22: The Coding Lab

I met Bai Yueran in the open coding lab on the second floor of the engineering building at ten past four on a Wednesday afternoon, with a Computer Architecture lab printout in one hand and a small Styrofoam cup of vending-machine coffee that had gone cold during the walk across campus in the other, and I did not recognize her, at the precise moment of meeting, because her hair was up.

In the in-game frames I had filed of her — three of them now, all from the central plaza fountain or the western lower-city fountain, all from launch-week evening or morning light — she had her hair down. It was the cosmetic option she had picked for the avatar and it was, I had assumed, the way she wore her hair IRL because the avatar was a faithful build. The avatar was a faithful build of everything but the hair. IRL Bai Yueran, on the second floor of the engineering building on a Wednesday afternoon, had her hair pulled up in a low precise twist with two small lacquer pins, and the pulled-up hair changed the line of her throat enough that I looked at her for a full half-second and registered only *young woman in a navy cashmere cardigan and a camel-colored skirt at a coding lab terminal* before my second look caught the cheekbone and the iris-amber and the precise composed mouth and I understood.

She was sitting at terminal seventeen.

Terminal seventeen was four terminals down from terminal twenty-one, which was the terminal I had reserved at three-thirty for my own lab assignment. The reservation system had given us non-adjacent slots on purpose — the lab software queued non-adjacent assignments to discourage chatter — but the room was sparsely occupied this afternoon, only six students out of twenty-four terminals, and the gap between us was four empty chairs.

She had not seen me. She was hunched, very slightly, over her keyboard, with the pale finger of one hand pressed to her mouth and the other hand on the trackpad scrolling slowly through what looked, from my approach angle, like a Java compiler error log. The cashmere cardigan was buttoned at the throat. The skirt fell to mid-calf. She wore brown leather flats. She was — I noted, in the small disciplined way of looking and not looking that the muscle was now reasonably good at — a very precisely turned-out young woman in a Wednesday-afternoon coding lab who had not, in the seventeen minutes she had been sitting at terminal seventeen, managed to make her code compile.

I crossed to terminal twenty-one. I sat down. I logged in. I opened my own assignment.

I worked, or pretended to work, for four minutes.

I could feel her shoulders hunch incrementally with each new failed compile attempt. The compile fail in the lab software made a small unobtrusive *bonk* sound by default, and the *bonk* had sounded, in the four minutes since I sat down, six times. She was not turning the sound off. She was, perhaps, not entirely sure how to turn the sound off; the lab software's preferences pane was two menus deep and not intuitively labeled.

On the seventh *bonk* she made a small soft sound at the back of her throat. The sound was almost not voiced. It was the small frustrated exhalation of a person who had spent twenty minutes on a problem that she knew should not be taking twenty minutes.

I closed my own terminal. I stood up.

I walked four chairs down. I stopped at her shoulder, two paces back — far enough that I was not in her body's bubble, near enough that she could see me in her peripheral vision.

"Excuse me," I said, in the small flat polite register that engineering-building strangers used to other engineering-building strangers. "I noticed the compile sound. Would you like a hand."

She turned her head.

She looked at me for one second.

She did not register me as anyone in particular. I was, in her present perception, a Wednesday-afternoon engineering student at the lab in a faded grey hoodie with a Styrofoam coffee cup, no different from the other six students in the room. The amber iris caught the late-afternoon light through the second-floor windows. There was no recognition. There was, instead, the small composed alertness that I had begun to know, the trained politeness of a young woman from Suzhou old money who had been managing strangers' attention since she was eleven.

"I would," she said. "Thank you."

I stepped to her shoulder. I read her screen.

The compiler error was a clean little classic — she had declared a HashMap with the wrong generic parameter on line forty-three, then was passing it into a method on line sixty-eight that expected the right one. The compiler's error message pointed at line sixty-eight, which was the symptom; the cause was line forty-three. In old timeline at this exact same lab terminal in the second week of my second year, I had taught a different freshman the exact same lesson with the exact same Java pattern. The pattern had not changed. The compiler's error message had not changed.

"Line forty-three," I said. "Your HashMap declares Object as the value type. Line sixty-eight expects String. Compiler is yelling at sixty-eight, but the bug is at forty-three. Change it to HashMap<String, String> and the rest of it should rebuild."

She scrolled up. She read line forty-three. Her eyes — the amber iris, a centimeter from the screen — narrowed for a half-second and then unhooked.

"Oh," she said.

"It is the easiest thing to miss when the error message is not pointing at it."

