Chapter 1: The Boy Who Solved the World and Knew Nothing About It

The room was white—too white. Sterile, like a hospital. Or a prison that didn’t want you to know it was one.

___ blinked once, slowly. He always blinked slowly when he was bored. The screen in front of him displayed a problem involving particle physics, three unsolved conjectures, and a riddle about cats. He solved it in under eight seconds.

“Done,” he said, monotone.

The speakers clicked on. “Already? Try not to rush through everything, Subject 013.”

“That problem was old. I saw it three years ago in a Russian paper.”

A sigh crackled through the static. “Fine. Take a break.”

___ leaned back in his chair. He was fifteen, with black hair that never grew long enough to need cutting, and eyes that saw too much but understood too little. He could calculate the orbit of a newly discovered exoplanet in his head but didn’t know what it meant to have a birthday party.

He didn’t have friends. He didn’t have enemies. He had books, puzzles, and a schedule precisely calibrated for “maximum cognitive output.”

And he was tired.

The door hissed open with its usual overdramatic flair. But this time, someone new walked in.

She wasn’t wearing a lab coat.

She had brown hair tied in a lopsided ponytail, and her uniform looked like it belonged in a high school, not a high-security research facility. She was holding a cup of soda in one hand and a crumpled bag of chips in the other.

“Yo,” she said, popping a chip into her mouth. “You the genius?”

___ blinked again. “And you are…?”

She grinned, ignoring his question. “So you’ve never been in love, right?”

___ tilted his head. “Love is a biochemical phenomenon involving dopamine, oxytocin, and selective memory formation. Why?”

She walked right up to him and poked his forehead. “Because I’m your assigned girlfriend. Starting today.”

___ stared.

“…What?”

Behind the glass wall, the scientists watched with cold intensity. Project RF had begun. The girl—Subject K—was the first of her kind. A normal, emotional teenager dropped into a genius’s sterile world.

And ___?

He just wanted to know why his chest felt weird when she smiled.