Crushing Every Doubt into Applause in a Boston Autumn

Autumn came earlier to Boston than to Beijing, and it was more generous, too.

In the second week of September, the leaves on both banks of the Charles River had only just begun to turn. Flecks of gold and orange-red showed through the green, as though someone had dipped a brush in paint and dabbed it at random across a vast canvas, reluctant to fill it in, yet leaving traces everywhere.

Su Jin arrived at Boston Logan International Airport on a Tuesday afternoon.

The private jet landed at the general aviation terminal, and customs officers were brought to the cabin door to handle her entry formalities. The whole process took less than ten minutes.

The moment she stepped out of the cabin, the wind of New England rushed toward her, carrying the distinctive damp chill of the Atlantic Ocean. It was nothing like Beijing's dry autumn wind.

Today, she was dressed completely differently from the loose loungewear she had worn on the plane.

She wore a dark blue Ralph Lauren V-neck sweater, fitted and made from a cashmere-silk blend. It hugged her body without being tight, and the neckline dipped just low enough to reveal a small patch of skin above her collarbones and a delicate Buccellati necklace-an openwork flower pendant from the Opera collection that rested in the hollow of her collarbone.

Her light blue Agolde straight-leg jeans were high-waisted with frayed hems. She had picked them out herself at a Paris boutique, and their wash looked as natural as if they had been worn for three years.

On her feet were white Common Projects sneakers, minimalist in design and without a single logo, apart from a row of gold-stamped size numbers on the side of each heel.

Her hair was loose, and the wind had tousled it a little, but the disarray made her look younger-not through any studied languor, but with the genuinely unadorned beauty of a woman in her twenties.

Sunlight slanted through the terminal's glass curtain wall onto her face. In the natural light, her skin had an almost translucent quality, and the faint flush the wind had brought to her cheekbones looked like a thin layer of blush.

The person sent to meet her was waiting at the terminal entrance-a Chinese international student Ji Yunshen had arranged for, surnamed Gu. He was a third-year doctoral student in MIT's computer science department, wearing round-framed glasses and a gray MIT hoodie. He looked very thin, but bright and alert.

He held up a sign with her name on it. When he saw her come out through the exit, he nearly dropped it.

"Su... Su Jin?" His voice was a little unsteady. His gaze lingered on her face for two seconds, then darted away as though he had been burned, the tips of his ears turning red before her eyes.

Su Jin smiled at him. "Senior Gu? Sorry for the trouble."

Xiao Gu barely spoke on the way. As he drove, he occasionally stole a glance at her in the rearview mirror. Each time, she caught him, and he hurriedly turned his eyes back to the road.

Su Jin didn't mind. She leaned back in the passenger seat and watched the scenery sweep past outside-the Charles River shimmered in the afternoon sun, with a few sailboats drifting lazily across it;

On the far bank, Boston's skyline was low but pleasingly varied, and the spire of the Prudential Center gleamed in the distance;

As they passed Harvard Bridge, she saw the graffiti-covered measurements and markings on its railings. A group of students were cycling across it, their laughter carried to her from far away by the wind.

"MIT is over there." Xiao Gu pointed to a cluster of red-brick buildings across the river, an unconscious note of pride in his voice. "The main building is the Maclaurin Great Dome. You've definitely seen it in photos. The computer science department is in the Stata Center, the building Zaha Hadid designed. It's twisted like something aliens built."

Su Jin followed his pointing finger. The white building stood out among the red-brick structures, its curves sharp and its angles distinct. It really did look like something from another planet. The corners of her mouth curved up.

"It does," she said.

Two

The car stopped on a quiet street in Boston's Back Bay.

The street was called Commonwealth Avenue, and it was one of Boston's most expensive residential areas.

The row houses on either side were all late-nineteenth-century Federal-style buildings, with red-brick walls, white doors and windows, and black wrought-iron fences. Neatly trimmed boxwoods and hydrangeas grew by their entrances.

Autumn afternoon sunlight filtered through the branches and leaves of the century-old trees, casting dappled patterns on the red-brick sidewalk. The whole street was as quiet as an Edward Hopper painting.

