INT. SETHEORY OFFICE – RAYMOND’S DESK – AFTERNOON
A quiet, peaceful office environment. RAYMOND WILCOX (mid-30s, muscur and handsome) sits at his desk, though all the surrounding cubicles are vacant. A quiet knock comes from the entrance to his cubicle, and we see MAYA BROWN (early 30s, beautiful and curvy) standing at the entrance to his cubicle, draped tantalizingly against the cubicle wall. Raymond’s eyes travel slowly up her body, finally meeting her gaze with a smoldering look.
RAYMOND
Yo, Maya. What’s up?
Maya slides gracefully into the cube, lifting herself up to sit on Raymond’s DESK, and he looks on appreciatively as she crosses one leg over the other, the pattern on her tights continuing up her thigh until it becomes hidden by the shadow of her skirt.
MAYA
(dramatically)
I’ve made...a discovery, Raymond. I need your help.
Raymond stands up and closes the distance between them, taking Maya’s shoulders gently in his hands and gazing down at her.
RAYMOND
Anything for you, Maya. You know that. What...do you need?
MAYA
(longingly)
I need you, Raymond. Now more than ever. I don’t think I can do this alone.
RAYMOND
You’re never alone, Maya. Not while I’m here.
Raymond slides his hands down to Maya’s waist, so that his strong hands can lift her--
My eyes blinked open to the early dawn light just starting to peek in through the blinds in our bedroom window, the sheets in a tangle around my limbs, and to Chris lying on his side, wearing a sleepy smile on his face and little else as he watched me. I smiled, freeing a hand so I could trail my fingers across the rough morning stubble on his chin. “Hi,” I offered.
“Morning, beautiful,” he murmured back, a note in his voice and the crinkling of his eyes suggesting amusement. “Fun dreams?”
I groaned, letting my forehead fall against his shoulder with a clunk. “Ughhh. It ended just before it got good. I went to ask Raymond for help with that performance thing when I found it. In the dream, I mean. Well, in real life too.”
“Aww, poor babe,” he crooned, petting my hair and letting his hand trail down my neck. “He still has no idea you have a crush on him, does he?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” I compined. “How am I supposed to tell him that? It would be so unprofessional. Unless…”
I gave Chris my best puppy-dog eyes, but he ughed softly and gave my nose a gentle flick. “I have no problem with you hooking up with your coworker, Mymy, but I’m not going to py wingman for you. You’re gonna have to figure this one out on your own.”
“Awww,” I pouted. “Not even a little?”
“Frankly, I’m surprised he’s managed to resist your bndishments this long,” Chris opined mildly. “Are you sure he’s into girls?”
“I met his girlfriend at st year’s holiday party,” I grumbled. “I’m obviously his type, I’m pretty sure she and I even wear the same size clothes. But of course who even knows if they’re monogamous or not.”
“Truly, your life, it is so very hard.” He almost even managed to keep a straight face through the whole line, which was impressive, but then he spoiled it by nibbling at my shoulder. I squeaked, and then I shot him a mock gre, to which he didn’t even have the grace to look apologetic. He did purse his lips, though, adding, “So, does Raymond think this bug is the real deal too?”
I pondered, letting my eyes unfocus as my attention turned inwards. “Well, to be honest, I don’t really think it is some nefarious plot or anything,” I admitted. “That’s just the worst-case scenario. The most likely expnation is that this twenty-five percent is just getting wasted. That it’s just repeated effort, and the only thing that’s actually happening is that there’s some energy and some time being wasted everywhere.”
“But not necessarily,” he prompted, having decided to kiss his way down to my hand, which he was now holding in his.
“Not necessarily,” I agreed. “That’s why this bothers me so much. People just take computers for granted. Computers are capable of acting so much faster than people, in their particur ways, that as long as things don’t slow down enough that they inconvenience the users, people just seem to think that’s okay. So if things get slow, we just push more electricity into it, and that makes it get faster enough that people just don’t care anymore. The code is still as inefficient as it ever was, it’s still wasting just as much energy, but now their file saves a little faster, so it’s okay.
