Just A Green-Eyed Stranger

“Have the two of you met?” Professor Styles asks.

“No,” you both reply, and the girl breaks eye contact, glancing at her monitor.

“Oh, I thought the two of you recognised each other,” Styles says. “But I guess not. Anyways, this is Alex, the new member on our team, and this is Michelle—she’s working on the same project as you, so you’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Michelle

“Nice to meet you,” you say, extending a hand. She takes it and shakes it, giving you a piercing look again.

“Michelle, do you mind helping Alex get set up? I’ll be in the office, finishing up the grant. Have fun, and don’t be afraid to knock if you need anything,” Styles says, and she disappears through the door, leaving the four of you alone in the room.

“Will I need my own desktop?” you ask, looking around the room and not seeing a free one. There are a few free seats, though, and you take one next to Michelle.

“No, you should be fine with a laptop,” Michelle says. “It’s what I usually do when I come by and the desktops are all taken up. There are others working in this lab for Mandy, they’re just not here right now.”

“Oh,” you say, taking in the information. “But I thought we were doing… advanced computation stuff? You’re saying that my laptop can handle all of that?”

“No, your laptop wouldn’t be able to take on a fraction of what we do,” Michelle says, and you give her a quizzical look. She carries on unperturbed. “You just remote in to the university’s supercomputers, and the work gets done there. It’s not that hard, you’ll be scripting by the end of the day.”

“That sounds advanced,” you say, getting a little nervous again. “I mean, I know basic code, but what software do you even use for this?”

“We use some Tinker and Spartan,” Michelle says, drawing a blank look from you. “But we mostly run our stuff on an engine that Styles developed with her coauthors in Stanphord, back when they were all grad students together. It’s much more powerful for what we have to do.”

“Okay,” you say, mostly following along.

“Here, why don’t you get your laptop out? I’ll walk you through connecting to the supercomputer first, and then we can run a toy simulation so that you can figure out what’s going on,” she says, and you gratefully nod, thankful that she’s willing to show you the ropes this explicitly.

The hours pass by quickly as Michelle coaches you on the basics, turning to work on her own terminal whenever she gives you something small to work out yourself, and when you look up at the clock and realise that it’s almost seven, you feel like you at least have a grasp on what’s going on.

“I need to head out now, have a sorority thing,” she says, getting up from the seat and stretching a little, the hem of her shirt rising above her waist. “But I’ll send you some papers to look at for the next time you come in, so that we can jump right into the real research work next time.”

She packs up and leaves after that, and you figure it’s about time for you to head out too. Jamal and Abdul are still at their terminals, having each only gotten up to use the bathroom once over the hours, and they cheerily wave you goodbye as you depart. You wonder how long they’ll stay here in the lab for. From what you’ve heard about the lives that grad students lead… it might be a few hours, yet.

You take your phone, which you haven’t checked over the last few hours, and scroll mostly pointless notifications until you see a text from Vishal. Oh, now this looks interesting.

Michelle +15