Sharath recognized that voice immediately, and his stomach did that odd acrobatic trick it had been rehearsing the last year or so whenever Dr. Madhu Priya showed up. It was as if his digestive system had learned Olympic gymnastics without informing the rest of his body about it beforehand.
"Alas, yes," he answered, still holding firm in defeat to the keyboard. Spouting into the desk likely muffled his words, but he hoped if she didn't understand what he was saying, she might think he was announcing some deep statement concerning the nature of computational existence rather than confessing his total and utter failure as a programmer. "My code has achieved sentience and is currently trying to drive me mad through a masterfully planned campaign of psychological warfare."
"That's. strangely specific."
"You'll be able to view the error messages. I'm pretty sure my algorithm has been reading Kafka in its off time."
The clink of ceramic against his desk caused him to finally raise his head. Madhu was there, standing before him, holding two mugs, as if she'd just walked out of a "How to Appear Professional at 3 AM" course that certainly didn't but absolutely should exist.
"Actual coffee," she declared, pushing one mug over to him like a peace offering to the coffee deities. "Not the instant kind out of the vending machine that has been filtered through gym socks."
Sharath blinked at her, attempting to wrap his head around this turn of events. At 3 AM, Madhu was still able to appear put together in a manner that made him horribly self-conscious of how much he resembled a scarecrow that had been ravaged by a very bad storm and then just lost all hope for life. Her lab coat was really white rather than the beige color that his had attained through careful coffee application. Her hair was tied in a neat bun secured with what looked like a pen—because naturally she was the kind of person who could turn writing tools into style accessories.
In contrast, he resembled someone who'd been put together by a tornado that had bad taste. His t-shirt was wrinkled to a degree that implied it had been folded by a person having a seizure. His jeans featured enigmatic stains that might have been coffee, might have been food, or might have been the tears of his now-gone optimistic self.
"You brewed coffee? At 3 AM?" He picked up the mug as if it held the secrets of the cosmos, which, considering the quality of the lab's typical drinks, it very well could.
"I couldn't sleep," she explained, dropping into the chair next to him with the ease of a woman who'd not spent the previous six hours wrestling with recalcitrant code for her life. "I thought you'd still be here, wrestling with your computer in a battle of epic proportions. How's it coming?"
"Well," Sharath said, taking a sip of the coffee and all but groaning in relief at actual flavor touching his taste buds, "imagine Sisyphus was a programmer, and instead of pushing a boulder up a mountain, he was attempting to debug code that actively ridiculed his life decisions. That's roughly where I am right now."
"That bad?"
"The system crashes every thirty seconds with increasingly creative error messages. I'm starting to think it's developed a sense of humor specifically to torment me." He gestured helplessly at his screen. "Yesterday it told me there was a 'PENGUIN OVERFLOW ERROR' and suggested I consider a career in marine biology."
Madhu attempted to stifle a chuckle, but it slipped out nonetheless, sounding like a sneeze held in at a funeral. "Penguin surplus? How in the world does a cybersecurity system even know what penguins are?"
"That's what I want to know! And this morning it crashed with 'EXISTENTIAL CRISIS IN MODULE 7: Algorithm ponders heat death of universe and goes to sleep instead.'" He stroked his hair, which by now looked like a bird's nest created by an architect going through a nervous breakdown. "I think I've broken it so badly it's gotten clinical depression."
".r Or perhaps," Madhu said with that specific smile that caused his brain to momentarily forget how to work, ".t's just reflecting the mental state of its programmer."
Sharath stopped mid-sip. "You're.xing I'm in an existential crisis?"
"When's the last time you went home? And by home, I mean literally home, not just commuting from this chair to the sofa in the break room that you secretly sleep on."
"Define 'home,'" he said, which was most likely not the response she had been seeking but certainly the most truthful one he could provide.
"Sharath."
The manner in which she pronounced his name—using that specific blend of frustration and affection—made him feel as though he was a spoiled puppy who'd destroyed something valuable but was too adorable to remain angry with.
"Tuesday? Perhaps Wednesday?" He massaged his eyes, which felt like sandpaper and remorse had taken up residence there. "The days tend to blur together when you're surviving on a diet of caffeine and hope deferred. Time becomes a two-dimensional circle of infinite debugging sessions."
Madhu remained silent for a moment, looking at him with that sort of expression that had him questioning whether she could actually see right through all the layers of carefully guarded facades he'd built up to the mess of anxiety and imposter syndrome below.
"You know," she said at last, "there are other things to do. Other things that take normal hours. Where human beings don't gradually lose their minds trying to teach computers to think."
"But then I wouldn't get to see you at 3 AM bringing coffee like some sort of caffeinated angel of mercy."
The words slipped out before he could stop them, suspended in the air between them like a confession he hadn't intended to make. He instantly felt his face flush to about the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
Madhu arched an eyebrow, and he couldn't determine whether she was amused or frightened by his unexpected candor. "Is that your way of telling me you'd miss me?"
"I meant. the coffee. I'd miss the coffee. The coffee is extremely. coffee-like. In the optimum sense. Not that you're not. I mean." He was spouting now, words pouring out of his mouth like clowns out of a very small car. "Coffee is significant. For the. the mental functioning. And things."