“On the other hand, though,” I continued, “If you asked a person to do all the things that a computer does, like, all of them, they’d quit after the first day. Probably after the fourth time you asked them to take a square root of the same number by hand, despite the fact that neither the number nor the definition of ‘square root’ has changed in the meantime. Computers don’t have the option to quit, though. They just keep doing that same costly operation, over and over again, and because they can do it so damn fast, no one cares.
“I care. I feel like we should…um. I mean, I feel like we shouldn’t just keep throwing more resources at…er, that is, um.” I narrowed my eyes and gred down at him. “You are not making it easy for me to hold onto my train of thought, Chris Christopher.”
“In my defense, I wasn’t trying to do that even a little,” he replied throatily, the feel of his breath against my skin making me shiver.
“You’re just lucky you’re cute,” I growled, my thoughts turning decidedly away from software, and I dragged him up for a kiss.
The morning proceeded apace, but it was only just before I was about to walk out the front door that I realized I’d forgotten the “present” I’d promised I was bringing him yesterday. “Oh, honey, could you bring me your computer for a moment?” I called.
“One sec!” he called back. A few moments ter, he emerged from the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist and his computer in one hand. “What is it?”
I waggled my computer at him. “Want the fix?”
He grinned. “And be the second one on the block to achieve this miraculous twenty-five percent performance improvement? How could I resist?”
I reached my computer out to touch his, and we held them back-to-back, letting the two machines Gossip.1In our world and Maya’s, a wireless protocol called Near-Field Communication (NFC) allows two devices to exchange data wirelessly by holding them against one another. Unlike Wi-Fi, which works by broadcasting radio signals out into the world, NFC uses magnetic coupling between the two devices to transmit data and even power, but only at extremely close range. Maya’s computers (or our smartphones) typically do this by being held back-to-back against one another, as Maya and Chris do here. I’d long since added my signature to his computer as a “trusted developer,” so his computer would happily accept any fixes I’d added to mine, the same as it would if they’d been issued by Commodore itself.2The practice of crypographically signing code that you write is ubiquitous in both our world and Maya’s. This “digitial signature” is an attestation by the signature’s owner that the code is safe, complete, and untampered with. Typically, a computer’s manufacturer will preload a computer with the manufacturer’s signature, so that the computer will trust updates that come from its original manufacturer, but in many cases it’s possible to add your own signature to the list that the computer will trust.
One benefit to using the Gossip protocol3A gossip protocol, lowercase ‘g’, is one that shares data organically, from one computer to the next to the next, in a series of peer-to-peer connections. This is in contrast to a client/server protocol, in which all computers everywhere connect to a single central server (or, more frequently, a worldwide fleet of computers who all cim to be that central server). The Gossip protocol that Maya mentions here, capital ‘G’, is fictional. was that the receiving computer didn’t have to spend as much time integrating the change, even without being connected to an external processor.4This is simir to how, in a programming nguage that indirectly compiles to a form of bytecode or intermediate nguage (IL), it is possible to include a fully-compiled version for certain architectures in the distribution along with or even instead of the original bytecode or IL. After five or ten seconds, the two computers sounded a small, tinny chime. “Great! Thanks, babe.” Chris leaned forward to give me a kiss, which I was all too happy to return.
Just before I shut the front door behind me, I heard his voice drift out: “You were right, Mymy.”
I poked my head back inside to see him tapping and swiping at his computer’s screen. “Hmm?” I asked, and he looked up at me, a wry grin on his face.
“The fix. Like, it makes things a little faster, but I’m not sure I’d have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it.”
I rolled my eyes, but I smiled at him. “Goodbye, Chris, I’ll see you this evening.” I shut the door before he could reply.
I barely noticed my morning commute. From the moment my front door closed behind me, my brain was already running full-tilt, turning the twenty-five percent problem over and over in my head and trying to make sense of it. No matter how I looked at it, it just didn’t fit any expnation I could come up with. I needed more information, but if I was lucky, it’d be waiting for me at the office.
It felt like I’d barely left my house before I pulled into the Setheory parking lot. I passed by the receptionists without noticing who was at the desk; I rode the elevator up to my floor without bothering to pay attention to who got on with me. Someone held the door to the engineering wing for me. It was a good thing that Riley had arrived before I had, because otherwise I was probably just going to camp out in front of their office like it was release day for a new game console.
