Chapter 3

3

The hearing was set for Wednesday afternoon.

There were about eight people in the conference room.

The Principal, the Dean, the disciplinary head, and a guest expert from the state university.

And, of course, Lyra.

She sat across from me in a white hoodie, her hair in a low ponytail.

She looked like a wounded lamb, the picture of suppressed hurt and grace.

The entire room was already on her side.

The Dean spoke first. “Miss Vance, as the project lead, please explain the basics.”

“Tell us about the inspiration, the core innovations, and the data collection process.”

Lyra nodded and began a polished, fluent speech.

She explained the concept clearly and summarized the innovations perfectly.

Of course she did―she was reading the script I had written line by line.

Then, the Dean turned to me.

“Zoe, do you have any actual understanding of this project?”

I looked him straight in the eye and began to speak.

“Our project is based on researching computational redundancy in traditional convolutional neural networks for edge devices.”

“The core innovation is the introduction of a dynamic sparse pruning strategy.”

“This improves inference speed by 4.7 times while keeping accuracy loss under 0.3 percent.”

“The data was pulled from the CIFAR-100 incremental learning subset.”

“We ran three hundred epochs with a cosine annealing learning rate decay.”

“The biggest hurdle was overfitting, which we solved by implementing label smoothing and MixUp augmentation.”

“That specific change happened at epoch forty-two. My logs can prove it down to the second.”

The room went dead silent.

The university expert looked up, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

His eyes shifted toward Lyra.

“Miss Vance,” he said politely but firmly.

“Can you explain why you look like you have no idea what she’s talking about?”

“As the project lead, you should be much more familiar with these technical details than she is.”

Lyra’s face drained of color.

“I… I’m just nervous. My head is spinning today…”

She pressed a hand to her forehead, her eyes welling with tears.

“I really don't feel well, Professor. I can't recall the specific technical jargon right now―”

The expert didn't push her.

But he closed his notebook with a heavy thud.

I stood up and placed a USB drive on the table.

“These are the raw project files. Every iteration, every timestamp, and every digital signature.”

“You can trace the source code back to its origin now.”

Lyra’s tears finally spilled over―but not because she was a victim.

It was because she realized she was no longer the only one people believed.