"It is." She made the change. Tab. Save. The compile button. The terminal *bonked* once more — no, twice — and then on the third try produced the small clean green *Build Succeeded* tone and a clean output stream.

She sat back from the screen.

She did not turn her head to me immediately. She let her shoulders drop, the small visible release of a person who had been carrying a problem for twenty-some minutes and had set it down. The cashmere cardigan settled along her shoulders. The pulled-up hair caught the late-afternoon sun through the lab windows along the line of the throat.

Then she turned her face.

"Thank you."

"It was nothing."

She watched me for one full second. She was, I knew, doing the thing that very precise people did when they had just been helped by a stranger: she was filing the stranger's face. She was filing the face for her own internal indexing, in case the face came up again. She was not, anywhere in her body language, particularly impressed by the help — in the universe she lived in, code that compiled was a baseline expectation, and the boy in the grey hoodie who had pointed at line forty-three was a person who had performed a baseline service. She was, however, courteous, and she would file the courtesy.

"What is your name."

"Ye Cangtian. Computer engineering. Freshman."

"Bai Yueran. International finance. Freshman." A small precise inclination of the head that was, I knew, the IRL counterpart of the small precise inclination of the head she had given me at the western lower-city fountain alley on Tuesday morning. "I will remember the name. Ye Cangtian."

"Bai Yueran."

She held my eyes for a half-second longer.

"I will remember."

She turned back to her terminal. The conversation was over. I had been politely, gracefully, dismissed.

I walked back to terminal twenty-one. I sat down. I worked, this time, on my own assignment for forty minutes without looking up from the screen. The vending-machine coffee was cold. I drank it cold. My terminal compiled on the first try because I had memorized the assignment in old timeline and had been writing the answer to a slightly different version of the same question for ten years.

At ten past five Bai Yueran finished her assignment. I knew because I heard the small soft *chime* of her assignment submission, three terminals upstream of mine. She did not say anything. She did not look at me. She gathered her things — a slim canvas tote, a small notebook, her phone — and stood up. She walked toward the lab door.

At the door she paused.

She did not turn around.

She said, almost not voiced, "Thank you again, Ye Cangtian."

The door closed behind her.

***

I sat in the lab for ten more minutes, staring at the clean green *Build Succeeded* tone of my own terminal, with the cold coffee cup in my hand and the small disciplined emptiness in my chest that I had not, in the small disciplined way of looking and not looking, fully prepared for.

She had said my name twice.

She had said my name twice in the same five minutes and she had done it because she was a precise person and precise people repeated names to anchor them, but she had also done it because she was a young woman and young women said the names of young men who had helped them with code at four in the afternoon at the small careful distance that civilized young women maintained around the question of whether the young man who had helped them with the code was the kind of young man who one did anything else with.

In old timeline, IRL, I had not met her until I was twenty-two. The Bai Yueran of twenty-two had not held her hair up at a coding lab in a navy cashmere cardigan in the second week of her freshman year because by twenty-two she had been engaged to Lu Yifan and the cashmere cardigan had been replaced with a series of business-formal blazers from a Shanghai tailor, and the lacquer pins had been replaced with diamonds, and the small coding-lab problem of a HashMap<Object, String> had been replaced with corporate-finance spreadsheets that her father's firm had quietly assigned to her as a debutante apprenticeship.

The Bai Yueran of nineteen, in a coding lab, in cashmere, with a HashMap problem, was a person who in old timeline had not survived to be the Bai Yueran of twenty-two. The corporate apprenticeship had eaten her by twenty-one. The engagement had eaten her by twenty-two. The Bai Yueran I had loved at twenty-three in old timeline had been the surviving version: thinner, sharper, sadder, more brilliant, with the small precise composed mouth that did not quite know how to soften except in private and only with me.

The Bai Yueran in the coding lab at four-fifteen on a Wednesday afternoon of the second week of her freshman year was the version who had not, yet, been eaten.

I had her in my hand and I did not know what to do with her in my hand.

I closed the terminal. I gathered the cold coffee cup. I walked out of the lab.

In the corridor on the second floor of the engineering building I passed a poster for a debate-team recruiting event. I did not stop. Past the poster, around the corner, at the head of the stairs, I almost ran into a girl in a black hoodie with a textbook tucked under her arm and a small loose ponytail and a half-eaten meatbun in her free hand, who stopped a half-step short of me on the landing and tipped her head sideways and said, in the small voice she used when she was already planning the next sixteen steps of an argument she had already won:

"Cangtian. You have a face."