Thankfully it didn’t come down to that, but unfortunately, their office door was closed when I walked up. Peeking through the window, I saw them having a conversation with Patrick; I couldn’t see the junior’s face, but as Riley’s expression seemed rexed, it probably wasn’t anything too serious. I tapped the doorbell taped to the outside of their door jamb, and its indicator lit green. Riley, being a manager, had mounted their attention light where they could see it whether they were using their computer, drawing on their whiteboard, or (as they were now) having a conversation, and so when the light inside the office presumably lit green as well, they looked up immediately. Catching sight of me through the door, they held up a finger, and I nodded. I’d have to wait until they and Patrick were done. I fished my computer out of a pocket and tapped it against the doorbell; the attention light upgraded itself to red, and my computer gave a short vibration to confirm that it had registered for the notification.
The doorbells weren’t a Setheory innovation, but the way we were using them was. They were marketed as an assistive device for hearing-impaired people, and unsurprisingly, they were just about as simple as could be. There was a small button that could be stuck, pinned, or taped up just about anywhere, and each one was paired with a small indicator light about the same size. They were connected by a short-range wireless link, so that when you pressed the button, the indicator would illuminate, and you could reset it by tapping the indicator itself.
Since ADA regutions required that any company over a certain size had to offer assistive devices to any employee regardless of disability status,5The “Americans with Disabilities Act,” or ADA, is legistion that governs the responsibilities of US businesses towards disabled customers and employees and, among other things, requires corporations to provide disabled employees with reasonable accommodations. However, since other legistion prevents them from inquiring about an employee’s medical or disability status, some corporations will simply offer accommodations or accessibility devices to all employees, if the cost of simply accommodating everyone is less than the cost of keeping track of who needs which ones. Maya is either incorrect about the w here (a distinct possibility) or the w in this world is more strict than in ours. Setheory had just acquired a few hundred of the things, and they included one in each little welcome kit given to new employees. Up until shortly after I’d been hired, they most commonly gathered dust in desk drawers; a few people had mounted theirs to their cubicles, using them in the expected way: mounting the button behind them and the light in front, so that someone “ringing the doorbell” would immediately get their attention. Given that none of our employees at the time actually had hearing difficulties, no one actually used them; it was faster and easier to get someone’s attention with your voice, or by knocking on a wall, than to find and press their attention button.
Now, though, just about everyone had one mounted near their desk. As I walked down the aisle to my cubicle, the only desks I saw without doorbells posted were the vacant ones. Raymond had been the first with the idea; one day, during our weekly dev team meeting (back when all the developers at Setheory could fit in the same meeting room at once), Raymond had held up his call button and, in no uncertain terms, he informed the rest of us that no one was ever to interrupt him while he was working, that we could press the button and wait, and he would get to us whenever he finally noticed. The st part, he crified, was because he had specifically mounted the attention light where he couldn’t see it while he was working.
Given his seniority and skill, he had the pull to enforce his mandate. He refused to talk to anyone that came to his desk unless they pressed the button first and then waited for him to acknowledge it, and slowly (though not without some friction) people adjusted. More and more people started digging theirs out from drawers and cabinets and mounting them to their walls; some chose to have their attention light in their line of sight so that they would know immediately when someone dropped by, and others, me included, mounted theirs like Raymond had, where it wouldn’t risk interrupting a programming flow.
I was the one who’d dug up the manufacturer’s documents and figured out how to link them to our intra-office messaging system, so that you could let someone know you’d stopped by and get a message when they were free. I was still proud of that. That was when the practice spread outside of the engineering department; now, it was just part of our corporate culture, and I got to be part of making that happen.
My wrist buzzed shortly after I’d set my things down. I gnced down to see Riley’s profile picture lighting up my smartwatch’s face, and I hopped to my feet, eager for news.
