Kabanata 7: Chapter 7: The Virtuoso
He never used the front door
properly.
If there was a window, he'd climb
through it. If the hallway was blocked, he'd hop over the railing two floors
down. The others called it reckless. He called it "efficient route
testing."
The Virtuoso
was energy bottled into limbs. He moved like his thoughts, fast, nonlinear,
often without explanation. The kind of guy who dismantled the coffee maker just
to see if it could brew tea more efficiently. (Spoiler: It couldn't. They
needed a new coffee maker.)
He had a toolkit in his closet and
more wires than socks. His desk wasn't a desk; it was a miniature lab.
Soldering iron. Prototype drone parts. A disassembled VR headset he swore he'd
fix someday.
He didn't believe in instruction
manuals.
He believed in figuring it out.
Music blared from his headphones
most nights, everything from jazz to hyperpop to Mongolian throat singing. He
claimed variety kept his neurons "flexible." Nobody questioned him after that.
He didn't argue much. Not because he
didn't care, but because if something didn't make sense, he just moved on.
Fast. Faster than most could keep up with.
People mistook him for shallow. He
wasn't.
He just didn't show his depth unless you stuck around long enough to notice it.
Back home, he was the youngest. The
experiment. The unplanned kid with too much energy and a penchant for making
things explode (accidentally). He nearly set the garage on fire when he was
ten.
His parents gave up trying to
control him around age thirteen. Instead, they gave him a budget and a basement
workshop.
High school was a blur. He hated
theory. Hated sitting still. Hated being told he "had potential" like it was a
leash.
But he could build. Oh, he could build.
He once hacked the school's vending
machine to accept verbal commands. Briefly.
Now in college, he was finally in
his element. No one batted an eye when he showed up to physics lab in goggles
and fingerless gloves. No one stopped him from turning his desk into a flame
sensor testing rig.
Room 304 called him a hazard.
They also called him when their chargers broke, their speakers fizzled, or
their laptops went blue-screen.
"Tech gremlin," Spark called him.
He grinned and added it to his Instagram bio.
Despite the chaos, he had a code:
Don't
touch people's stuff without asking.
Fix
things when you break them.
Say
what you mean or say nothing at all.
He wasn't the type to get sentimental.
But once, when Observer mentioned how nobody listened to him talk about quantum
models, Virtuoso sat with him for an hour and asked questions, real ones.
Once, when Guardian was up late
cleaning alone, he wordlessly took the broom and started sweeping. Didn't even
make eye contact.
Once, when Spark was crying over
something she laughed off a minute later, he handed her an old Game Boy and
said, "Distract your serotonin."
She said he was weird.
He said, "Obviously."
Tonight, he was rewiring a broken
LED strip on the ceiling. Balanced on a stool. One hand in the wiring, the
other holding a half-eaten sandwich.
"Dude, that's not safe," someone
muttered.
He nodded. "Yup."
Kept going.
Later, as the lights flickered into
a soft purple glow, he stepped back, admired his work, and stuffed the last of
the sandwich into his mouth.
Someone passed by, heading to bed.
"Good night," they said.
He gave a two-finger salute, mouth
full.
Then he muttered, mostly to himself,
"Lights optimized. Vibe check: passed."
And dove back into the chaos of his
corner, already pulling apart an old speaker.
Sleep could wait.
There were still things to build.
Lingguhang Katayuan ng Kapangyarihan
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-- Bato ng
Kapangyarihan