Chapter 07: Drs. Kim and Souza work late and talk about their experiences

Lauren stepped into the hub room of the Historical Technologies Group’s office. The door hissed closed behind her. She had just returned from the clean rooms, having spent three hours repairing the last circuit board of the generation ship black box she had started working on before her adventure on the Jezebel system. She had a week to recover at least one file for the funding agents to show that she was capable of delivering the rest of the files they wanted. She surveyed the empty office. To her right, the dish rack was actually empty thanks to Morgan’s efforts earlier that day. Adjacent to the kitchenette, the electronic bulletin board, without any messages coming in at this time of the night, was blank save for the weather and time: CLEAR, 22:39. From behind the curtain on the far side of the room, the sound of a keyboard clicking came from one of the desks: short strings of clicks punctuated by forceful staccato strikes of the spacebar. Lauren pulled aside the curtain to find Jethro seated at his desk and typing away.

“What are you doing here this late?” asked Lauren as she sat down at her desk next to him, “isn’t your residential family doing something for Friday night?”

Jethro pushed away from his desk and took off his headphones, “what am I doing here? What are you doing here? I’m always here. This is the first time I’ve seen you here so I’m guessing you have a pretty serious deadline coming up on Monday.”

Lauren slotted her computer into its dock, “it’s actually due next Thursday. I need to restore a file from this generation ship black box. I just got what I think are the contents of an auxiliary drive onto this data pin and I need to figure out how to decode it.”

“You’re working too late in the day, too early before the deadline, my friend, you can burn out that way” said Jethro. He yawned, “do you want to go get a coffee?”

“No thanks,” said Lauren, “I don’t plan on staying that late.”

“Psh,” said Jethro, “if you plan on decoding those files tonight, you’re going to need at least one coffee.”

* * *

The Snaptic Mart was empty save for Lauren and Jethro who searched through the aisles.

“I can’t believe you haven’t had dinner yet,” said Jethro.

“I guess I was planning on just eating at home,” said Lauren. She tried to find something to eat from the array of plain packaging.

“When you said ‘let’s get a coffee’ I thought you were talking about Cafenol,” said Lauren.

“Yeah, it’s technically a nicer place,” said Jethro, “but for whatever reason, late night shopping in a general store has a special quality for me.”

“Really?” said Lauren. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw Jethro smiling from something that wasn’t a joke.

“Really. Since I was a kid, one of my favorite things has been going shopping for cheap things with friends.”

“Hey, I think that’s the first time you’ve referred to me as a friend,” said Lauren, smiling.

“Just pick something to eat,” said Jethro, “we both have a long night ahead of ourselves.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you why you are always in the office,” said Lauren, picking a soup package.

“Oh, that’s because I’m not that smart, relatively speaking,” said Jethro as if stating a fact, “and this is the only way I can meet my deadlines on time.”

“Why take so many projects though?” asked Lauren.

“Ah, well that’s a discussion for the office,” said Jethro, shrugging, “it’s complicated and we both have things we need to get done.”

“We’ve messed up this time,” Lauren thought to herself. She cycled through the 19 different code files she had written. Each module was passing its unit test but when she ran the whole program together, the output, which should have been standard LF-2, was gibberish. She was convinced at this point that the approach she had taken was wholly incompatible with the data she was trying to recover and that she had incorrectly guessed the encoding of the auxiliary drive. If that was the case, she wouldn’t be able to even begin writing a recovery program until she could find out what that was, and she had no idea how she was going to find that out. She pushed away from her desk and computer screen and rubbed her eyes. Upon replacing her glasses she looked over at Jethro. Jethro had long ago transitioned from typing frenetically to thoughtfully scrolling through a document file on his vertical monitor, reclined in his chair with one elbow resting on top of the seat back. He glanced over and caught her watching him.

“Let me guess,” he said, “you have a bunch of functions that are working individually but together are producing garbage?”

“Yup,” said Lauren, “I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to scrap it all because I took the wrong approach to decoding the artifact drive.” She leaned back in her chair and let out a long sigh.

“You can’t have messed up that much,” said Jethro, righting himself in his seat, “is it backed up to the HTG repository? I can take a look at it if you’d like.”

“You’re welcome to if you think it can be fixed.”

“The odds of it being broken and having one unit test that isn’t perfect are so much greater than—” Jethro assaulted his keyboard with a flurry of keystrokes, “—any one of us not knowing the right encoding.” Jethro hit the enter key and a dozen windows opened on his three monitors. Jethro proceeded to step through the code while talking.

“So earlier you asked why I didn’t just skate on by while doing my job as a designated scholar,” he began.

“That’s not what I said,” said Lauren.

“Alright, but if you did, I would understand the sentiment,” said Jethro, “the thing is, designated scholars are really looked up to in the family, more so than the other roles.”

“There are other roles?” asked Lauren.

“Oh sure,” said Jethro, “family historian, the letter writers, there’s a lot but not everyone in the family has a role. So those that do get imbued with a certain sense of purpose and identity from an early age. Like I was I suppose.” Jethro glanced at his vertical monitor. “Nothing wrong with this module either,” he mumbled.