I arrived at their office to find Riley standing in front of their whiteboard, wearing an extremely Riley outfit of a tailored denim jacket over a knee-length bodycon dress, along with heavy boots that ced up to mid-calf. “Dang,” I commented as I walked in, indicating their outfit when I got their attention. It was expensive enough (meaning high-quality, though for all I knew they actually had used money on it) that I thought I could probably get away with asking them about it without it seeming inappropriate. “Got pns tonight?”
They chuckled. “Yeah, heading out to the Rhineyard for a show tonight,” they replied, naming one of the city’s rger music venues.
“Neat! Who’s pying?” I didn’t tend to listen to music much myself, but people generally liked being given the excuse to talk about their hobbies and interests.
Riley, I knew from experience, was no different in that regard, but today they waved the question away, a smirk pying over their lips as they returned to their chair. “You won’t have heard of them, don’t worry. And that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
I darted over to the chair that Patrick had vacated; I hadn’t seen him leaving, but the seat was still slightly warm. I leaned forward eagerly, unable to restrain my excitement. “Well? Did it pass? It did, didn’t it?”
They ughed, their usually soft and understated voice turning musical for a moment. “Yes, Maya,” they replied, eyes crinkling. “As you were expecting, your performance fix passed the overnight burn-in test with flying colors, and we have gotten some very interesting numbers. Would you like to see them?”
“Ngggggggg!” I replied incoherently, my voice coming out as a high-pitched squeal as I nodded excitedly; I drummed my fists on my knees, leaning forward as Riley turned their monitor so I could see it.
“Setheory comprehensive integration test suite, total runtime,” they intoned, bringing up a chart with five bars beled Sunday through Thursday, representing the overnight full-scale runtime tests we ran each night, testing every piece of software the company had ever written. The first four bars hovered just above the line denoting six hours; the fifth was slightly below the five-hour line. “Reduced by roughly twenty-five percent.”
I squealed, bouncing my feet off the floor, my knuckles pressed to my lips in excitement. “Really??” I squeaked, my voice slightly muffled.
Riley nodded, then pressed a key to bring another set of five bars in alongside the first, with a very simir profile. “Test cluster electricity usage, reduced by nearly thirty percent.” I made more incoherent noises, but they weren’t done, bringing up a third set of five. “Test center HVAC usage, reduced by about ten percent.” My eyes widened, and they brought up a fourth and final set. “And here’s a really interesting one. The standard deviation on test runtimes has dropped from ten percent down to about five. Whatever it was you fixed, it not only makes the tests run faster, it also makes them run more predictably. Congratutions, Maya.”
I stared in shock, overwhelmed beyond even the ability to express excitement. The idea that the fix had just worked felt completely incomprehensible, but I stared at the twenty bars of proof on the screen, representing, among other things, an entire hour of computing time saved, here in the real world. Because of what I’d found.
“You’re saying…it didn’t break things?” I whispered, scarcely able to believe it, and Riley smiled at me.
“You didn’t break things,” they confirmed softly, their voice gentle. “From everything we can tell, this is real, and it works, and it’s as big as you thought it would be. Fantastic work, Maya.”
I felt myself begin to tear up, and I didn’t even care. From slightly behind me, I heard a deep voice chime in, “Looks like, against all odds, it was just a simple performance bug.” I looked up to see Raymond standing there, leaning against the door jamb and grinning down at me, and I ughed, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Nice going, Brown.”
“Well, it’s probably a simple bug,” Riley cautioned, and I looked back over at them. “We’ll be submitting this to Commodore, obviously. The question is, do we make this a public bug report, or does this have security implications?”
I considered that, and I gnced up at Raymond to see him looking thoughtful as well. “I don’t…think it does,” I finally concluded, and Raymond slowly nodded in agreement, both of us looking back at our boss. If this were some sort of backdoor, it could be risky to publicize its existence, since bad actors could take advantage of it in between the time the report was submitted and when the fix propagated worldwide. “I can’t think of any way this could be used as a privilege escation. The only attacks Raymond could think of require you to have already compromised the computer. I’m pretty sure this can be public.”
Riley grinned, a rare dispy of excitement from the enby. “Good, because the st thing I want is for Commodore to pretend they got there first. Setheory is ciming this one if I have anything to say about it.”
