David's mornings followed a pattern so precise it could have been plotted on a graph.
He woke before his alarm, not because of discipline, but because his mind rarely rested long enough to wait for sound. By the time the city outside his window began to stir, buses coughing to life, vendors shouting into the haze, he was already sitting at his desk, pencil moving across paper, finishing a line of calculations he had abandoned the night before. The numbers came easily, arranging themselves with a clarity that felt less like effort and more like recognition, as though he were recalling something he had always known.
By the time David turned fifteen, the world had stopped appearing ordinary to him. What others accepted as everyday experience arrived in his mind already dismantled, stripped into components, governed by equations that felt more real than the objects themselves. A bouncing ball was not play, it was elastic collision, energy conservation, and loss to heat. A ringing phone was not just magic, it was vibration translated through air, quantified by frequency and amplitude. Even light, the most familiar of things, was never simply seen; it was wavelength, velocity, refraction, and particle behavior depending on how closely one dared to look.
His apartment was small, functional, and unremarkable, but David's room carried the quiet intensity of a workspace rather than a bedroom. Books lay stacked in uneven columns, their spines creased and annotated. Notebooks filled with equations and diagrams shared space with half-disassembled devices salvaged from old electronics. His school uniform hung untouched on the back of a chair until the last possible moment, an afterthought compared to the ideas occupying his head.
At school, David moved through the corridors like a visitor from somewhere slightly ahead in time. Teachers greeted him with a mixture of pride and caution. They had learned to expect excellence from him, but also to brace themselves for questions that stretched beyond the syllabus. In class, he listened quietly, rarely raising his hand, yet when called upon, he answered with unsettling precision. He didn't recite formulas, he derived them, sometimes offering explanations so clean they left the room silent.
His classmates noticed him for different reasons.
Some admired him openly, whispering his name whenever results were posted or competitions announced. Others resented the effortless way he topped rankings without appearing to try. A few tried to befriend him simply to bask in reflected brilliance. And then there were the girls, drawn to him not just for his intelligence, but for the calm detachment that surrounded him like a barrier.
David noticed their attention and disliked it.
Compliments made him uncomfortable. Flirtation felt inefficient, distracting, and oddly intrusive. He responded politely, briefly, and without encouragement, returning his focus to books, problems, or the quiet comfort of his own thoughts. It wasn't arrogance that kept him distant, he simply found most conversations uninteresting once they drifted away from ideas and into performance.
To the school administration, however, David was not a complication. He was an asset.
When the annual inter-school science contest was announced, a high-profile event involving complex theoretical problems and applied experimentation—his name surfaced immediately. There was no debate. He would represent the school in physics. Teachers spoke of him in meetings with certainty, as if the decision had already been approved by some higher authority. A letter was printed. A badge prepared. Expectations settled onto his shoulders without anyone bothering to ask if he wanted them there.
David accepted without ceremony.
Competitions were familiar territory. They offered structure, rules, and clear outcomes, elements he appreciated. More importantly, they allowed him to test himself against problems designed to challenge the sharpest minds, not just repeat lessons he had mastered years ago. Victory was never his primary motivation; clarity was. He wanted to know how far logic could take him when pushed to its limits.
As he walked home that afternoon, contest letter folded neatly in his bag, Aarav felt the faint satisfaction of alignment, another predictable step in a life governed by cause and effect. Tomorrow would follow today. Problems would yield answers. Effort would produce results.