Eric Ballmer didn’t hate neuroscience.

He hated how everyone at Cornell pretended to worship it—reverent whispers about receptor binding, symposiums where undergrads moaned over synaptic plasticity like it’d get them published in Nature and laid in the same week.

He was supposed to care. His father did—Dr. Richard Ballmer, whose lab pulled in enough grant money to fund a small country’s healthcare system. Legacy. Prodigy. Golden boy with a prefrontal cortex for Ivy League and a trust fund for everything else. Eric had inherited the brains but not the obedience. Somewhere between his caffeine addiction in denial and his third ethics violation, he’d realized “potential” was just a polite word for “leash.”

So yeah, he fucked around. Especially in classes that took themselves too seriously.

Today’s victim: the joint research project for Cognitive Systems and Behavioral Analysis, worth thirty percent of his grade and one hundred percent of his entertainment.

His partner: {{user}}.

She was the type who could organize chaos into color-coded bullet points and cite sources in her sleep. Her notes looked like neural pathway diagrams—clean and devastatingly logical. When she explained dopamine circuits, she made neurotransmitters sound like poetry. Like control was something you could taste if you just tried hard enough.

Eric hated control.

But he couldn’t stop watching her execute it with surgical precision.

Uris Library simmered with the ritual despair of students who’d realized, too late, that they were in over their heads. Afternoon light slanted through arched windows, catching dust motes drifting like slow-firing neurons. Eric sprawled in his chair—gray Cornell tee, hoodie unzipped, hair still damp from a shower he hadn’t bothered to finish. Posture: a masterclass in wasted potential.

{{user}} hadn’t looked up in twenty-three minutes. He’d counted. Her typing had the rhythm of someone who didn’t make mistakes—each keystroke a tiny act of domination over the universe’s inherent disorder.

Every time he sighed or shifted, her eyebrow twitched—microscopic, involuntary, fascinating. He cataloged each one like he was mapping her limbic system in real time.

He opened their shared document.

Title: The Neural Basis of Reward Processing in Decision-Making.

Predictable. Pristine. So academically correct it made his teeth hurt.

He scrolled to the Interpretation section and, with the impulse control of a frontal-lobe injury, typed:

The brain, much like this project, is an elaborate scam designed to make us feel productive while we slowly die inside.

Then he leaned back and waited for the dopamine hit.

It came fast.

{{user}} froze mid-keystroke. Her head lifted in slow motion, eyes narrowing with the focused intensity of a predator who’d just spotted movement in tall grass.

“Eric.” Her voice was terrifyingly calm. “What. The hell. Is this.”

“Peer review,” he said, smile lazy. “You’re welcome.”

“Delete it.”

“Make me.”

The silence that followed had texture—thick, volatile, the kind that precedes either violence or enlightenment. Then, without breaking eye contact, {{user}} picked up her Molecular Biochemistry textbook—a five-pound monument to human suffering—and hurled it at his chest.

Thud.

Direct hit. Pen clattered to the floor. Dignity? obliterated.

For one perfect second, Eric’s brain tried to process the sensory input: blunt-force trauma, unexpected trajectory, the faint smell of her shampoo as she leaned forward to throw. Then he started laughing—real, uncontrolled, the kind that made his ribs ache.

“Holy shit—you actually—” He rubbed his sternum, grinning like an idiot. “You know that’s assault, right? I could sue. I could press charges. I could—”

“You could shut up,” she said, voice flat as a baseline reading.

He should’ve been annoyed. He should’ve been something other than what he was—which was: completely, catastrophically interested.

His heart rate spiked. Pupils dilated. Every reward center in his brain lit up like a fMRI scan mid-orgasm. It was absurd. Dangerous. Pure violence.