It was Monday morning. Adrianna found herself in an Engineering building that she had never had a class in and waiting for office hours of a professor she had never met. She thought back to how she had ended up here.

It had been an unusual weekend for sure. Friday evening had started out well enough. She had been invited to a party by a cute guy. Normally she and her friends were left behind by the girls who were joining Sororities or who had boyfriends. This time they were excited to get out and finally meet some new people.

The party was fun. They had met some guys, although they weren’t exactly boyfriend material. Scott had been really shy at first, but he seemed very intense when talking about his little hobby of helping out some crazy homeless lady. Her friend Elsa liked his friend Barry. She had bullied Adrianna into telling Scott she would look at his code and see if she could port it to mobile. A few hours after leaving the party Scott had sent her his code and a video of the lady he was trying to help.

The next morning, she slept in, but decided she would at least take a look. She wasn’t really interested - coding was a lot of work and not something she wanted to do on the weekend. His code was fairly organized, and it looked like he had added comments to explain some sections - probably just for her. What kind of guy leaves a party early to spend a couple hours commenting on his code? Did he think she would be impressed by well written code?!

To be honest, she was a little bit impressed. He had speech to text, video processing, and an almost casual use of some machine learning code she had only read about. Her opinion of Horace Mango’s computer science department went up a few points. She remembered at the party his friends teased him but seemed to be a little bit in awe of his programming.

Maybe if Scott had spent a little more effort picking out his clothes, getting a decent haircut or going to the gym once in a while he would be more her type. Ugh, never mind that.

Against her better judgment she had given a bit of thought on what it would take to make a version of his code that could run on a phone. She quickly decided it would take a month of solid work and there was no way she was going to get sucked into that mess. She felt sorry for that old homeless lady, but she had enough trouble with her own Civil Engineering classes. She was not going to take on some huge side project!

On Sunday she got another email from Scott.

Hello Adrianna,

Hope you are doing well. I have this pretty good program that recommends training material. If you are interested in helping on my projects, you might find some of this useful.

This was followed by about 10 links.

The nerve of that boy! He asked for her help and then sent some training materials like she needed his help learning to program. That jerk!!

She remembered trying to decide whether to just delete the email or respond, telling him to get lost. While trying to think of a suitably rude response, one of the links caught her eye. She had been thinking the different video codec would be the hardest part of running the code on mobile, but this link indicated it was easy to solve. She had clicked the link and a few hours later had clicked some of the other links as well.

Reluctantly she admitted to herself that the articles in the links saved her hours of effort for every hour she had spent reading them. During this time, she had written about half the code. Still, there was probably a good two weeks' worth of work and she was pretty tired. It was painful to her pride, but she replied with the following.

Scott,

The articles you recommended were interesting. You said you had a program that recommended them. Could you share it with me?

She waited a few minutes to see if he would respond. He didn’t. Hmmph! She was not going to sit around waiting for some boy to write her an email! Adrianna turned on her TV and watched a few dumb shows before going to bed. She would never admit to anyone she had checked her email a couple times and once before going to sleep.

So here she found herself on Monday, waiting to meet Professor Springer. On Friday she had been convinced Barry was lying and she thought it would be fun to prove to Elsa he was a dishonest jerk. It would give her an excuse not to have to be nice to Scott. Now she kind of hoped Barry was telling the truth. Scott was not her type at all, but he was interesting. He had sent her a link to something called Glitch_HR this morning along with some instructions, but she had not had a chance to look at it yet.

Finally, Dr. Springer called her in.

“Hello, can I help you? I don’t recognize you from any of my classes,” the professor said. He seemed friendly but a bit distracted as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

“Oh, sorry to bother you. This may seem a bit silly, but I was wondering if you could tell me anything about a student named Barry Yong?”

“Oh!” Dr. Springer said, suddenly looking excited. “Yes, Barry and I are partners in some very interesting projects. I hope you understand I can’t go into much detail about what we are working on - I promised to keep things secret.”

He was telling the truth?!

“That’s good to know.” Adrianna said, trying to keep her composure. “In that case you should probably tell Barry not to blab. He was telling my friend about some kind of fusion research - you should probably know if he’s giving away some kind of military secrets.” Adrianna felt like a horrible snitch, but she didn’t want Elsa dating someone who was going to get thrown in jail for treason.

“Hah! That’s a relief.” Dr. Springer said. “I was dying to tell my wife, but I thought Barry would be furious if I told anyone. How many people did he tell about this?”