“Early on?” asked Lauren.

“Yeah, at least for designated scholars,” said Jethro, “I was elected by the other designated scholars when I was in primary school which is pretty standard.”

“You weren’t given a choice?”

“No, but no kid knows what they want to do with their life at that age. I certainly didn’t.”

“What about later? DId you ever want to do something else?”

“I thought about it in grad school after I had to switch advisors a second time and I was suspecting that I wasn’t the right person for my role.”

“But you stayed with it?”

“Yes, for a number of reasons,” said Jethro, “one, I’m not a quitter. Two, I was afraid of what would happen if I quit. Not only to me but the family, there weren’t really any other suitable candidates to take my place. And also, I guess I like being looked up to as a designated scholar. So that’s why I work late, to earn that respect.” He reopened the document file he had been reading on his vertical monitor. “Even if it means reading five papers after some family members ask you to explain to your grandma why the article she forwarded to everyone makes no sense. So that’s my story, now tell me why you’re here.”

Jethro’s eyes darted to a line of red text on his secondary monitor. “Wait, I think I found your error, back here in your revision history, you modified a loop to run only once but then never changed it back. When you fix that, the code runs fine.” Jethro looked at the output of Lauren’s program, “apparently the test data you gave me is about a mutiny occuring on the colony ship over resource distribution?”

“Wait let me see that,” Lauren got up and looked over Jethro’s shoulder. Aside from the odd scrambled character, the text was perfectly restored, definitely legible enough to answer the questions of the funding agents.

“Does the output look good?” asked Jethro, scooting out of the way.

“Great,” said Lauren, “I can’t thank you enough.”

“You made the program. I just changed one number,” he said, “I’m sure you would have figured it out by next Thursday. Which brings me back to the question: ‘why are you here, now?’”

“I guess I’m just taking care with this project, being the first one and all.”

“I get that,” said Jethro, “but you’ve always been one to do your work earlier in the day, not earlier in the week, no offense.”

The room was silent save for the rumble of the ventilation system. Lauren looked down at Jethro’s keyboard. She thought about how she had told Neil that she thought that Jethro might be worth adding to her list of people that she could seek guidance from.

“I have been getting worried about more things lately,” confessed Lauren. She fell back into her chair.

“Any idea what the cause is?” asked Jethro.

“I guess I realized the extent of the uncertainty that I’ve lived my life with.”

“Everyone lives with some amount of uncertainty and from my experience, the variance is high.”

“That’s the thing, I think I was someone who was used to living with a lot of uncertainty but now I’m uncomfortable with it.”

“I don’t think that people that live with more uncertainty in their lives necessarily suffer from more problems, rather they are more adept at preventing them on shorter timescales.”

“But I don’t think I can trust myself to navigate those problems anymore, to be appropriately cautious, especially when the stakes are high.”

“You’re referring to the mission on the Jezebel system?”

Lauren was reminded of just how little escaped Jethro’s notice.

“Yes,” she said at length.

“If it’s any comfort, it would certainly be on my mind for a long time,” said Jethro, “but, although it may sound ridiculous, I don’t think you need to worry about making that kind of mistake again, as in, ever again.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” said Lauren, “but I need a more concrete way of knowing that I’ve learned how to be cautious.”

“Well, I do know of one way,” said Jethro, “to tell if you’ve learned from an accident, that is.”

“What would that be?” asked Lauren.

“Well, let me first tell you about the time I fell off my bike,” said Jethro.

“Okay,” said Lauren, unsure where Jethro was taking the conversation.

“Bear with me,” said Jethro, “so there’s this hill on the way to grad school that I would ride my bike down. At the bottom of the hill there is this shallow trench that stretches across a parking lot that led to my office, and it’s really uncomfortable to simply ride over it when you’re going fast, as one would be after riding down the hill. But if you rode across the trench like this,” Jethro drew an ‘S’ in the air, “the bump would be less pronounced.

So I did that every day, and of course I optimized my path for speed because I was in such a hurry to get in my office and do nothing for the whole day. I was going fast enough that I had to lean into the turns quite a bit, but easy enough, I had been riding a bike for twenty years by that point. One day, I had come back on a night train from Denavita city so I hadn’t gotten a good night's sleep. I went through the parking lot at my normal speed. But I had the pedals positioned the wrong way.”

Jethro held up both hands in front of him, palms down and at different heights, “you know, when you lean into a turn, you want your inside pedal to be positioned above the drive sprocket so that you have as much clearance from the ground as possible.

Yeah, so I didn’t do that. The inside pedal hit the pavement and the whole bike pivoted around that pedal, I was thrown into the air and landed on my backpack and my bike landed a little farther away. It was all very unpleasant. From then on I was hyper aware of the position of my pedals. I felt like they were always millimeters away from hitting the ground below me. I always kept my pedals in front and behind the drive sprocket whenever I could so that no pedal was ever in the down position. Needless to say, I didn’t try that S maneuver from then on and just slowed down to a crawl to cross the trench. It sucked. Then one day I was in a real hurry for an advisor meeting and had to cross that trench again. I did the S maneuver and went through the two turns as fast as I ever did but this time keeping the pedals in the correct positions. And once I had done that,” Jethro shrugged, “I wasn’t afraid of that trench anymore or of my pedals clipping the ground and sending me flying because I knew that I had learned from that.”