Su Jin's house was halfway down Commonwealth Avenue, at number 217.

She took her key from her bag, climbed the five granite steps, and opened the black oak door.

The moment she stepped inside, she stopped in the entryway and stood still.

It wasn't surprise, but a subtle feeling of being struck.

This house was completely different from the courtyard house in Beijing. The courtyard house grew inward, with the courtyard at its center and the rooms arranged around it. All of life unfolded around that open space, quiet, restrained, and cut off from the world.

This house, on the other hand, opened outward-wall after wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows let light pour in from every direction, illuminating every corner until it was clear and bright.

The entryway floor was laid with custom black-and-white marble in a crisp geometric pattern.

Directly opposite was a huge abstract painting, nearly filling the entire wall. Broad expanses of indigo and dark green were split by a few golden cracks, like light forcing its way out from behind dark clouds.

Cheng Yan had picked it out for her. It was the work of a young New York artist, and it suited Boston's character unexpectedly well.

Beyond the entryway lay the heart of the house-a three-story atrium.

A huge skylight crowned the atrium. Afternoon light poured through it and passed through the custom glass chandelier suspended in the air, casting tiny scattered patches of light on the white marble floor.

The chandelier had been hand-blown by an Italian glassmaking family. More than a thousand irregularly shaped pieces of glass hung down from the height of the third floor, each angle calculated with precision. When the wind blew in through the windows, they touched softly, making a sound like wind chimes, so faint and distant it was like falling snow.

The first floor contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen, all open to one another without a single partition.

The living room floor was made of oversized, wide planks of pale gray oak, coated only in matte lacquer so the grain was clearly visible.

The sofa was a custom L-shaped piece in dark gray suede, with enormous cushions that let a person sink right in.

Opposite it was a wall-sized bookcase of dark gray steel, interspersed with a few walnut shelves. It wasn't yet full, holding only a few rows of books she had brought from Beijing-art history, hotel management, and several introductory deep learning textbooks.

A black Steinway grand piano stood in one corner of the living room, its lacquered surface reflecting a cool gleam in the light.

She didn't really know how to play, but Cheng Yan had said the living room needed something to command the space, so she had bought it.

A crystal vase stood on the piano, holding several fresh, pale blue hydrangeas the housekeeper had prepared in advance.

The dining room was next to the living room. An enormous walnut dining table seated twelve, and instead of a tablecloth, it had only a narrow, handwoven table runner.

A minimalist black metal pendant light hung above the table. Geometric in shape, its shade could be adjusted at will, directing the light wherever one pleased.

Beside the table was a temperature- and humidity-controlled wine cabinet, already stocked with a few bottles-a bottle of Krug champagne, a bottle of Sassicaia red wine, and a bottle of Yamazaki 25-year-old whisky, all prepared by the housekeeper according to her previous preferences.

The kitchen was completely open-plan, with an island big enough for a person to lie on.

The countertop was a single slab of Calacatta marble, white with gray veining that seemed to flow when the light fell on it.

The range was Wolf, the oven Gaggenau, and the refrigerator Sub-Zero. They were all top-of-the-line, but she probably wouldn't use them-she had a private chef who came only when needed.

The second floor held the guest rooms and the study.

The study faced south, with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looking directly onto the small back garden.

The desk was a huge, single slab of walnut, with an Apple Studio Display monitor on it, a Herman Miller Embody ergonomic chair, and a classic Anglepoise desk lamp with a white enamel shade that could be adjusted to any angle.

Bookcases filled an entire wall, and this time they really were packed-while still in Beijing, she had drawn up a reading list and asked the housekeeper to buy the books in advance. They ranged from classic machine learning textbooks to the latest academic paper collections, from Deep Learning to Computer Vision: Models, Learning, and Inference, all neatly arranged by category.

The third floor held the primary bedroom and dressing room.

The bed in the primary bedroom was a custom four-poster in dark walnut, without carvings, its only decoration the minimalist geometric facets cut into the tops of the posts.

