Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 37: Growth and Principles
HENRY TRIED to maintain consistent participation in his study group, even though his class load was lighter than the others and he wasn’t on campus as much or as long as they were. He was often gone by noon and since his courses were all electives, none happened to be shared by his study partners. He had Subword Modeling for two hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Monte Carlo Methods and Applications and Family History and Social Understanding were each an hour a day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
As a result, the study group decided to meet once a week at the row house in the fourth floor lounge. The study sessions usually started with a pizza and went well into the night on Wednesdays. Lisa had suggested the arrangement, and it had worked out well.
Until Chastity moved in. She had everything ready to move out of her apartment a week before the end of the month, so rather than wait until she had to be out, Henry, Lisa, and Luke helped her move a week early. They were all still trying to figure out how the new dynamic in the house worked without expecting her to start every night in Lisa and Henry’s bed.
When the study group met Wednesday night, Chastity brought a couple of her course books to the fourth floor as well. She was still catching some online courses to finish her AA degree. Her own studies had slowed down as soon as the company was formed.
“Mind if I join you to study tonight?” she asked as she walked into the lounge.
Chastity was dressed like Chastity. The weather was still warm and the fourth floor was comfortable, so the shape-hugging booty shorts and crop top were appropriate for a casual study session. Everyone else was still wearing shorts, though perhaps not as revealing as Chastity’s.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Dan said. “You can sit right here on my lap. I don’t mind at all.”
“Excuse me?” Chas said.
Henry stood, but Leonard and Josh both rounded on Dan. Dan had been more and more an outsider to the group as they progressed through the program. It was generally known that he’d been the one who tipped off the army captain the previous spring as to Henry’s likely involvement in the Chinese affair. They’d all been careful about what they said around him since then.
“Dude, seriously?” Josh said. “You speak to a woman like that?”
“What? Look at how she’s dressed.”
“What difference does that make?” Leonard asked. “We’re talking about your comments, not her.”
Josh, Lisa, Leonard, and Simon had all worked on contracts for Open Cloak and had seen Chastity in many jaw-dropping outfits. Regardless, they weren’t about to comment on it in a professional or collegial environment, nor anywhere else for that matter. Simon immediately stood up and positioned himself between Chastity and the offensive person, asking her what she was studying and subtly moving them away slightly. Lisa went to join them.
“Look, a woman dresses like that, she wants some action. No question. What’s she even doing here? You said this wasn’t an office any longer.”
“She lives here,” Henry growled. Dan looked puzzled.
“How was I to know that?”
“Why would it make a difference?” Josh asked. “We’re in Henry’s home. He can have anyone here he wants. And I can’t imagine he wants you. You organized our hackathon when we tried to break into his server. You squealed to the first cute woman you saw after the Chinese affair and pointed out Henry. You’ve been getting more and more gross as time goes by. What is your problem?”
“You have no evidence I said anything,” Dan said nervously.
“Captain Bernard was by to visit a couple of times this summer at our office. Seems she became kind of attached to Conrad and insisted on a full disclosure when he came to work for us,” Henry said.
“Shit! You can’t trust a woman! She said no one would ever know,” Dan said.
“Guys, I hate to put it this way, but we can continue to meet with our study group on campus from now on,” Henry said. “Or we can continue to meet here without Dan. Gather up your shit and get out of my house, Dan.”
“That is just not fair! I’ve been part of this group since the first day we were on campus!”
“If you’d said something like that to me, I’d have kicked you in the balls,” Simon said, rounding on Dan. “After I slapped your face.”
“I’m sick of not having a girl. Lisa wouldn’t have anything to do with me after our first date as freshmen.”
“Last date,” Lisa said. “First and last date.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. You’re just a cunt,” Dan said. “Played your sex up to get in Henry’s bed I’ll bet.”
Henry had been trying to keep his cool—especially since the other guys had taken up the crusade. This comment, however, was too much. Henry slugged Dan in his abundant stomach and Dan doubled over.