"Wanqing."

"What kind of face."

"It is an *I have just done a thing I knew I should not have done* face."

"Mn." She held the meatbun up between us at chin height. The pass-through of the corridor's late-afternoon light caught the small steam still rising off the meatbun. "What thing."

"I helped a girl with a HashMap."

She watched me for a beat.

"What kind of girl."

"She has not connected me with Bladeless."

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"You are going to need to tell me her name eventually."

"Eventually."

"Is *eventually* this week or next week."

"This month, possibly."

"Mn." She lowered the meatbun. "I am buying you instant ramen at the campus convenience store. You will eat it at my dorm. You will tell me about the dungeon run and the Black Iron Heavy Blade. You will not tell me about the girl. The girl does not exist for the duration of the ramen."

"Wanqing."

"Mn."

"Thank you."

"Mn." She turned. She started down the stairs ahead of me, the long single ponytail swinging. The black hoodie was the same one she had eaten noodles in on day two. The strap of her small canvas backpack rode up at her shoulder; the cardigan beneath it shifted; the line of the upper back, the small visible knob of the upper spine where the hoodie collar fell open, caught the late-afternoon corridor light, and I noted it at the periphery of vision without looking and the pass-through carried, briefly, the small clean familiar shape of a person walking down a stairwell ahead of me whom I had been walking down stairwells behind for three days now and who had become, in three days, the small shape that the IRL world arranged itself around.

She paused on the landing. She turned her head over her shoulder. The small smile was the small settled corner-of-the-mouth one that I had been collecting since the gully.

"Treat used," she said.

"Wanqing—"

"You used your treat looking at my back. You don't have to lie about it."

"All right."

"All right." She started down the next flight. "Ramen. Move."

I moved.

***

In Wanqing's dorm at five-forty-five we ate instant ramen out of two thin paper bowls at her desk. Her three roommates were not in. The small dorm window was open. The campus broadcast on the speaker outside was running the late-afternoon English-listening practice tape that all the dormitories had been piping for a decade. I did not, while we ate, mention Bai Yueran. Wanqing did not, while we ate, ask.

She talked about the Black Iron Beasts run instead. The first floor had been clean — she had taken Iron-Hide Boar's third charge with a Twin Notch into its eye that had given me the kill window. The second floor had been bad — the three Iron-Tooth Mastiffs' coordinated flank had broken our positioning twice, and we had wiped on attempt one, and on attempt two she had improvised a kite line along the room's eastern arc that had pulled the lead mastiff out of the formation and let me clean up the other two in sequence. The third floor, the Ironclad Bear, was tomorrow night. We needed three more Severing-Path cycles' worth of stat bumps and a better DEF setup before we tried the bear.

She ate the last of her ramen.

She set the chopsticks across the rim of the bowl.

She said, without looking at me, "Cangtian."

"Mn."

"The girl. She is — she is the dream-girl, isn't she."

I had said I would not, while we ate, mention her. Wanqing had said she would not ask. Wanqing was not asking. Wanqing was, in the small precise way of Wanqing, telling me that she had already deduced the answer and was offering me the option of confirming it without my having to volunteer.

"She is."

"Mn." She did not look up. She tucked her hair behind her ear. "I am not going to ask her name. I am, however, going to ask one question."

"Ask."

"She has not connected you with Bladeless."

"She has not."

"She will. Soon."

"She will."

"When she does, you will need to be prepared for what kind of conversation the connection produces."

"Yes."

"Mn." She looked up. The freckled cheek caught the late-afternoon light through the dorm window. The eyes were the eyes — green-flecked brown, not amber, the faithful build of a face I had been looking at for ten years and that had been alive for ten of those years and that had not been alive in old timeline for the last eight months of my old life. "Cangtian. Whatever conversation it produces. I am still here. The bond icon is still on. The wagon-driver bench is still in the field. My job is still the saves. Are we clear."

"We are clear."

"Mn." She picked up the empty paper bowl. She walked it to the small trash bin under her desk. She did not turn back to me. "Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow night we beat the bear."

I went home.

In the corridor outside her dorm, in the late afternoon, the small new IRL geometry of my life was the small heavy thing that I carried home with me past the engineering building and across the courtyard and up the stairs to my own dorm, with the cold coffee cup I had forgotten to throw away still in my hand and the small disciplined emptiness in my chest that the coding lab had opened and that the ramen with Wanqing had not, this time, fully closed.