He wants to scream. He wants to run through the building telling everyone. He wants to call his mom, except he can't because she wouldn't understand what NeurIPS is and he'd have to explain it and the explanation would make it smaller somehow, would reduce this mountain of validation into something she could nod at before asking if he's eating enough.
He pulls out his phone and texts the only person who would get it.
Alex: guess what just happened
Three dots. Then:
Jian: You finally slept with that girl from the climbing gym?
Alex: fuck you. neurips accepted the paper
Jian: Congratulations. This is significant. We should discuss implications.
Classic Jian. No exclamation points, no emojis, just "significant" and "implications." But Alex knows him well enough now to read between the lines. Jian is proud. Jian is probably already thinking three moves ahead, calculating what this means for their trajectory, for Inferthermic, for everything.
Alex leans back in the chair and lets himself feel it. The glory. The validation. For one perfect moment, he is exactly where he wanted to be - a published researcher, his ideas recognized, his work taking up space in the world.
Then the thought comes, creeping in at the edges like it always does.
This is just the beginning.