The bedding was Frette, pale gray silk that felt cool and smooth to the touch.

A small ceramic lamp sat on the bedside table, handmade by a Japanese ceramic artist. Its glaze was a warm ivory, with an irregular crackle pattern across the surface.

The window looked directly onto the small back garden. When she woke in the morning, sunlight would filter through the branches and leaves of the old oak tree, casting shifting patterns of light and shadow on the white wall.

The dressing room was next to the primary bedroom. It wasn't large, but it was designed with exceptional efficiency.

Open clothes rails lined two walls, arranged by color and season. The lights were motion-activated and came on when she walked in.

An island stood in the middle, topped with white marble and concealing jewelry compartments inside. Buccellati, Tiffany, Cartier, Bvlgari-every piece had its own designated place.

The shoe cabinet was on the other side of the dressing room. From sneakers to high heels, from Common Projects to Christian Louboutin, every pair sat in a transparent acrylic box, like a little museum.

What Su Jin liked best were the private cinema and gym in the basement.

The cinema had a seven-meter-wide screen and custom French-made seats, upholstered in leather and electrically adjustable so they could recline flat. The

gym wasn't large, but it was well equipped-a Technogym treadmill, a rowing machine, a multifunctional training rack, and a wall of mirrors for her morning stretches and yoga.

The back garden wasn't large, but it was well tended.

An old oak occupied most of the garden, its crown turning gold and red in the autumn, its fallen leaves carpeting the whole lawn.

A wrought-iron bench stood beneath the oak, painted dark green, its back covered in ivy.

A cluster of hydrangeas grew in the corner of the garden, pale blue and pinkish-purple flower heads pressed together, looking especially soft in the afternoon light.

Su Jin stood in the garden, looking up at the old oak.

Sunlight filtered through gaps in the foliage, scattering tiny patches of light and shadow across her face.

Seen from behind, she looked like an ordinary MIT graduate student, young and fresh-faced, without a trace of makeup.

But when she turned around, that face overturned every notion of ordinary.

[Host,] Little Golden Egg squeezed out of the air and floated beside her, a note of near emotion in his voice. [This system thinks this house suits you better than the one in Beijing.]

Su Jin said nothing, only looking up at the tree.

"Why?" she asked.

[Because the one in Beijing is closed in, and this one-is open.] Little Golden Egg spoke earnestly. [The state you're in now is open.]

The corners of Su Jin's mouth curved up, and she didn't deny it.

Three

MIT's campus was smaller than she had imagined, but prettier than it looked in photographs.

The Maclaurin Great Dome shone white in the afternoon sun. Students sat in twos and threes on the lawn in front of it: some coding on laptops, some lying on the grass soaking up the sun, and others sitting in a circle playing guitar.

Across from the Great Dome was the Infinite Corridor, a colonnade that stretched farther than the eye could see, every column Ionic, stately and elegant.

The Stata Center stood at the end of the Infinite Corridor. The white building designed by Zaha Hadid rose among the red-brick buildings with claws and fangs bared, like an alien spaceship that had accidentally landed in the wrong place.

Su Jin had come to register on her own.

Xiao Gu had dropped her at the entrance and left, saying he still had an experiment to do in the department.

She pushed open the Stata Center's glass doors and entered the lobby. A smell of coffee and printer toner greeted her, the distinctive, reassuring smell of an academic institution.

People came and went through the lobby, students hurrying along with backpacks on their shoulders and coffee in their hands.

Most wore MIT hoodies and sweatpants. Their hair was messy, their glasses as thick as bottle bottoms, and they looked as though they hadn't slept in days.

When Su Jin walked in, the lobby fell quiet for a moment-not deliberately, but instinctively. It was like a flock of foraging birds suddenly seeing one of their own with especially brilliant plumage fly in: they all looked up for a second, then bent their heads and went back to what they were doing.

But afterward, several gazes followed her as she moved.

She wasn't surprised.

In this building, she was probably one of the few people who could hold everyone's attention even in jeans and sneakers.

That face needed no help from cosmetics to make the doctoral students in the hallway forget what algorithm they had just been thinking about.