We all shared a chuckle, and then Riley settled back into their seat, their usual collected demeanor returning. “I’ll make sure your name’s on this when I send this up the usual channels, Maya. Think you can get back to working on our software, in the meantime?”
I shrugged. “You mean, like, my actual job? Honestly, no clue,” I admitted. “I’ll certainly try, though.”
“Please do,” they requested. “We are still hoping to release in two weeks.”
“And I need to get my butt in gear so my features can go through testing, yeah,” I replied with a rueful chuckle. “I’ll do my best.”
“Oh, and Maya?” they added as I was turning to go. They shot a look of some sort at Raymond, who took it as a cue to leave and close the door behind him, so I shrugged and sat back down in the chair I’d just vacated.
“What’s up?”
They gave me a look I couldn’t quite recognize. “I understand you talked with Patrick yesterday?”
I blinked. The only thing that really stood out in my brain about yesterday was the twenty-five percent issue, so what—oh. “Yeah, I did,” I admitted, chagrined. The spreadsheet ticket problem that Patrick had interrupted me with. Which Riley had specifically sent him to ask me about. “I hope it was okay that I just told him where I figured the problem was. Normally I’d try and do a little more mentoring, but I was kinda distracted yesterday, sorry.”
Riley frowned briefly, shaking their head. “Of course. That’s not a problem. That’s not what I was talking about, though. I heard you read him the riot act on pronouns. It wasn’t strictly necessary; my profile reads ‘they/he/she’ because I honestly am comfortable being referred to with any of those.”
My face flushed hot with embarrassment, and I opened my mouth to reply, but Riley beat me to it. “However,” they continued, holding up a finger at my attempt to speak, “a great many of my trans and non-binary siblings would list the same thing when they truly identify with ‘they’ but are afraid of the backsh they’d receive by explicitly requesting people to use their correct pronoun, so it was an entirely reasonable assumption on your part.”
They chuckled, rexing in their chair as my furious self-recrimination subsided, and they continued. “You put quite the fear of God in him, though; at a guess, I’d say it was probably the first time he’d ever put serious thought into the question of what pronouns he uses in everyday speech. So, while it wasn’t really necessary in my case personally, I still wanted to thank you, on behalf of my community.” They lifted a hand to their chest, and this time I recognized the look they were once again giving me: gratitude. “It’s always nice to find a genuinely supportive ally. Thank you.”
I flushed again, but this time with a very different and softer kind of embarrassment, and I couldn’t meet their eyes. “Uh…you’re welcome?” I guessed.
They seemed to recognize my discomfort, and they leaned back in their chair, reducing the feeling of emotional pressure from having someone focusing on me so hard. “You might want to reassure him that you’re not upset with him, though,” they mentioned, tone light and easy. “He looks up to you, you know.”
I snorted, thankful beyond measure that we’d finally arrived at a style of conversation I had ready responses for. “I’m not sure how,” I quipped, sweeping a hand back over my head to indicate my height, and giving the best approximation I could of my usual joking grin. “I’m all the way down here.”
They ughed, and while I was fairly certain it wasn’t because they’d actually found my tired and well-used joke that funny, I greatly appreciated how the banter defused the emotional tension in the room; I felt myself rex almost despite myself. I got the feeling, at times like this, that Riley was as consciously intentional about their social presentation as I was. Knowing (or, rather, assuming) that they were maniputing my emotional reactions to put me at my ease always made me feel more comfortable around them. It was like getting into a car with someone you know to be a good driver; knowing that you’ll never need to grab the wheel in an emergency means you can rex more while sitting in the passenger seat. I wasn’t sure if that would be everyone’s reaction, but it was certainly mine, and I smiled as I got up to leave.
I realized when I got back to my desk that I’d left the snacks I’d picked up yesterday in the car, so I grabbed the purse I’d just dropped and headed back to the elevator. To my surprise, Raymond was waiting there as well; I shot him an inquiring look, and he held up a thick, pen-shaped metal cylinder with a mouthpiece on one end. “Heading out for a smoke,” he said, smiling down at me, and I nodded, mind racing as I felt out the unexpected social situation. I’d been aware, of course, that he vaped; he’d picked up the habit five or six years back, when Setheory had been gearing up for our first brand-new product release since I first started working here nine, almost ten years ago. All of us had been working long hours, as no one wanted to be the one to let the company down for such an important milestone, but Raymond, who had been given his first major capability to design and implement, had worked harder than most.
