Page 26 of You Had Me at Hello World
I force myself to head in.
Once I’m inside, I scan the half-filled seats. Everyone is chattering away like they’ve known one another forever. Nobody casts a glance in my direction. No sign of Aisha, either…
I find Khoi next to a Black teenager clutching a metal rectangular box. He introduces himself as Obi, Khoi’s roommate. Right, the kid who ditched dinner to cozy up with a concurrency bug.
“Do you know where Aisha is?” I ask.
“Oh. That… uh…” Khoi’s face goes blank. “No idea. She does her own thing.”
Yeah, okay. Between Aisha saying she isn’t serious about him and Khoi’s completelywhateverattitude, I feel like someoneshould just throw the kill switch on this relationship.
But I’m not about to comment. Like, I’m too much of a broke bitch to be giving away my two cents nobody asked for. I turn to Obi.
“What are you holding?”
He tightens his bear hug around the box, as if he’s scared I’m going to nick it. “It’s an Nvidia A100.”
Sounds like a spaceship. “What now?”
“It’s a GPU.”
“Sorry?”
He stares at me like I just asked how to add two plus two. “A graphics processing unit. For doing big computations.”
“Okayyyy.” I don’t ask for more details, not wanting to give him another chance to make me feel stupid. “But why did you have to bring it here?”
“Obi’s GPU is very important to him,” Khoi says.
“Didn’t want it to get stolen. It’s worth fifteen grand.” Obi cuts his eyes to Khoi. “Not like this guy would understand. He doesn’t need to care about money.”
“Wait, why not?”
“Don’t you know? Last year he—”
“Wow, the architecture of this auditorium is fascinating,” Khoi interjects. “It’s one-eighth of a sphere. You know that’s called an octant?”
For some incomprehensible reason, that distracts Obi. “Whoa. What other geometry facts do you know?”
“Are you familiar with Ptolemy’s theorem?”
Khoi pulls out an iPad and draws the math proof, which is actually sort of interesting, but not interesting enough to make me forget that there was something Obi was about to say that Khoi didn’t want me to know.
Then the program director, a smiley woman with a HellomynameisCourtney name tag, steps out onto the luminous stage, and everybody falls silent.
She has some speech about how it’s an honor to be here and how Edvin Nilsen, the billionaire founder of Alpha Fellows, is sorry he couldn’t deliver the keynote. He got tied up with somelast-minute business meetings.
Obi whispers, “Heard his company has been catching strays.”
I glance over. “Nexus? For what?”
But before he can answer, a girl turns around and does a very aggressiveshushat us.
HellomynameisCourtney mentions some of the program alumni. Photos of famous tech bros flash on the screen. They even include a picture of thisForbes30 Under 30 crypto founder who went to prison recently, which leads to some muttering.
“Why are they flexing about him?” someone mumbles from behind us. “He’s a horrible person!”
“Anybody who ever believed in crypto deserves to lose their money,” Obi shoots back. “Remember the FTX scandal? Or Pegasus? And NFTs are the most brain-dead invention of the twenty-first century.”
