Michelle

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

“We’ve met,” you reply, but Michelle only shrugs.

“Hey, that’s great,” Styles says. “Alex, Michelle, you’re going to be working on the same project together! 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.” She disappears through the door, leaving the four of you alone in the room.

“So… hi again,” you say, and Michelle looks at you flatly. This is… not a promising start. “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. She’s woking on some piece of code, and takes a moment to wrap up before turning to face you.

“No, you should be fine with a laptop,” Michelle says. “It’s what most of us do when 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. There’s a moment of awkward silence that follows. “So… how do I get started on any of this?”

“Just connect to the supercomputer and work through some basic simulations,” she says, turning back to her screen.

“Sorry, wait, how do I do that?” you ask, and she gives you a look that makes you feel a little stupid inside for not knowing.

“What’s your email? I’ll send you a few links. You should be able to follow along them and get the work done.”

The hours pass by quickly as you slowly work through the basics yourself. You can figure most of it out yourself, although there are a few tricky things that you end up having to ask for help with. Michelle gives you brisk answers at first, but by the end, she takes a few minutes to walk you through some complicated molecular interaction that you weren’t quite grokking. When you look up at the clock and realise that it’s almost seven, you finally feel like you have a little bit of a grasp on what’s going on.

“I need to head out now, have a sorority thing,” Michelle 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 +1