There’d been more than a few evenings when the two of us had been the only ones left in the office until quite te, and despite the noise-dampening acoustics, the difference to the daytime ambience had been palpable. Even with my headphones off, the only things I’d been able to hear were the soft whirr of the ventition overhead and the occasional tap-tap-tap of his keyboard from his desk near the windows. I…may have had more than a few daydreams about him at the time.
I’d certainly never joined him on his smoke breaks, though, so I didn’t have any ready responses prepared, and internally I was scrambling. “Cool,” with a judicious head nod, was a typical and safe response to someone telling you they were going to engage in a hobby you didn’t share, but I felt that it wasn’t quite appropriate when talking about something commonly considered to be a bad habit; it could have seemed insincere and patronizing. On the other hand, I could have shrugged and said “Okay,” but that would have been dismissive, and I certainly didn’t want that. By this point, I had almost run out of time to come up with an answer; any longer, and continuing to nod my head would read not as acknowledgement, agreement, or even contemption, but instead it would start to seem like I was distracted. Lacking any better option, I took the emergency escape route and scrambled for something personal to share.
“Forgot something in my car,” I finally settled on, and he nodded, in that slow-but-brief way that indicated acknowledgement, and that, thankfully, brought the conversation to a polite end. The elevator arrived, and we filed in, passing the ride down in awkward silence. (At the very least, it felt awkward on my end. I couldn’t speak for Raymond.) We parted ways at the front doors; he walked to the small smokers’ shelter, and I headed out to my car to pick up my snacks before the sun could get high enough to bake them in my enclosed car.
I felt like knowing that Raymond smoked should have been a turn-off, but honestly, all I could ever think of when I considered it was that I’d never kissed someone who smoked before, and I had no idea what that would taste like. Get it together, Maya, I admonished myself, shaking my head, but I knew better than to expect that I’d listen.
On the way back inside, shopping bag dangling carelessly from one hand, purse slung over the other shoulder, I detoured to stop by the shelter a short distance from the front door. As Raymond took a long puff from the vape, I leaned against the opposite wall of the shelter and let my head fall back against the hard surface, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath of the outdoor spring air; by visibly doing something, even if it was just rexing, it wouldn’t signal to Raymond that I expected anything of him. I could detect the faint hint of whatever it was he was smoking on the breeze; it smelled a little like apple pie.
“Not ready to head back in yet?” he guessed, and I shook my head without opening my eyes.
“It just doesn’t feel real,” I agreed. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. What’s that you’re smoking, by the way? It smells nice.” People liked talking about the things they liked, especially when they were guilty pleasures. Right now, that felt a lot easier than trying to talk about what had just happened.
“Two parts apple, one part vanil,” he replied offhandedly, and my eyes blinked open so that I could get a good look at his vape. I’d never actually studied it before, but I’d assumed it was much like any other: you had a rechargeable battery, you plugged in a cartridge, and then it made vapor that you inhaled.6This is a common type of vaporizer (‘vape’) in our world.
Apparently his was somewhat more complex than that. “You can mix them?” I asked, curiosity overwhelming my usual reluctance to admit when I was unfamiliar with something.
He smiled and nodded, his eyes crinkling smilewards as he drew from the mouthpiece. “Yup,” he agreed, his voice a little raw as a wisp of cloud escaped his throat with the word. He turned his head to blow the rest of the lungful of smoke (yes, I knew it was technically ‘vapor’, but I always tended to think of it as smoke anyway) away from the shelter before he continued. He tapped the upper part of the device, just below the mouthpiece, where a few small windows revealed an amber liquid within. “The reservoir is up here; I like to try out new mixes whenever it runs dry.7This is also a common type of vape in our world.
“I guess I’ll mark this one as a success,” he added, shooting me a wink that turned my insides entirely to jelly, despite the fact that I knew that a wink was just a standard form of nonverbal communication and was in fact a normal and appropriate thing to do when someone expresses enjoyment for a thing they didn’t realize that you’d created. Tell that to my hormones, though.