Even under the fluorescent lights, her skin was translucent, the curves of her brows and eyes just right. Her lips were a natural rose pink, full and soft, like berries freshly picked from an autumn orchard.

The registration office was on the fifth floor.

The administrator receiving her was a white woman in her fifties, with cat-eye glasses and hair dyed blond. She spoke quickly, with a strong Boston accent.

When she saw Su Jin, her glasses nearly slid off her nose. She stared for two seconds, then looked down through the documents in her hands, as though checking that she had the right person.

"Su... Ms. Su?" She looked up at Su Jin, then down at the photo in the documents, and let out a short sound somewhere between surprise and admiration. "Oh, my goodness, you're so much more beautiful than you are in the photo."

Su Jin smiled and handed over her passport and invitation letter.

When the administrator had finished the paperwork, she handed Su Jin a student card. It was dark blue, with her photo and name printed on it; the status field read "visiting scholar."

"Welcome to MIT." The administrator looked at her with the sincere warmth of an elder toward someone younger. "You'll like it here."

Su Jin took the card and thanked her.

After leaving the registration office, she stood in the hallway for a while, looking at the card in her hand.

The dark blue card gleamed coolly under the fluorescent lights. Her photo was printed on it, with a faint smile on her face and a glimmer in her eyes.

Her phone vibrated. It was a message from Ji Yunshen: Did registration go smoothly?

She replied: It did.

He sent another message: There's a welcome mixer for new students tomorrow. Do you want to come? It's nothing formal, just a gathering so everyone can get to know one another. The people coming are all master's and doctoral students starting this year, along with a few visiting scholars.

She thought for a moment and replied: I'll come.

He replied instantly: Then I'll pick you up tomorrow.

Four

At four the next afternoon, Ji Yunshen appeared on time at the door of 217 Commonwealth Avenue.

He was dressed much more casually than he had been in Beijing-a gray crewneck sweatshirt with MIT printed across the chest, dark blue jeans, and gray New Balance sneakers.

His hair was unstyled, his fringe falling over his forehead, and his eyes behind his glasses looked especially clear in the afternoon light.

He stood on the stone steps by the door, holding two cups of coffee. The moment he saw Su Jin open the door, his fingers tightened around the paper cups.

Su Jin was wearing an ivory-white Loro Piana crewneck cashmere sweater today, so thin and soft that it lay against her like a layer of cream. Its V-shaped neckline dipped just low enough to offer a glimpse of her collarbone.

Her dark blue Mother flared jeans fell to the tops of her feet, paired with distressed white Golden Goose sneakers whose star patterns at the heels were bright gold.

Her hair was tied in a low ponytail, revealing her whole face. The only things on her earlobes were a simple pair of Mikimoto pearl studs, less than a centimeter across, small and delicate, glowing softly in the sunlight.

She wore no makeup, or at least none that could be seen.

The glow of her natural skin was lovelier than any foundation. Her lashes were naturally thick and curled enough without mascara, and her lips were a natural pale pink that grew a little redder after the wind touched them, as though she had a strawberry candy in her mouth that hadn't quite melted.

Ji Yunshen handed her a coffee, his gaze resting on her face for a second before he looked away. "Let's go," he said. "The mixer is at the student center by the Great Dome."

They walked along Commonwealth Avenue toward MIT. At four in the afternoon, Boston's sunlight had turned a warm orange-gold, bathing the red-brick sidewalk in warm color.

Passing pedestrians occasionally glanced at them-a tall, slender Asian man and an Asian woman so beautiful she hardly seemed real, walking side by side in the autumn sun like a frame cut from a film.

"The place you live is close to campus," Ji Yunshen said. "It's a ten-minute walk."

Su Jin nodded and took a sip of coffee.

It was a latte, just the right temperature, with dense, velvety foam. It was probably from the nearby Tatte.

She glanced at him. He was looking ahead, his expression calm, but there was an almost imperceptible curve at the corner of his mouth.

The student center stood east of the Great Dome, a red-brick building with an MIT flag hanging by the entrance, snapping in the wind.

