The Interface

The Quantum Lab in the basement of the St. Sterling Computer Science building was kept at a constant sixty-two degrees. It was a temperature designed to preserve the massive server banks lining the back wall, but Clara Lin was fairly certain it was also maintained to freeze the souls of the students working there.

Clara pulled her cardigan tighter around herself, adjusting her glasses as she stared at the assignment board.

**Capstone Pairings - Section A**

**Team 14: Sterling, Reid & Lin, Clara**

A collective groan, audible only to the dogs of the underworld, echoed in her head.

Reid Sterling. The Sterling of *Sterling Tech*. The guy who had patented his first algorithm at sixteen. The guy who walked through campus like he owned the pavement, primarily because his grandfather had paid for it.

"Lin."

The voice came from behind her, crisp and devoid of warmth.

Clara turned. Reid Sterling was leaning against a server rack, scrolling through his tablet. He didn't look up. He had the kind of face that belonged on a magazine cover—sharp jaw, eyes the color of cold brew coffee, and hair that was artfully messy in a way that cost three hundred dollars.

"Hi, Reid," Clara said, summoning her best scholarship-student smile. The one that said *I am grateful to be here and will not cause trouble.* "Looks like we’re partners."

Reid finally looked at her. His gaze was a scan, swift and dismissive, assessing her utility and finding it wanting.

"Right," Reid said, pushing off the rack. "Let's establish the workflow immediately. I’m aiming for the Turing Prize with this adaptive AI, not just an A. So, I’ll handle the backend architecture, the neural net training, and the core algorithms."

Clara blinked. "Okay. That’s... the entire project."

"Not entirely," Reid waved a hand vaguely. "We need a user interface. And a presentation deck. You can handle that. The UI needs to be clean. Don't use Comic Sans. And try not to break the repository when you commit your files."

The insult was casual, tossed out like a wrapper. *Try not to break anything.* As if she were a toddler wandering into a nuclear power plant.

Clara felt the familiar prickle of heat in her chest, a dangerous flare of pride she had spent three years suppressing. She was top of her class in Data Structures. She had aced Advanced Cryptography. But she was also on the Whispering Pines Scholarship. One bad peer review, one conflict with a donor’s grandson, and her funding could vanish.

"Understood," Clara said, her voice steady. "I'll focus on the frontend and the documentation."

"Great." Reid turned back to his tablet, already walking away. "I set up the Git repo. I’ll send you the link. Don't push any code to the main branch without my approval."

He didn't wait for a response. He just walked out of the lab, leaving Clara standing in the freezing air, staring at his retreating back.

"Arrogant jerk," she whispered, the words visible in a small cloud of breath.

She walked over to her designated workstation and opened her laptop. She didn't open a presentation software. She opened the terminal and pulled up the repository Reid had created. She looked at his initial commit.

It was brilliant. Of course it was. The architecture was elegant, aggressive, and efficient.

But it was also rigid. He hadn't accounted for memory leakage in the secondary nodes.

Clara’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. She could fix it. She could add a comment, a gentle suggestion.

*Try not to break anything.*

Clara closed the terminal.

"Have fun with your memory leaks, Sterling," she muttered, and opened PowerPoint.

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