“Oh, he was kind of drunk, but there were 3 girls and 3 other boys with us when he was talking. I don’t think anyone really believed him except 2 of his friends who had apparently heard it before.”

“That’s a bit disappointing. I’ll talk to him - he should probably not be sharing this with everyone. I ran some tests this week and the results were very promising. There are people out there who would take advantage of us if they knew how close we were to making a prototype.”

“Oh wow. I don’t know much about this, but it sounds like a big deal.”

“That is probably an understatement. Well, it was nice talking to you… Adrianna?... anyway, I will tell Barry you were asking about him and I would ask that you not tell anyone else about this without his permission.”

“Sure… thanks for talking with me.” Adrianna made a quick exit. What had she gotten herself into going to that party?!

Later that afternoon. Adrianna opened Glitch_HR. According to the program she was an employee of a company called Genysis with the job title “Junior Architectural Designer”. That was a puzzle, but she went to the “Job Skill Training” section following Scott’s instructions.

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Her name and job title were at the top with a skill ranking that indicated hundreds of millions would be better at her job - rude!

The links were a mix of articles on architectural design in harsh environments (weird), mobile app programming (useful), and an eclectic mix of items that were just confusing. She spent a few hours browsing and got some ideas for Scott’s program. Maybe she could get it finished this week after all.

Oops, she had forgotten to call Elsa!

“Hello?” Elsa answered.

“Hey. I investigated Barry Yong. Talked to his professor - apparently, he was telling the truth.”

“Oh, that's good.” Elsa didn’t seem too surprised. “Hey, Barry sent me some program called Glitch_HR. I wasn’t going to open some random application from a boy I didn’t really know. He said it had a really cool system to get training articles. Why would I even want something like that? I already spend all day in class!”

“Scott sent me the same thing. I thought it was rude at first, but I gave it a try. It was amazing! I was working on that app for Scott, and it made things so much easier.” Adrianna said, surprised at her own enthusiasm.

“I didn’t think you were going to help him with that. You must like him more than you were letting on!” Elsa teased.

“Ugh. Maybe if he got a decent haircut and picked some clothes that didn’t emphasize his pitiful physique!”

“Ouch! Hah, well even if he’s not boyfriend material he seemed nice enough. Anyway, I’m opening that program.”

“What job did it give you?” Adrianna asked, curious.

“Oh. It says I’m a Junior Medical Tech. I guess that makes sense since I’m Pre-Med. And there are 140 million people better than me… ouch!”

“That’s much better than my ranking. Anyway, read some of the articles. I know it sounds lame but you might find something interesting.”

“Whatever, talk to you later.” Elsa hung up.

A couple days later, Adrianna found herself addicted to the Glitch_HR training. She had finished an initial version of her phone app, but she found herself immersed in some strange articles about retraining her brain. At first, she assumed this was one of the junk links that were fairly common in the recommendations. Still, it was interesting enough that she decided to give it a try. Now she was starting to get a headache after doing some of the mental exercises and decided to take a break. She was a bit nervous but decided to call Scott. Her first impression of him had not been good, but after playing with the software he built she found herself a bit intimidated. Taking a deep breath, she dialed his number.

“Hello, Scott? This is Adrianna… uh…” Adrianna blanked about what she was going to say.

“Oh hi! It’s really great to hear from you! I thought I had scared you off” Scott managed to say this so quickly she could barely understand. Was he nervous too? Hah!

“Oh yeah, I thought it was weird that you shared it, but I admit it is pretty great!” Adrianna recovered smoothly, “Anyway, I have a version of that phone app for Melinda and wondered if you would introduce me to her. Maybe we could test it out?”

“Oh umm… you want to go with me. That would be great! I mean not like a date. Urgh.” Scott seemed to be really struggling - had he never talked to a girl before? “Um yeah, I have a car but it’s really not good.”

Adrianna was amused - how could she have been nervous talking to this goof? “Sure, I don’t care about your car unless it smells bad. I don’t have a car. If you want, I have time this afternoon after 3”

They made plans and Scott picked her up in an ancient looking Oldsmobile Cutlass. It smelled so strongly of Lysol; Adrianna wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to cover the smell of a dead body. During the chat they discussed some things they had found on Glitch_HR training. When

Adrianna mentioned the article she had read about improving memory, Scott was very excited.

