Day 4: Colleen (Error 400: Bad Request)

You wake up feeling like someone shuffled your brain overnight and left it stuck in a loading screen. Four days in, and you’ve communicated with both Freya and Colleen, but you'd be kidding yourself if you said you'd made ANY real progress. You're not even sure either of them is really approachable for anything other than intellectual issues.

Freya’s cold but watching. Colleen’s warm-ish but unreadable. And you’ve had so many mixed signals lately you’re beginning to suspect you're the problem. Maybe you’re trying too hard. Or maybe you’re just not trying the right way.

At lunch, you take a chance. You shoot Colleen a message. “You around later? Still trying to wrap my head around the COMPAS recalibration model. I’ll bring caffeine.”

Her reply is short, but fast: “Student lounge. 3PM. Bring espresso. No weird sweetener.”

She’s already there when you arrive. Same spot near the wall, laptop open, screen bright. She’s dressed down again—simple jeans, a black tee with white binary code across the front. You squint, and try to work out what it says. It's just 3 sets of 3 numbers: 000 111 000. You shrug. Just another nerd shirt, you figure. You hand her the coffee you brought.

“Triple shot?” she asks, checking the lid. “Acceptable.”

You sit beside her, a little closer than last time. She opens a new tab, loads up some diagrams, and spends the next forty minutes walking you through a comparative breakdown of justice models and data feedback corruption.

She’s sharp. That’s nothing new. But today she’s... less guarded. She lets you speak longer before interrupting. She even smiles once—kind of—to herself, when you make a self-deprecating joke about AI judges sentencing based on Spotify playlists.

Somewhere in the middle of a discussion on flawed recidivism scores, she glances sideways at you and says, “You lean in when you concentrate.”

You straighten up slightly. “Bad habit?”

“No. Just… funny. Like the answer might try to run if you don’t keep your face close.”

You chuckle. She doesn’t. But there’s a pause there—a pause you can’t quite read.

Later, when she passes the laptop your way, your hands brush. You glance up. She’s watching the screen again like it owes her rent.

“You don’t stare,” she says a few moments later, tone unreadable.

“Sorry?”

“At me,” she clarifies. “Most guys do. Either like they think I'm something they scraped off their shoes... or they're scared of me.”

You fumble for a reply. “Really? Why?”

She doesn’t answer that. She closes the laptop with a quiet click.

“You’re not the worst conversation I’ve had this week.”

You nod. “Thanks. I think.”

Then she stands, slipping her bag over one shoulder. “Let me know if you ever work out how to analyze some code.”

She walks out. No smile. No joke. Just a quiet exit.

That night, you check your messages. There's nothing from her. No response to the meme you sent. Nor the follow-up “thanks again.” Nor the “let me know if you want to hang tomorrow.”

She's silent.

You’re not sure what you did wrong—but something’s off. You replay the whole conversation in your head. Maybe you laughed at the wrong moment. Or didn’t laugh when you were meant to. And the way she closed it things, made it sound like she didn't hate you but that somehow you had messed things up.

You send one last message.

“Hey. Sorry if I was being weird earlier. I’m not great at reading people sometimes. I'm not sure what I did, but I want to make it up to you. If you’re still up for it, I’d like to meet again.”

You stare at the screen for a while.

Then, finally, she replies: “Same table. Tomorrow. Bring your own charger this time.”

You exhale. You’ve got one more shot.

Later that night, your focus shifts. The campus forum has a new thread: “The Ethics of Intimacy: Consent, Performance, and Social Expectation in Modern Relationships.”

You read through it slowly. The responses so far are clinical. Detached. Like the topic’s an equation to be balanced, not lived. So you post.

You write about the pressure to always want sex—how society wires guys to chase it, claim it, joke about it, brag about it. How weird it feels when you’re expected to be into something, even when you’re not. And how sometimes… you are. Just not in the way you thought.

You admit you’ve known women who broke all the so-called rules. Dominant. Bold. Playful in ways that made you question not just what you liked, but why. You don’t name anyone. You don’t mention the game. But the emotion is real.

You post it.

An hour later, Freya replies.

“You frame your discomfort as moral curiosity, but it still centers your own uncertainty. Consider this: what happens when women are the ones expressing desire, and men are the ones withholding it? The dynamic doesn’t vanish—it inverts.”

There's no warmth. No softening. But she read it. And she responded. Even if it does seem she's challenging you rather than supporting your arguments.

You pause. Then type back:

“What if the real problem isn’t inversion? What if it’s that we don’t know how to name our own responses at all?”

You post that too. She doesn’t reply.

But an hour later you notice she’s started a new thread under her name.

Topic: “Power, Gaze, and Mutuality: Between Performance and Participation.”

She’s not speaking to you. But she’s not ignoring you either. She’s thinking. And for now, that’s enough.

You’re about to put your tablet away when something tugs at your memory. The shirt Colleen wore today—black with white numbers. Three groups. You thought it was just nerd stuff. But something's nagging at your brain as if it's something you recognize, but can't fully name

000 111 000

Binary? No. Wait. Dots and dashes. Your eyes widen. “That’s not binary. That’s Morse code.”

Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot. SOS. She’s been wearing a distress signal on her chest. And you never noticed. You sit back, heart thumping just a little harder than you want to admit.

That was a signal. She's reaching out in the only way she knows... and you missed it.

God, what else have you missed?