They pushed open the door and went inside. Thirty or forty people had already gathered, scattered around the lobby. Some stood chatting, some sat on sofas with drinks, and several others were gathered around a foosball table.

Ji Yunshen led her in, and several people immediately came over to greet them.

He introduced them one by one-this was a new doctoral student in computer vision, that was a postdoctoral researcher in computational neuroscience, the one beside them was an assistant professor who had just received tenure that year, and several others were visiting scholars like Su Jin, some from Europe, some from Japan, and some from Silicon Valley.

Everyone's gaze lingered on Su Jin noticeably longer than usual.

The computer vision doctoral student was a white man with curly hair who spoke quickly. After introducing himself, he stared at Su Jin for three seconds, then blurted out, "Are you an actress?"

Several people nearby laughed.

Su Jin laughed too and shook her head. "No, I work in computer vision."

The curly-haired man froze for a moment, then scratched his head sheepishly. "Oh, sorry. I thought you were some kind of... celebrity invited to the event or something."

Ji Yunshen coughed softly beside them and changed the subject.

Five

Halfway through the mixer, a middle-aged man in a dark blue shirt pushed open the door and came in.

He was in his early forties, with slightly messy hair and bright eyes behind his glasses. He habitually frowned when he spoke, as though he were always thinking about some problem.

When he entered, the atmosphere in the lobby shifted slightly. Several doctoral students immediately straightened up, and the curly-haired man even adjusted his collar instinctively.

"That's Professor Harris," Ji Yunshen said, leaning close to Su Jin and lowering his voice. "He works in computer vision and has been at MIT for twelve years. He's won best paper at CVPR and ICCV several times. The course he teaches is the hardest in the whole CS department, and the best."

Professor Harris's gaze swept across the lobby and paused on Su Jin's face for a moment-just a moment-before moving on.

He walked to the center and clapped his hands, signaling for everyone to quiet down.

"Welcome to MIT." His voice wasn't loud, but it carried throughout the lobby. "I know you're all the smartest people in your respective fields, or you wouldn't be sitting here. But there's something I need to remind you of-"

He paused, his gaze passing over everyone present before finally stopping in Su Jin's direction, though he didn't look at her deliberately.

"At MIT, being smart isn't enough. What you need is to be smarter than everyone else, work harder than everyone else, and be less afraid of failure than everyone else. People here won't think more highly of you because of who you are. They'll respect you only because of what you can do."

With that, he turned and left.

The hall fell quiet for a few seconds, then buzzed with conversation again. But something new had entered the bustle-a faint sense of competition had been kindled, as though an invisible layer of static electricity had suddenly filled the air.

The curly-haired guy leaned over and said to Su Jin, "Professor Harris says that at the freshman mixer every year. I've heard it three times now. But he's right. MIT is that kind of place-whether you're beautiful or rich, it doesn't matter. You have to be able to do the work."

As he spoke, he looked at Su Jin. There was no malice in his gaze, but there was an open, undisguised scrutiny. Translated, it meant: You're so good-looking, but can you really do the work?

Su Jin looked at him and smiled without saying a word.

Two days later, she faced her first test at MIT.

It wasn't a formal exam, but a placement test before the start of Professor Harris's "Introduction to Computer Vision" course.

It was MIT's flagship computer vision course, accepting only thirty students each year. Those who wanted to enroll first had to take a placement test, and only the top thirty could stay.

Those who didn't pass could attend other professors' classes, but everyone knew that at MIT, Professor Harris's class and everyone else's were separated by a whole Charles River.

The test was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, in a large lecture room in the Stata Center.

When Su Jin walked in, more than twenty people were already seated, each with a laptop in front of them. Their expressions varied-some nervously flipped through their notes, some closed their eyes and silently recited formulas, while others stared blankly at the ceiling.

The curly-haired guy was sitting in the front row. When he saw her come in, he waved and pointed to the empty seat beside him.

Su Jin sat down and took her laptop out of her bag.