"Uh-huh."
God, dear man. A year of late-night bull sessions and complaining together over science that never quite worked out the way it was supposed to, and he still became a stammering idiot whenever she came into reach. It was as if his mind had been coded by the same individual who designed his error messages—with a sadistic sense of humor and no consideration whatsoever for elementary functionality.
He grabbed a third desperate swallow of coffee, hoping that somehow it would possess magical qualities that would make him a less socially disastrous person. Rather, it tasted really good, and somehow this made everything worse because now he was consciously aware of how considerate she was being.
"This is excellent coffee," he told me, because apparently his brain had chosen that to utter the obvious was a wiser conversational tactic than keeping on digging himself deeper into the pit of humiliation he'd dug.
"Thanks. I might have pilfered it from Dr. Peterson's private supply."
"You stole coffee?"
"Borrowed. Forever. Without asking. He'll never miss—it's the man who only ever drinks decaf, which ought to be a crime against nature and caffeine."
The picture of Madhu sneaking through the department like a coffee-fueled ninja put a grin on his face in spite of his humiliation. "A woman of many talents."
"You have no idea."
There was a way she said it, a hesitation in it, that led him to study her more intently. Madhu was always a bit of a mystery—genius, clearly, but with layers he assumed people never got to see. She was the sort of woman who could fix complicated bugs in an algorithm with one hand and most likely disarm explosives with the other, all while keeping impeccable posture and never spilling coffee on her white lab coat.
"Show me the code," she instructed, apparently feeling sorry for his clear social discomfort. "Perhaps a new set of eyes will make the difference. Sometimes when you've been looking at something for too long, you overlook the solutions right in front of you."
He yanked out his primary algorithm, quietly thankful for the subject shift even though it involved sharing the steaming hot mess that was his code with someone whose code functioned on the first attempt like it should.
"It's meant to anticipate cyber attacks by reading network traffic patterns," he said, attempting to sound competent. "But rather than learning what's normal, it appears to be acquiring. personality traits."
"Personality traits?"
"Yesterday it reordered my music collection into categories such as 'Songs that make humans cry for no reason' and 'Songs that make humans dance badly when they think nobody is looking.' It also made up a playlist called 'Music for Questioning Life Choices' which was. appallingly correct."
Madhu moved closer to examine the screen, and Sharath suddenly found himself acutely aware of many things: the floral aroma of whatever perfume she used, the way her hair reflected harsh fluorescent light, and the fact that he likely reeked of stale coffee and desperation born from too many late nights.
"That's sort of sweet," she replied, scrolling through his code with the expert eye of someone who actually knew what all those semicolons were meant to be doing.
"Sweet? It's a next-generation cybersecurity system, not a virtual life coach with a boundary problem."
"Perhaps it's just trying to take care of you. You know, because you don't appear to be doing a very good job of taking care of yourself."
She wasn't mistaken. His face on the screen was a warning about what would occur if you sacrificed fundamental human necessities such as sleep, food, and bath time for academic drive. When had he last consumed a meal that wasn't taken from a vending machine? When had he last spoken to another human being who didn't say something related to error messages or when the deadline was?
"Here's your issue," Madhu told him, tapping on a line of code that appeared perfectly normal to Sharath but somehow included the seeds of computer chaos. "You've got a recursive loop attempting to improve itself, but there is no ending condition. It's like saying to someone, 'be better,' with no explanation of what 'better' is."
"I do have exit conditions."
"You've got what you're assuming are exit points. But look here—" She underscored a part that left Sharath's eyes crossing trying to keep track of the reasoning. "This function calls itself over and over because you're looking for better but not really saying what counts as good enough. So it just goes on and on, attempting to refine itself until it uses up all memory and has what can only be called a digital nervous breakdown."
Sharath glared at the code, then at Madhu, then back at the code. "You solved that in thirty seconds?"
"Sometimes the answer is staring you right in the face. You just have to have someone else point it out." She began typing, her fingers dancing across the keyboard with the sort of assurance Sharath normally saved for calling for pizza. "Try this."
She performed what appeared to be cosmetic changes, throwing in an extra line here and there, tweaking parameters that seemed random to him but somehow made sense to somebody whose brain hadn't been wrecked by caffeine overload and lack of sleep.
"What did you do?"
"Nothing earth-shattering. Just set some reasonable expectations for your algorithm and an escape clause in case it's optimized enough for one sitting. It's a kind of digital therapy—sometimes you have to remind the computer that perfection is the archenemy of progress."
She pressed the run button, and Sharath's breath caught in his throat. The progress bar gleamed, that oh-so-familiar promise of victory or devastation.
1%.
2%.
5%.
"It's actually running," he said, too afraid to curse it by speaking too loudly.
10%.
15%.
"Don't get too excited yet," Madhu cautioned, but she was monitoring the progress bar as closely as he was.
20%.
25%.
30%.
This was further along than the code had progressed all week. Sharath found himself leaning forward in his chair, as if body English could somehow affect the fate of computational things.
"I can't believe this could actually work," he whispered.
"Believe it," Madhu said. "Sometimes all you need is a little fresh perspective and someone to tell your code to stop having an existential crisis."