Beginning Your Labwork

After lunch, you sit through chemistry class, diligently taking notes. Beatrice, as usual, sits by you, and she looks over at you nervously a few times as the lesson goes by. She’s awfully fiddly with her pen, and hardly seems to be writing in her notebook. Finally, when Professor Styles wraps up her lecture, Beatrice clears her throat.

“So… um… want to study together?” she asks.

“I think I should head into lab,” you say, trying your best to look sorry. “It’s been a couple of days and I haven’t gone in yet, so I’d feel bad if…”

“No, it’s okay, I get it,” Beatrice says, looking away. “You… um… have fun?”

“I’ll do my best,” you say. “And hey, if I find myself with some extra time today, I’ll hit you up, okay?”

“Okay!” Beatrice says, sounding just a bit too cheery, and with that, she tidies up her stuff and leaves.

Inside, you know you won’t be seeing her for the rest of the day, and you wonder if it was right to give her false hope like that.

The lab is a bit of a dingy place, you realise now that you’ve visited it for the second time. Unlike the pristine and shining wet labs that you spy through the windows on your way to Styles’ lab space, this room is dimly lit, the low ceiling and rusted pipes showing on the sides of the room looking distinctly unimpressive. It’s just a bunch of chairs and monitors, and a couple of people using both.

“We’re a computational lab,” Michelle says, noticing you looking around the room. “There’s not exactly a need for the fancy, expensive facilities.”

“Yep, so long as I can connect to the server, I’m happy,” one of the grad students agrees with a throaty laugh. He strokes his lengthy beard and takes a swig out of his hip flask containing some deeply ambiguous fluid.

“No, this place is nice. It’s… homey,” you say, hesitantly.

Michelle snorts.

“It’s basically our second home,” she says. She hits her keyboard a couple times and clears her screen. “So, did you get a chance to read through the papers that we mentioned last time?”

“Sort of?” you say, taking one of the empty seats next to her.

“The Karplus is the most important one, so if you got through that, you’re golden,” she says, her sea green eyes flashing.

Is this a test?

“I read them all,” you clarify, “but I’m not sure I fully understood them all. It seems like they’re all building on other papers that I haven’t read, like I’ve been… dropped in the middle of a conversation, and I’m trying to figure out not only what people are saying, but the context in which they’re saying things, you know?”

“That’s a good way to put it,” Michelle says, smiling. “Yeah, that’s how it’s going to be at first. A lot of confusing things. But don’t worry, we all go through it which is why I’m here—to answer any of those questions about the ‘conversation’ that you’ve got.”

“Great,” you say, sounding massively relieved that you weren’t supposed to understand everything that you read in those papers.

“So, I was thinking I could get you started on coding up some particle interactions,” Michelle says, tapping on her keyboard a couple of times and pulling up some code from somewhere. “We want to run this simulation and see what happens under different charges, so see if you can figure that out over the next few hours. It shouldn’t be too much work—most of the trouble will be figuring out what’s going on.”

With that, you sit down next to her and pull out your own laptop, navigating to the code that Michelle was just looking at.

“Yep, that’s it,” she says, glancing over at your screen, having already pulled up her own projects on her laptop once more. “Give me a holler if you get stuck on anything.”

“I’ll do it in an appropriate inside-voice, thank you very much,” you say.

“Right,” she says, rolling her eyes, but you catch the hint of a smile emerging on her face as she turns back to her own screen.

The next hour or two passes by quickly as you pore over the lines of code on your computer, quietly trying to figure out what exactly it is that is going on. You’ve not worked with code a whole lot before, mostly just dabbling around for fun after you took an intro class in high school, so you end having to stop and ask Michelle some questions that are probably embarrassingly basic every ten or twenty minutes. She doesn’t seem to mind though, always willing to patiently clarify whatever it is that doesn’t make sense.

“This one’s tricky, it’s basically a modification of how we usually discretize the space,” Michelle says after you ask her yet another question about a confusing thing that you’ve been staring at for minutes on end. “It’s a pretty low-level change to the engine that we had to make to get everything to play right with what we’re doing. See these lines? It’s some calculus to interpolate what’s going on in the gaps when we move between the different levels.”

“Oh, that’s clever,” you say, the code finally clicking in your head from Michelle's explanation. “Super smart stuff.”

“Thanks,” she says casually, brushing her hair to the side.

“You wrote this?” you ask, mildly surprised.

“I wrote most of the code you’ve been reading through,” she says, arching an eyebrow. “We are working on the same project together, you know?”

“This is damn impressive,” you say, scrolling through the entire codebase on your screen. “Man, no wonder you’re so good at explaining this stuff to me. You wrote everything!”

You see her squirming a bit from the compliment, as if not quite sure of how she should take it.

Eventually, she settles on a “Happy to help,” and then turns back to her computer, once again hiding a smile behind her hand as she peers intently at her monitor.

After another hour, you finally feel comfortable enough with everything going on to write up a small function to vary the charge of some particles in the system.

“Does this look right to you?” you ask Michelle, showing her what you came up with.

She takes a second to read through it, and then nods.

“Yep, perfect,” she says.

“You could have done this yourself in five minutes,” you say, almost accusingly. “It took me three hours!”

“Yes, but the next thing you do will take you a quarter as much time. And then next thing after that will go even faster, and not long after that, you’ll be working just as quickly as me,” she says.

“I bet you I could be faster,” you say, and then you take a look at your screen again, realizing that all you did was basically make use of infrastructure that Michelle had already set up to make your task easy. You’re miles behind her. “Actually, on second thought…”

“Keep coming in and you might just do it,” she smiles.

Beatrice -5
Michelle +10