“I guess so,” I allowed myself to reply with a polite chuckle, letting my diligently-practiced social reflexes take over while I scrambled to reassert my professionalism. A change of subject floated past my thoughts; I grabbed for it like a lifeline. “Riley got kinda intense in there for a moment,” I murmured, thinking of the uncharacteristically heartfelt gratitude they’d expressed after Raymond had left. “Do you think it’s weird that I don’t think I’ve ever seen them get really passionate about something before?”
Raymond shrugged. “They did get pretty excited about that patch, huh?” he incorrectly assumed, but I didn’t bother to correct him; it was close enough. “I dunno. I’ve always kinda gotten the impression like this is just a day job to them, like it’s good work but not really close to their heart. Who knows, maybe they just really care about energy conservation.” He chuckled softly before drawing again from the vape.
Or maybe they really care about gender stuff, I mused to myself, extrapoting. I wasn’t sure why I kept the st part of my conversation with Riley to myself; I could have made the argument that telling someone about another person thanking you was rude, approaching self-aggrandizing—which it was!—but that was just an excuse. The truth was that I still felt kinda uncomfortable about seeing that much raw emotion on Riley’s face, despite it not even being my emotion. It felt like I had, somehow, been intruding on someone else’s private moment.
I had a time-tested solution to memories that made me feel uncomfortable, though. I took it, snipped it carefully away from the surrounding thoughts, and then I gently and lovingly pced it waaaaaay back in a dark corner of my mind, where I wouldn’t have to think about it ever again. Perfect.
My mind drifted back to the axiom bug. Riley had said it had made the tests more predictable. Why would it have done that? The performance improvements, those made sense. The computer had been doing too much stuff; I told it to do slightly less stuff. Thus, things got faster. Wow, very technical expnation, Brown, I thought to myself, pulling open the front door of the building. Gold star. I rolled my eyes.
Visualize the problem. You have a test, let’s say it usually takes a hundred seconds. Only, sometimes it takes as many as a hundred ten seconds, sometimes as few as ninety. Now, though, it takes seventy-five seconds; twenty-five of them were wasted effort. Sometimes it takes as many as eighty seconds, sometimes as few as seventy. What does that mean? I stepped onto the elevator.
Well, if you turn it around, it means that the twenty-five seconds of wasted time actually range from twenty to thirty, and that bothered me. The longer deys were half again the duration of the shorter deys. Why such a huge variance? It made a sort of sense, I supposed; if removing something made the remainder less chaotic, that meant that the part you removed was more so. For some reason, that gave me chills; I shuddered as I stepped off the elevator, and it had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
Crossing the threshold brought a smile to my face, as I involuntarily recalled meeting Raymond in this pce minutes prior. It wasn’t the kind of all-sensory, top-priority, thought-overriding fsh as one of my memory triggers, though it was the instinctive reaction that I’d isoted, tuned, and amplified when I’d first taught myself to set them. In this case, though, it just brought a sense of warmth and accomplishment that put a slight spring in my steps. It’s generally safe to assume that if someone tells you about an activity they’re going to perform, unprompted, it’s an implicit invitation to join them, and I was pleased that I’d followed up on that and had a nice, socially-competent conversation…with….
I froze mid-stride, my blood suddenly transmuting to ice in my veins. Had I? We’d talked about the bug…then about the vape…then about Riley…what after that? What conversation-ender had I used? Maya, how did you end the conversation? I hadn’t spoken since then, so I should be able to feel the st thing I said in my mouth and tongue, right? I gave my speech centers just the tiniest bit of a nudge, just enough to repy whatever it was I had st buffered without introducing something new, and I felt my heart drop all the way back to the ground floor when I felt my lips form the question, “...something before?”
“Fuuuuuuck,” I moaned aloud, after surreptitiously checking to make sure the hallway was still empty. I drifted over to the wall and let my forehead fall heavily against it, and when that didn’t suffice, I beat my head against the wall a couple more times until I started to feel the faintest bruise forming under my hair, where no one would be able to see it. “Goddammit, Maya,” I whispered to myself, feeling tears forming in the corners of my eyes before I could stop myself, and they had absolutely nothing to do with the clean, simple pain in my forehead.
