The Start-Up Read Online Free Page B

Amelia since she’d arrived on campus, showing her where everything in the lab was, and even taking her as a date to his Kappa Phi fraternity mixer.
    “George, I’m almost there! Ahh! I think I’ve got it!”
    “What? What have you got? Let’s see!” George hurried around to stand behind her chair.
    At 1:34 in the morning, with George standing over her shoulder, Amelia held her breath and pressed the “Enter” key to run the program from beginning to end to check it for bugs. At 1:37, the “ ACTION COMPLETED” message popped onto her screen, indicating that no bugs were detected. She plugged her phone into the computer and downloaded the program.
    By 1:53, Amelia and George were both holding their breath. Amelia cradled her iPhone in one hand as her other hand hovered above the button on her new program.
    Amelia thought about the past year and all the changes she and Adam had experienced. They grew up together in Indiana and were everything to each other. They had never met their parents, didn’t even know anything about them. For as long as they could remember, they had been “juvenile dependents,” cared for by the state. Their only family, their real family, was each other. They bounced around foster homes and formed fleeting friendships, but they always returned to one truth: that they were twins, and they were inseparable.
    They called themselves the Doriis, the plural of their last name that they’d made up during a pact that they’d always stick together. Only once were they separated, when they got caught doing something wrong and Amelia went to a juvenile detention center for a little while, but they never talked about what happened. A year ago, when they applied to college, despite the odds and expense, they agreed that they would only go if they were both admitted. They would never separate again. Now they were here and Amelia was free to do nothing but code and code all day long, indulging in her one true passion, free from the responsibilities and fears of their old life.
    At last, Amelia had built up the nerve to press the button on her iPhone.
    It was an ambitious and risky experiment, almost doomed to fail…but it didn’t. It worked perfectly. Amelia had a way of beating the odds, always.
    Like a kid on Christmas, Amelia squealed with delight, throwing her arms around George in an ecstatic hug, not noticing how much it made him blush.
    “It works, George! Oh, it works!”
    “Say it, Amelia!”
    “Oh, I can’t, George. It’s not that big of a deal.” George turned to the room and yelled, “Hey guys, Amelia is awesome!” The whole room turned to look at her, and she felt her face turn red but couldn’t hide her smile. “Amelia, you’re awesome!” they all cheered.
    George lowered his voice, hoping to have a moment alone in a very public place.
    “Amelia, this is really huge. What you figured out with this … What you got the iPhone to do … I think it can make something big.”
    “I’m so relieved, George! I knew there was a way to do it, and it’s been bugging me for, like, an entire week.”
    “An entire week?” George was dumbfounded. “You mean you started this a week ago?”
    “Well, yeah. I started it on Sunday. What is today? Friday? Yeah, a week.”
    George looked at her in astonishment. “Amelia, there are PhD students who couldn’t do cross-signal programming of this complexity if they spent an entire year on it. You seriously did it in a week?”
    “That’s not true. It wasn’t that complicated. You just had to figure out the—”
    “The signal frequency algorithm of multiple devices cross-coordinated with the Apple platform and unpublished cell tower proxies—that is incredibly complicated, Amelia. You’re not just awesome, you’re, like, the next Sergey and Larry.”
    Amelia shrugged, embarrassed by the comparison to the Google founders, Stanford graduates who were revered as Gods around campus. “I just made an iPhone application, George. I didn’t