She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater from The Row that day, pure cashmere with a loose fit. The sleeves reached the base of her fingers, leaving only her fingertips exposed.

She wore light blue straight-leg jeans from Acne Studios and a pair of white Common Projects sneakers.

Her hair was loose, her bangs slightly tousled by the wind. Framing her clean, unadorned face, they made her look like an ordinary female MIT graduate student-except she was one who could make all the light in the classroom tilt toward her.

When Professor Harris walked in, he was carrying a stack of printed test papers.

He handed them out, one per person. Three pages, eight questions, two hours.

"Open book," he said. "You can go online, look things up, and use any tools you need. But you may not discuss the questions with one another."

He paused and glanced at the clock on the wall. "Begin."

Su Jin opened her test paper.

The first question was linear algebra: given a high-dimensional matrix, calculate its eigendecomposition and use it to reduce the dimensionality of the data. She glanced at it, and an approach to the solution had already taken shape in her mind.

In the three weeks before coming to MIT, she had watched all of MIT's open course videos and done more than half the exercises. Linear algebra was one of her strengths.

The second question was probability theory-a Bayesian inference problem requiring her to derive a closed-form expression for the posterior probability.

She scribbled a few lines on the paper and quickly found a direction.

The third question moved into the heart of computer vision. This wasn't difficult; she knew the steps of the Canny operator by heart.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth questions grew increasingly difficult and went ever deeper.

For each question, she first wrote out her derivation on paper, then implemented the code on her laptop. Once it ran successfully, she pasted both the results and the code into her answer sheet.

When she reached the seventh question, she stopped.

The question presented a blurry grayscale image and asked her to restore it to a clear image using deep learning.

There were no hints, no specified network architecture, and no training data-only one question: How would you do it?

Su Jin stared at the blurry image for thirty seconds. Ordinary deblurring algorithms couldn't handle this kind of nonuniform blur. She needed a model that could estimate spatially varying blur kernels.

She closed her eyes and thought for two minutes.

Then she began writing code.

Her network architecture drew on a recent paper about spatially varying deblurring, but she made improvements of her own. She spent forty minutes writing the code and ten debugging it, and got it running.

The moment the results appeared, she glanced at the screen, then at the original image.

The restored image was very clear, with sharp edges and natural textures. For a question in a two-hour test, it was already good enough.

She organized her method and code, pasted them into her answer sheet, then turned the test paper to the last page.

The eighth question consisted of a single sentence: Design a system capable of estimating an object's three-dimensional shape and pose from a single image.

There were no further instructions, no constraints, and no evaluation criteria.

It was simply an open-ended question without a single hint.

Su Jin leaned back in her chair and stared at the question for five minutes.

The classroom was quiet except for the tapping of keyboards and the occasional rustle of a page turning.

Outside, sunlight slanted through the large floor-to-ceiling windows, casting a small patch of light on her laptop keyboard. Looking at it, she suddenly remembered the papers she had read in her study until three in the morning before coming to MIT.

One paper on single-view 3D reconstruction had left a particularly deep impression on her. The author used a method called "implicit neural representation"

She decided to use that method.

For the next hour, she wrote code frantically.

Her hands moved quickly, the tapping of her keyboard sounding especially crisp in the quiet classroom.

Halfway through, Professor Harris walked past her. His steps paused, and his gaze settled on her screen for about five seconds before he walked away.

She didn't notice.

When the final hour ended, she had just managed to get the code running. The 3D model it produced was already far beyond expectations for an hour's work.

She pasted the code and results into her answer sheet, saved the file, and closed her laptop.

Seven or eight people were still hunched over their work, anxiety written all over their faces.

She stood and handed her test paper to Professor Harris.

As he took it, he looked up at her.

That look was different from before-not scrutiny or appraisal, but a serious, probing gaze.

"Finished?" he asked.

Su Jin nodded.

He opened the test paper and scanned the first few questions, then turned to the seventh. He glanced at her code and raised an eyebrow.

He turned to the eighth question and studied it for so long that Su Jin thought he was going to say something.

He said nothing, only nodded.

"You may go," he said.