“I told you to get out of my house,” Henry said calmly.
“Fuck you! Fuck you all and the cunts you rode in on!” Dan dragged his bag as he stumbled toward the stairs. Leonard and Josh closed behind him to escort him out of the house.
Chastity was leaning on Lisa and Simon had returned to comforting her.
“Are you okay, babe?” Henry asked, stroking her cheek with his finger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This was all a bad idea. I didn’t mean to cause a problem.”
“You didn’t cause the problem,” Henry said. “The problem was sitting in the room with us. There will never be a time when you aren’t welcome in any gathering where Lisa and I are.”
“Or me!” Simon chimed in. “You are the coolest woman I know. Want to be my bestie?”
“Oh, Simon,” Chastity laughed. “I’ve been your bestie since the first time we met.”
“Let’s go shopping Saturday,” Lisa said brightly.
“Oh, yes!” Simon exclaimed.
Leonard and Josh returned to the room.
“Is everybody okay?” Josh asked. “We can all take off if you want us to.”
“No. Stay,” Lisa said. “I have a pile of studying. Did any of you take Deep Learning Systems: Algorithms and Implementation?”
“I looked at that course and ran away screaming,” Leonard said. “I’ll listen though if you want to review something.”
“We’re supposed to build a complete deep learning library from scratch, capable of efficient GPU-based operations. I think I could have devoted my entire semester just to this course,” Lisa said.
They had soon settled in for the evening, forgetting all about the unpleasantness with Dan.
Dan did his best on campus to cast shade at the other members of the study group, but the five of them were generally well-liked and considered to be the stars of the program. Henry was looking forward to when they were all graduates and he could hire them full-time. He’d never really had that feeling about Dan.
The thing was that he could see a geometrically growing need for more people in the near future. They had released the network versions of both the optimization app and the search engine. He’d shifted the two testers over to primarily focus on Darrel’s plan for the server security program and to test Forever Yours. Conrad was trying to manage all the projects and he had no dedicated developers to put on the security program.
If they were going to need more developers, they were going to also need more funding. Luke and Isobel were spending the bulk of their office time working on the company prospectus. Henry arranged a meeting for the second Monday of October with Professor Jacoby and suggested they meet at the office. Henry wanted to show off the business to his advisor.
“This is a nice setup,” Jacoby said when he was greeted by Nancy at the front desk. Henry quickly joined him. “I saw the interview in HBR last week. You have a dynamic leader for your company. Luke, is it?”
“Luke’s been one of my best friends for all my life,” Henry said. “I’m just glad he turned out to have a business mind like my coding mind. He’ll join us in a little bit. He has a Monday morning class.”
“The article is just what you needed if you are looking for more funding,” Jacoby said. “Do you have a current sales report?”
“Our quarterly report comes out next week. If we have continued interest with you, we’ll forward it as an addendum to the prospectus,” Henry said. “We won’t be profitable yet, but we are generating income.”
“That’s good to hear.”
They went to the conference room and Henry gave Jacoby the outline of their development progress and what he considered to be his pressing needs for more developers. He figured that for the next couple of months, he could have Leonard and Simon join Josh and Lisa as ten-hour per week contractors and start developing the security program.
“We’re at a point where we could use an actual program manager, too,” Henry said. “We’ve had both Lisa and Darrel filling that role, but that’s not either of their strong suit.”
“And what about your legacy creation app? You’ve decided to call it Forever Yours?”
“Yes. I plan to write a research paper based on it, too. We’ve discovered some interesting things that surprised me.”
“How so?”
“I’ve put the exact same data on two different computers and installed the exact same AI on each. I set the same training parameters. Scientifically, the same inputs should yield the same outputs. But that’s not the case. After setting up the same parameters and asking the same questions of the two AIs, we got two different answers. The longer we trained the AIs and the more questions we fed them, always keeping the parameters the same, the more the answers diverged.”
“Randomness?”
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