In the third year of junior high school, when He Yanqing saw Lu Xu shooting a three-pointer for the first time on the playground, he never thought that this boy who always added half a spoonful of sugar to his milk would become the most stubborn variable in his life code.
They were once neighbors in the third row, sharing a chipped eraser and drawing crooked basketball hoops on the back of post-it notes; later they became companions secretly typing code in the computer room of a vocational high school. The two young faces reflected in the light of the screen hid the promise of "taking the junior college entrance examination together." But the compilation of fate always has unexpected consequences, and the names on the application list end up in different schools, like two lines that briefly intersect and then suddenly deviate.
Many years later, they reunited in the Qingda University Library. The arc of Lu Xu's fingertips as he tapped the keyboard remained unchanged, but He Yanqing discovered that he had a shallow scar on his wrist. The leaky balcony of the shared house, the wrong jacket when working overtime, the synchronized heart rate on the sports bracelet... The details that have been buried by time are showing their warmth little by little in the gaps in the code. They thought they could complete the game of the year and let the two villains stand side by side at the finish line, but they did not expect that the life program would pop up an "out of memory" error message.
When the red light in the emergency room went out, He Yanqing clutched the hot USB flash drive and realized: some three-pointers have calculated the angle, but they can't hit the basket of time; some codes are written with their heart in them, but they will never wait until the day when they are passed the debugging. The sunshine on the playground, the cursor in the library, and the fallen leaves on the long street have all become unsent notes, left in the old program called "Youth".
Purpose: The author is interested in gay themes and programming background, and wants to combine the two to create a unique story that shows the lives and emotions of different groups.
I hope that by telling the stories of the protagonists, readers can find their own reflections in them, resonate with them, and think about their own lives, love and dreams.