Su Jin turned and walked out of the classroom.

Three days later, the results came out.

Professor Harris's teaching assistant sent an email to the CS department mailing list announcing the class roster.

The thirty names were arranged from highest score to lowest. The first name was-

Su Jin.

The classroom fell silent for a moment.

This silence was different from before.

Before, they had fallen silent because of her beauty. This time, it was because her name appeared above everyone else's.

The curly-haired guy was the first to react. He turned to look at her, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide as saucers. "You... you came first?"

Su Jin looked at him and nodded.

"Oh, man." The curly-haired guy leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh. "Not only are you good-looking, you're smarter than all of us, too. Are you going to leave the rest of us any way to live?"

Several people nearby laughed, but there was no jealousy in their laughter, only a frank admission of defeat after being won over.

At MIT, beauty couldn't earn you respect, but first place could.

When Professor Harris walked into the classroom, his gaze lingered on Su Jin for a second.

He turned on the projector, and the answer to the first question appeared on the screen-not the standard answer, but Su Jin's.

"This question," he said, "was answered correctly by only one person in the class."

He glanced at Su Jin.

"Su, could you come up and explain your approach?"

Su Jin stood and walked to the front of the classroom.

She picked up a marker and wrote out her derivation on the whiteboard, explaining as she went. Her voice wasn't loud, but every sentence was clear and forceful.

Her approach differed from the standard answer. She had used a different, more concise decomposition, cutting out three steps and reducing the amount of computation, yet the result was exactly the same.

Professor Harris stood beside her with his arms folded, listening to her explanation. His expression shifted from seriousness to thoughtfulness, then to a faint, almost imperceptible approval.

When she finished, applause rang out in the classroom.

It wasn't the polite kind of applause, but sincere applause from people who had been convinced.

As Su Jin walked back to her seat, the sunlight outside fell directly on her, casting a soft halo over her black turtleneck sweater.

There was no triumph on her face, only a slight curve to her lips, as though she were doing something perfectly ordinary.

That evening, Su Jin sat alone on a bench in the back garden, looking at the outline of the old oak tree in the moonlight.

Boston's autumn nights had grown a little chilly. She wore a camel-colored Loro Piana cashmere shawl, wide and soft, wrapped around half her body.

Her phone lay on the wrought-iron table beside her, its screen lit up with a message from Chen Shen: I heard you came first at MIT? Impressive.

She didn't reply.

It buzzed again. This time it was Lu Shen: Are you settling in all right in Boston? Autumn must be beautiful there.

She didn't reply to that one either.

The third message was from Ji Yunshen: Congratulations.

Just one word. She looked at it, thought for a moment, and replied with one word: Thanks.

She put down her phone and looked up at the night sky.

Boston's nights were much quieter than Beijing's. Without the glare of neon lights, the stars were clearly visible. Orion had just risen in the east, its three belt stars forming a straight line, twinkling above the treetops.

[Host,] Little Golden Egg floated out beside her, speaking softly. [Are you happy today?]

Su Jin thought for a moment and said, "I am."

[Is it because you came first?]

She shook her head.

"No."

[Then why?]

She was silent for a while, then said, "Because of the eighth question. Designing a system to estimate a three-dimensional shape from a single image." She paused, her lips curving slightly. "I did it."

Little Golden Egg said nothing.

She went on, "You know, I used to think having money was enough. With money, I could buy anything, go anywhere, and become anyone.

But now I've realized-" She looked at the stars. "There are some things money can't buy. Like that eighth question. Like the feeling of 'I did it.'"

Little Golden Egg was silent for a long time.

Then it said, [Host, this system thinks you're becoming less and less like a tycoon chosen by a system.]

Su Jin turned to look at it. "Then what am I like?"

[Like a-] Little Golden Egg thought for a moment. [A person who's truly alive.]

Su Jin was taken aback, then smiled.

The night breeze blew through, rustling the oak leaves, and moonlight coated her hair in a silvery glow. She pulled her shawl tighter and looked up at the stars, her lips slightly curved, a light in her eyes.