I let my self-directed anger chase the sadness out of my tear ducts, and I quickly flicked the tears out of my eyes before someone could see and question them. I already knew I’d dug myself a pit with Raymond that I wasn’t going to be able to climb out of in a hurry. I couldn’t go back down and apologize; there was no social protocol for how to apologize to someone for abruptly walking off in the middle of a conversation, on account of the fact that allistic people just don’t do that—except as an extremely obvious sign of disrespect. Fuck.
My ears picked up the faint click of someone putting their hand to the lever of one of the hallway doors, and I instantly lurched away from the wall, my mask of professionalism settling back over my features before they’d even finished drawing the tch. It thankfully wasn’t the door I was heading for, and I quickened my pace as I hurried to vacate the hallway, having absolutely zero desire to engage in even so minimal a social as a collegial head-nod in passing.
Passing back through the door to the engineering wing, my mind drifted, as was its wont, back towards what I’d been thinking the st time I’d been at this location, the twenty-five percent problem. I gratefully let my mind wander, gd to have something nice and all-consuming to ponder so I wouldn’t have to contempte the disaster I’d just made of my social life.
I thought back. Part of what had freaked me out when I’d first discovered this yesterday (it hardly felt like yesterday, it felt like a lifetime ago) was that the results were so consistent. The task-specific benchmarks had all been within a percentage point of twenty-five; the aggregate result was within a tenth of that. The only time I’d ever seen results that consistent before was when I’d been fine-tuning the diagnostic script itself; in order to get consistent results, I’d written a closed-loop dey system that let me force my computer to have certain performance characteristics. If I told it to simute a five percent performance loss, for example, my system would monitor the computer’s power usage moment-by-moment and add just enough pointless computation to slow everything down by exactly five percent, or at least as close to that number as my code could make it.
Once I was happy enough with the dey system, I’d used it to calibrate the diagnostics script, tweaking my algorithms until the script reported the exact same performance values that I was simuting. Even then, the shorter, task-specific benchmarks only ever got within about a percentage point or so of the exact values I’d set; chances were that I was running up against the limits of how accurate I’d been able to make the dey system.
I sat down at my desk and stared at my glowing monitor without seeing it for a brief moment, which extended to seconds and eventually to what must have been minutes. My brain felt like it had short-circuited; I dropped the grocery bag onto my desk and pulled a bag out of it at random, without looking. I tore into it and popped what turned out to be some Skittles into my mouth, chewing them without really thinking about anything at all. I’d spun and spun on what I couldn’t stop thinking of as “the twenty-five percent problem” until my thoughts just…ran out of go.
And seeing as how my beloved Setheory needed my brain working, this simply wouldn’t do. Swallowing the barely-disguised sugar mash, I let the pure, monochromatic taste sensation carry me inward to mindspace, my breathing slowing. I popped another couple candies in my mouth to give my jaw something to do as I focused in on my personal priority list, where the confounding performance issue had leaked so far out into my everyday thoughts that the entire concept of taking a quarter of anything glowed an angry, neon red at the top. My fingers twitched on the armrest as I imagined reaching out to take hold of that burning, unrelenting obsession, and I swallowed another mouthful of glucose as I ruthlessly tore it from its position of importance. It struggled, cwing at my self-control as it tried to retain control of my thoughts, but this was my brain, and it never stood a chance.
I shoved the problem down the list, all the way to the bottom. I fastened it there with no less than three cognitive triggers; it wouldn’t be able to worm its way back into my thoughts without getting bsted by a concentrated barrage of powerful sense memories, including the taste of sugar that still lingered on my tongue, along with the simply delightful morning I’d had with Chris, the feeling of running my fingers over a brand-new mechanical keyboard, and the thrill of victory when my friends and I had finally bested Square-Enix’s test endgame content—and that was just the first trigger. The problem wasn’t going anywhere until I decided to let it out, which meant my thoughts were finally, again, my own.
I opened my eyes. It was time to get to work.