“So what you’re saying is…” said Lauren.

“What I’m saying is that you essentially have to put yourself in a similar situation as when you messed up but this time without making the same mistake,” said Jethro, “by facing the situation that scared you and then besting it, you’ll know that you’ve learned from it.”

“I don’t like the implications of that,” said Lauren.

“I’m not telling you to get out on the battlefield again,” said Jethro.

“I understand,” said Lauren, leaning forwards and resting her elbows on her knees, “I’m worried that I’ll fail whatever test I give myself.”

“Why worry though?” You can start off with small tests where the outcome doesn’t matter before you work your way up to a test that evokes the same feelings. Also I really don’t think you will fail to prepare yourself twice.”

“Neil tried to stop me from making the mistake of ignoring my surroundings before I left. He warned me in such clear terms. I heard what he had to say and told him I’d be more cautious, but then I went and messed up anyway. What kind of person does that?” Lauren leaned back in her chair and sighed, “Jeez, maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

“I never said you shouldn’t make the mistake once,” Jethro took one of the water bottles from his desk and shook it before placing it back on his desk, “I said you wouldn’t make it twice, there’s a difference. Why are you looking at me like that? Listen, here’s a thing my aunt told me, she’s my mentor scholar in the family, teaches structural engineering at Jotito Delta University in ‘Vita City.”

Jethro took another bottle from his desk and drank from it.

“She told me that people can be thought of as metal beams,” said Jethro, replacing the cap, “they are made of a metal and that metal is formed a certain way. Now the properties of the metal determine a majority of who you are as a person, for example rigid or flexible. Fittingly, you don’t get much of a conscious choice in the material of your beam as it becomes hard set in your formative years. The shape of the metal also determines who you are, some shapes are stiffer than others for example, but importantly you have control over it, by making conscious decisions to grow in certain directions. I think you, like most people, underestimate the impact it can have. Two beams of the same metal but different shapes will have different properties while two beams of different metals and shapes can have similar properties.”

“I’m worried that my ‘metal’ is too reckless for any amount of shaping to fix,” said Lauren.

“Debatable,” declared Jethro, “but there is another way people change.”

“Which is?” prompted Lauren.

“Modifying the metal,” said Jethro, “there is a reason metal specifically was used for this analogy. Annealing or tempering a metal can change its properties without changing what the metal is. According to my aunt, modifying one’s metal is more rare, usually only accomplished with major life events, but they can lead to substantial change. Between shaping and modifying, you can become any sort of person while still being yourself. I think between your mission experiences and a little directed effort, you can become an adequately cautious version of yourself, if you haven’t already.”

Lauren leaned back and looked at the ceiling in thought.

Jethro paused then turned to look at his monitors again. “So getting back to our original conversation, you just need to get rid of the line that sets num_loops to 1 in your get_error_codes function and your program should work fine.”

“What?” said Lauren, “ah, yes, thank you again for your help, both in code and life.”

“No problem,” said Jethro, stretching, “now it’s time to go home.”

Lauren lay in her bed looking at her ceiling. The polarized glass of her studio windows kept out the dazzling lights of Markova until the morning when they would untint to let in the rising sun. She thought about what Jethro had said about testing herself to see if she learned from her mistakes so that she could begin trusting her own judgement again. She tried to come up with tests she could give herself but found it difficult to accept any of them. Even for the so-called “small tests” for navigating around danger, she was afraid she would fail them. And that worried her because the only time that she really failed to handle a dangerous situation had catastrophic consequences. Despite Jethro’s assurances that most failures are at the end of the day simple inconveniences, Lauren only had the one experience to set her expectations by. Perhaps she was the sort of person that experiences less failures at the price of them being more severe. With that thought, Lauren fell asleep.

On Monday, Lauren found Jethro in the community room of the E7 block while they were buying coffee from the vending machine.

“So Jethro,” she said as the machine ground away, “do you have any thoughts on what kind of metal each group member is?”

Jethro blew on his cup of coffee, “I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic. So yes. Miguel is cast iron, very solid, very strong, and just overall reliable. Ashley is copper, strong but also ductile and takes well to change. And Morgan, she’s tungsten because you can’t do anything to her.”

Lauren retrieved her coffee from the vending machine. “What about you?”

“I’m aluminum,” said Jethro, “aside from being light, not that impressive. But I’ve been alloyed several times in the past and I’m always trying to reshape myself into something strong enough to keep up with everyone else.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Ah, and my aunt always reminds me that aluminum can self heal from scratches just by being exposed to the air,” he added.

“Dare I ask what I am?” said Lauren.

“You’re steel,” said Jethro, “very strong on its own but also able to be modified a hundred different ways. I think you’ve become something more flexible and adaptable, but we’ll see in due time.”