous method to get what you want,” Wilson said, waving a highlighter like a conductor’s baton. “Voodoo Ruins lives Chase. My fourth wife, Sheila—or was it the one with the jet ski?—I swear she used Voodoo. Since she left, I’ve only had three pregnancy scares, would you believe it?”
“I don’t but you can though” Chase massaged his temples, his Master Chief chef-shirt itching against his skin. “Wilson. We have been here for three hours. We have yet to define ‘what a graphics card does’, but I now know the exact upholstery color of your ex-wife’s jet ski. Can we please focus on the transition from AGP to PCI-Express?”
“Politically Correct Idiocy EXPRESS, sounds like a scam created by social justice warriors to inject their beliefs into industry,” Wilson whispered leaning in. “Come on Chase, let’s be the ‘Bit-Boys’ of Orangeside, we can really show Cabar that we understand the tragedy of the digital age.”
Chase slammed his palm on the table. “I don’t wanna be part of the Bit-Boys! I care about passing this class so I can eventually leave this mockery of higher learning!”
The library doors creaked open as Elvis and Tyrone wandered over, looking suspiciously like they were avoiding work.
“You guys coming to the thing outside?” Tyrone asked, nodding toward the window. “Christina’s got a candle and she looks real intense. Like a lady in a pharmaceutical commercial before the medicine kicks in.”
“Are there gonna be snacks?” Wilson asked, his eyes lighting up. “I find that social justice is mildly tolerable with a lemon bar.”
“The presentation is due tomorrow!” Chase snapped, gesturing wildly at the mess of magazines. “We don’t want to start failing a class that teaches people how to turn a computer on. How are you guys done with the project?”
“I’m pretty sure Tyrone and I are pretty good,” Elvis said simply. “An explanation about storage isn’t that tough. Also, Sharon has a piñata. It looks like it wants to get smashed.”
“We can’t go,” Wilson insisted, surprisingly firm. “Chase and I are the ‘Bit-Boys’. We are the boys of the class who play with each other’s bits.”
“Speaking of bits,” Tyrone said, leaning against the table, “did you guys ever think about how an SSD is basically just a really fast library, but a Hard Drive is like a record player that hates being bumped? It’s all about the platters, man. The physical spinning of the soul.”
“Actually,” Elvis interjected, “the SSD represents the evolution of memory into a non-volatile state. It’s silent. It doesn’t need to spin to remember you. It just knows. Like a ghost that lives in a flash chip.”
“ENOUGH!” Chase yelled, attracting a sharp shush from a nearby librarian. He turned his fury on Wilson. “I am sitting here, wearing a shirt for a defunct mascot, discussing 90s hardware with a man who has more divorces than I have suits! I could be out there, standing in the humid night air with Christina, pretending to care about bullshit in some backwards country! I am wasting my prime years on you, Wilson!”
Wilson blinked, his lower lip trembling slightly. “But… I thought we were the Bit-Boys, Chase.”
Chase grabbed his bag, his face a mask of pure exasperation. “There are no Bit-Boys, Wilson! There is only me, failing this class due to a boomer with the foresight of Mr. Magoo. All the while the girl I think is pretty cool is out there wasting her time over a nonsense cause.”
The Vigil of the Falling Star
The quad was bathed in the flickering, orange glow of fifty beeswax candles. The silence was heavy, broken only by the distant hum of the freeway and the occasional self-righteous sniffle from an attendee.
Chase approached the inner circle like a man trying to sneak into a high-stakes poker game. He had a strip of black electrical tape over his mouth and held a candle he’d clearly “borrowed” from a decorative display in the Dean’s lobby. He caught Christina’s eye and gave a solemn, practiced nod.
He waited exactly sixty seconds before peeling the tape back with a painful rip.
“I love the collection of concern you got here,” he whispered, leaning toward Christina.
Christina didn’t look at him, her eyes fixed on the colorful, doomed piñata. “It’s a silent protest, Chase. The ‘silent’ part involves not talking.”
“I find that silence is only effective if nobody has anything important to say” Chase countered. He adjusted his Master Chief chef-shirt, which was now smelling faintly of library dust and desperation. “I’m here for moral support. And to make sure you don’t accidentally set your hair on fire.”
Christina let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You know, I act like I’m the only one here who cares about the world, but I’m mostly because Amelia and Sharon made me really reflect on myself. I’m not as good at this as I pretend to be.”
Chase flashed the high-beam grin. “Don’t sweat it. I, on the other hand, am exactly as perfect as I appear. Stick with me, and I’ll show you the ropes. The world is our oyster.”
A few feet away, Amelia’s candle wavered. She was staring at the flame, her jaw set tight. She had overheard every word. Part of her wanted to scream at Chase for his bravado but another, quieter part of her found the way he distracted Christina—and the way he’d actually shown up—infuriatingly charming. She squeezed her eyes shut, keeping the conflict locked behind her “A-student” exterior.