“Oh yeah, Nadia Kucharska is the best! That lady is probably the smartest person on the planet. I’ve worked through three of her articles and I still do some of the practice exercises every day. I thought I was kind of average before, but now I feel like my classes are too easy!” Scott gushed.

“It was interesting. I’ll have to look for some more articles like that. If it helped me understand my classes, it might be worth doing a few exercises a day!” Adrianna agreed.

They arrived at Melinda’s new apartment. It was sparsely furnished and undecorated. Melinda greeted them - she looked better dressed and her hair was neat. A big change from the video Adrianna had seen. Melinda smiled at them and walked back to a room she was using as an office.

Scott proudly explained the set up. “So, I figured I could track what Melinda was looking at and just switch between applications automatically. Most programs just sit there waiting for user input, so it wasn’t too hard. We just needed to add some monitors, an external graphics card and an application that kept track of a different mouse position for each screen. It’s actually something I wouldn’t mind running on my own computer. It can’t handle real time stuff like audio or video.” Scott seemed much more at ease talking about his project to help Melinda.

Adrianna looked a little closer at the screens. Melinda had already sat down and seemed to be happily working on five different things. She saw a business plan including an oceanic survey, a schematic for some kind of robot, a copy of Glitch_HR, some gossip about celebrities, and several odd medical diagrams mostly about brain surgery.

“So, I have an initial version of a video chat application.” Adrianna said. Melinda stopped working and looked at her expectantly.

“You can start or accept up to five sessions, and the screen and input will switch based on head tracking. I would probably work great if you were looking at the different screens here while you are talking. I understand you might not want to talk to five people at once, so you can add a personality as a separate participant if you want more than one on a call. There will be a bit of a pause when she speaks as it decodes. I just freeze the video while it is waiting.” Adrianna continued. “Also, if her other personalities still want to talk, it will just record the data to a file. It seems like she likes to talk with all five, but it might not make sense to always have them participate in a meeting.”

“That sounds great!” Scott enthused. Melinda had a big smile.

They tested it out. Scott and Adrianna went to different rooms while Melinda practiced calling them with different personalities individually or in a group chat. She seemed to be amused using the labels that Scott had given them. Melinda giggled a little when he saw you could add cat ears, mustaches or silly hats on people. That was the best feature!

“Thank you so much for your hard work, dear”, Melinda said sweetly.

“You are just a beautiful young lady! Poor Scott got so flustered every time he thought about you.” Melinda giggled.

“Uh yeah, I don’t think I’m interested in him like that. But he’s a really nice guy.” Adrianna said feeling awkward.

“So, now you have helped Scott finish his little project, I will need you to really focus on designing a long-term undersea habitat. You should spend a couple weeks on skill training - honestly your skills in this area are unimpressive. You will need to work harder!” Melinda demanded.

“Don’t mind me dear, I can be quite rude sometimes!” Melinda apologized… for herself?... “Don’t worry, we will offer you fair compensation. Scott would probably overpay you, but we will come up with a combination of salary and equity that should make this an easy decision for you.”

“Uh, I’m not sure I want to do that. I never really agreed to work for this company.” Adrianna hedged. She hung up before more Melindas could gang up on her.

“OK, I think the software worked pretty well. There were some visual glitches I will fix for the next version.” It was really creepy talking to multiple personalities.

“That was amazing!” Scott gushed. He had had a separate conversation while she was talking. “ Melinda said she is almost ready to pitch the first company to some investors.”

“Umm, first company?” Adrianna asked. She knew Scott and his friends had mentioned starting a company but wasn’t really clear on the details.

“Oh, we’ll send you a copy of the business plan. We’d love to get you involved with this one if you are interested. Your friend Elsa is not a good fit for this, but Melinda has been eager to work with her about some other project.” Scott continued. This was all moving so fast Adrianna wasn’t sure what to think.

“Your friend Marta has some unusual aptitudes. We haven’t shared Glitch_HR with her - frankly she’s a little scary.” Scott continued rambling. Huh? Marta was kind of an out-of-shape couch potato… Why was she scary?

They said goodbye to Melinda who seemed extremely pleased, but also seemed reluctant to stop working. Her fingers were just flying on the keyboard while her head jumped around. Adrianna and Scott left. Scott seemed to want to talk, but he realized Adrianna needed some time to process and trailed off. She didn’t say much - this was overwhelming, and she was not sure she wanted to get on this crazy train. Her life was boring, but this looked like a bit much in the other direction.

After she said goodbye to Scott, Adrianna decided to take it easy that evening. She took a bath and went to bed early.