Chapter 19: Up All Night
E L L I E
I arch my back and reach up toward my dorm-room ceiling. The muscles between my shoulder blades snap like rubber bands.
How long was I hunched over before my laptop? It was sometime around dusk when I first sat down to work. The eight o'clock curfew forced me to retreat from the library back to Fenmore Hall. The sky outside my window had been awash with pink and orange light, and I had to pull my window shade shut to block out the glare.
Now, I stand up from my desk and peek beneath the shade. The sky looks dark—a few shades shy of pitch black. But that creeping light at the horizon isn't the last remnant of sundown. More like the first rays of dawn.
Did I stay up all night coding?
It wouldn't be the first time. Sometimes I get in the zone. The logic clicks into place, and it's like I can visualize the whole grand plan. Every step that needs to happen. Every loop. Every function. Every if-then-else clause. I don't even need to draw myself a diagram. The entire logical structure comes to me all at once, and then it's a matter of getting it typed out and saved before I lose my train of thought.
I can code for hours when I get like that. Forget to eat. Forget to sleep. Forget to breathe, practically. I don't come up for air until it's done.
Done... The thought fills me with a sense of satisfaction. I sit back down at my desk, rolling my shoulders as I gather my loose hair into a ponytail. I just typed the final semi-colon and saved my work to the InstaLove remote corporate server where our group's files are all stored.
Next step: debugging...
That will have to wait. I can't start down that road right now. I've been typing for hours, and the tendons in my wrists are screaming for a break. My hyper-focused trance has ended, and the full effects of my all-nighter are hitting me all at once. My head throbs. My eyes feel gritty. I should really grab a few hours' sleep. I swivel in my desk chair toward my empty bed, but it's no use. I could close my eyes, but I'm on too much of an adrenaline rush for slumber.
I'll crash in a few hours... but for now, I only have one thought. I need to show this program my partner.
Maddox is going to flip when he sees it! I bite my lip, imagining his reaction. He's at his most adorable when he's excited. His eyes light up and he starts bouncing all the room with nervous energy... He tends get all touchy-feely, too. I'm still trying to figure out if all those little arm squeezes and elbow nudges are just his way of being friendly--or if they mean something more.
Oh my gosh, what's he going to do when he sees this program? What if he starts dancing all over the room again? What if he takes me by the hand and pulls me close to dance with him?
The thought makes my breath catch in my throat. I close my eyes, savoring the warm feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I hope he doesn't mind that I built the whole thing without him. I open my eyes, and my little smile turns into a frown. He was supposed to meet me at the library after dinner for a work session, but he no-showed. He was already half an hour late by the time I checked my visor and saw his text message.
Whatever that meant.
Maybe it was a mistake, agreeing to work with Maddox. Sometimes I wonder why I went along with it. I mean, it all made sense a week ago, sitting side-by-side with him in the library. He'd commandeered my laptop. Our whole Maker Fair proposal was his idea—using the networking capability between the visors to create a shared virtual map of potential obstacles.
"Don't you get it?" he'd insisted as he typed. "It's like crowd-sourcing!"
"OK... So..."
"So if one user visits a location, it will create a virtual map of that place and share it with all the other visors in the network!"
He'd paused to correct a typo, and I'd finally managed to speed-read the bullet points he was hastily writing out. "A shared map.... So the visor knows the terrain, even if the person wearing it has never been there?"
"Exactly!" He'd smiled at me so big and bright I almost melted from the sheer incandescent wattage. "So your visor will know to push a warning message, even if you aren't looking the hazard."
Brilliant.
Maddox is full of good ideas... but perhaps a bit less helpful when it comes to the implementation. A week has come and gone since we submitted our proposal. I've been chipping away at our work plan ever since, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't contributed a single line of code. He said he would take care of building out our format library, but it wasn't anywhere to be found on the server last night. It's weird. You'd think he would do something, especially after all that endless whining about how Reese never gives him edit privileges!
I reach for my visor, but it isn't around neck. I must have slipped it off at some point during my all-night hackathon. I spot the little blue LED light winking at me, half buried beneath some loose papers on my desk. "There you are," I mutter, blinking as I press the lenses to my eyes.
No new messages from Maddox since our last exchange. He's probably asleep. His visor will ping and wake him up if I text him. Maybe I should. Or better yet, maybe I should head over to his dorm room and pound on his door until he drags his cute/lazy butt out of bed. It would serve him right for ditching me to do all the work myself...
What time is it anyway? You'd think this visor would have a clock somewhere, but no. That's the one feature the InSight designers somehow failed to include, leaving those of us without cell phones in this weird alternate universe where time doesn't exist.
I abandon the visor and look toward the window again. The sky has lightened to reveal an early-morning fog, cloaking the green lawns and stone buildings of the Winthrop campus in misty gray.
Great. I'm not going anywhere. Not until that fog burns off. I have a hard enough time finding my way around campus when I can see.
Maybe I should try to sleep? Or shower? Or at least brush my teeth and splash some water on my face? I venture out into the corridor, heading for the bathrooms a few doors down.
And that's when I see it.
I'm not the only one awake. A sliver of light escapes from the crack beneath the door at the far end of the hall. I'm drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
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