“Is that…?” Sharon started, pointing toward the parking lot.
The silence of the quad was shattered by the rhythmic, wet slap of sandals and the unmistakable sound of someone humming “The Imperial March” through a kazoo.
Wilson Firestone stumbled into the light. He was swaying, clutching a half-empty bottle of something that smelled like industrial-grade maraschino cherries. His eyes found Chase, and his face twisted into a mask of drunken betrayal.
“There he is!” Wilson bellowed, his voice echoing off the library walls. “The Great Betrayer! The Bit-Boy who wouldn’t play with my bits!”
The silent protesters gasped. Christina buried her face in her hand.
“Wilson, you’re drunk,” Chase said, stepping forward to intercept him. “Go home. Call a wife. Any of them.”
“I don’t need a wife! I need a partner!” Wilson yelled. He lunged at a nearby student, snatching two long taper candles from their hands. He held them out like dual-wielded glowing batons. “You think you’re better than me because you have a sports coat and full head of hair? I have seven hundred million dollars and I don’t need to fake care about some bullshit protest.”
Wilson began swinging the candles wildly, the hot wax spraying through the air. “En garde, you beautiful coward! Fight me like a Bit-Boy!”
He lunged. Chase stepped nimbly to the left, the designer coat fluttering. Wilson’s momentum, fueled by cheap rum and rejection, carried him past Chase and directly toward the edge of the Orangeside Memorial Fountain.
With a spectacular, ungraceful splash, the lottery winner vanished into the waist-deep water. The candles hissed as they hit the water, plunging the immediate area into darkness.
Wilson surfaced a moment later, a plastic lily pad stuck to his head, looking up at Chase with the heartbroken eyes of a wet dog. The protest was ruined. The silence was there for another reason. And Chase Wright realized that being “perfect” didn’t stop the world from being unpredictable.
The Presentation
The next morning, the atmosphere in the CS lab was grim. Chase arrived to find Pablo S. Cabar standing at the front.
“Chase and Wilson were supposed to be first,” Cabar said, his voice unusually soft. “But Wilson explained the situation. There was a falling out. Betrayal. Chase, I’ll give you a C and let Wilson fall on his Nerf sword. Does that sound fair?”
Chase looked at Wilson, who was sitting in the back, looking small and defeated. Chase then turned to Christina, Amelia and Sharon, “Sorry about Darth Magoo crashing the protest, I think he had a voodoo curse put on him that made him go crazy.”
Sharon assured Chase, “Oh, it’s not your fault sugarbuns, Wilson must’ve lost it when he won the lotto.”
Amelia chimed in, “I volunteered at a psych hospital, and I’ve seen the face of schizos, and I saw it last night in Wilson.”
Christina then turned to Chase and said, “You know what’s crazy? Wilson gave me $1500 to switch cards with me, I think he wanted to get Chase to like him, and he probably thought that if Chase thought he was cool, the rest of us would too.” She then looked at Chase and continued, “I think Wilson would do anything to show that he’s more than just his money, he wants to be seen as a man.”
Chase had blown him off for a protest that ended with Wilson accidentally hurtling into a fountain with a candle while making light-saber sounds with his mouth.
Chase looked at Christina. She was watching him, waiting to see if he’d take the easy way out.
“That doesn’t sound fair to me at all,” Chase said. He turned to Wilson. “I understand if you don’t want to be my friend. But this thing we created? It’s bigger than both of us.”
Wilson’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.
They took the stage. It wasn’t a hardware presentation. It was an elaborate, interpretive dance-drama involving capes, voodoo magic, and Wilson Firestone playing a “Boy Bits Lover.” It was bizarre. It was long. It had absolutely nothing to do with Computer Science.
When they finished, the room was silent.
“F,” Cabar said flatly. “F-minus.”
“Did you say S?” Wilson asked hopefully.
“He said ‘F’.” A voice from the corner near a dead plant said.
Cabar gave the student a firm look, “Thank you Roberto.”
“That was one of the worst things I have ever seen,” Christina told Chase as they walked out of the lab. “Which I guess makes being a part of it a pretty selfless act. I’m impressed.”
“How do you know I didn’t do it just to get another shot at you?” Chase asked.
“Because,” Christina said, slinging her bag over her shoulder, “no woman who saw that could ever think of you as a viable sexual candidate again.”
She walked away, but as she reached the end of the hall, she paused and looked back at him. Just for a second.
Chase smiled.
“You did an all-right job up there, my friend,” Wilson said, sneaking up behind him and clapping him on the back.
“Thanks, Wilson.”
“Next time, we use more pyrotechnics,” the older man advised as they walked toward the quad.