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Time didn't stop.
It just moved around me like water circling a rock — untouched, unmoved.
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The third year began with rejection.
More job applications. More silence. More blank email inboxes blinking at me like dead stars. I had tried every trick they told me: reword your résumé, lie about your achievements, act confident in interviews.
None of it worked.
"You're not a good fit."
"We've gone with someone more experienced."
Or worst of all — nothing at all.
I wasn't stupid. I just wasn't what they were looking for.
Too quiet.
Too intense.
Too strange.
And maybe that was fine.
Because I was starting to realize—I wasn't building a life that made sense to them.
I was building something for me.
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But that didn't make it easier.
I heard my parents fighting more often.
"He's wasting his life."
"He needs help."
"What is he even doing in that room all day?"
I didn't answer them.
Not because I didn't care.
But because I knew my answer wouldn't make sense to people who never questioned the world they were born into.
I wasn't trying to live in the world anymore.
I was trying to find what was behind it.
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My room was becoming a machine of its own.
Cables everywhere. Broken screens. Burned-out chips. Circuit boards laid across the floor like failed blueprints of a forgotten future.
And in the center: a notebook, always open. The pages filled with scribbled code fragments, non-linear equations, and diagrams that had started showing up in my dreams.
I didn't have results.
I had glimpses.
Once, when I ran a crude signal test using a scavenged amplifier and my early prototype, a strange pulse occurred — a burst of static that knocked out my phone's clock for three seconds.
Three real, counted seconds.
"It shouldn't have done that," I whispered.
But it had.
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I wasn't sleeping much. Eating less. But not out of depression — out of focus.
The more I stared at the code, the more I felt something was staring back. Not a presence. Not a ghost.
A structure.
Something beneath reality.
Something the world refused to look at because it was always there.
Because it didn't care if we saw it.
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That's when I renamed the project.
' Witness Core.'
Not because it would change the world.
But because it would see it. For what it really was.
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Every test I ran brought failure. Every line of code led to more questions.
But the more the world ignored me, the more I understood something terrifying:
The world doesn't reward those who seek truth.
It erases them. Quietly. Without ever saying their name.
And I wasn't going to let it do that to me.
Not without building something that remembered.
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Not yet a machine.
Not yet a breakthrough.
Just the echo of something trying to be born.
And in that echo, I waited.
Because even if the world didn't care about me…
I was building something that would one day force it to.
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