Day and Night
We arrived in Monaco a couple of days ago. There was a lot of work to be done in the data analytics industry, and one of my company’s contracts included a full data management system for Space Formula 1. We didn’t actually have to travel to the Monaco Planetary System, we could do all of our work from our office in Kepla, but there was something special about Monaco, a sense of beauty and of aesthetic that I have always enjoyed. As such, every year we come here to watch the Monaco Grand Prix. The SF1 had gone to great lengths in order to emulate the Principality as closely as possible, and at least according to the pictures, they had done a great job. The lakes were made to perfection, the blue skies, the yachts in the pier. It smelled of the sea– and of champagne, a lot of it. It was a rich man’s place.
“Ah, what a move that was!” André says. “Yes! Verneven switcharooed Leciel right past the anti-gravity, that was such a great move,” I reply. “Oh fucking Verneven was not clean on that exit—” that was Nate, speaking in his faintly Italian accent. “—Leciel had to swerve out of the way just to avoid crashing into him, he did not leave enough racing space,” Nate continued to rant, although I stopped paying attention to what he was saying. I continued to watch outside our balcony as the rest of the cars zoomed through. It was a magnificent outer space recreation of the original Monaco Grand Prix, you could feel the attention to detail that the organizers had put into this. The antigravity section began just after that famous chicane, after the drivers had lowered their cars speeds just enough to be able to control their car. We were on top of the chicane, watching as their cars went up and over us. Every single lap, you could see twenty cars going full speed through the air, trying to overtake each other with marvelous technique. The race ended about an hour later, Verneven winning to no one’s surprise, while Leciel’s car broke down in the middle of the race, again to no one’s surprise. Breaking down was a very dangerous thing, especially in the antigravity sections. If your gravity warping device failed, you would fall to the ground at 0.1G— G is the unit of gravity back on Earth, and SF1 had very strict guidelines, races could not have anti gravity sections on planets with more than 0.15G. The limit used to be 0.1G, but after careful analysis with our company, SF1 bumped the limit to 0.15G, allowing Singapore and Cresta to be able to add antigravity sections to their own tracks (which greatly improved sales for them, more than tenfold by our analysis). We got some very good contracts with some of Singapore’s and Cresta’s major advertisers, that was a very good year for us.
The weekend came to an end, and we headed back to Kepla on Sunday.
———
At night, Kevin and Miranda were fighting about who could code the best Poker bot. They were gamblers at heart, they liked the thrill that came whenever they could multiply however much they had won during the week. They were smart enough to know that the odds were against them; no, they were smart enough to tell you exactly how much a rational agent would lose in the game they were playing, if both sides were to play optimally. But they also thought they were smarter, and that they could figure out the weaknesses of their dealer, a twitch when he got a good hand, a very specific hand gesture when he hadn’t. I don’t doubt their ability to find that, given enough time. But by the time they started to get somewhere, they would always run out of money. And this happened every single week (casinos are afraid of people like Kevin and Miranda, so they do tend to change their dealers every two weeks at the latest).
Andrea came in a couple of minutes into their argument, with a torn down robot. “No! What happened to Rocky?” Kevin and Miranda said at the same time. Meta and Neuralink had launched a couple years back a chip that could connect your mind to The Net. Currently, it was a kind of virtual meeting space, where you could have Zoom meetings that felt like in person connection, Meta’s motto was after all “to connect and create change,” although in the future the vision was to have everything live in The Net. Kevin and Miranda thought this was bullshit; even if they could afford the $7.2 million dollar chip, they wouldn’t even think about letting a big tech company access their thoughts. They had done everything to protect their online identities for the past decade, and so a couple months back they decided to try and create their own chip that would connect their minds to The Net. Unfortunately, all that they had managed to do was a very weird perception of each other’s thoughts, and so they said the same things every once in a while.
“He couldn’t make it,” Andrea replied. She was talking about the robot fighting competition, and she had worked months trying to fix it since last time. It looked even worse this time. Andrea continued, “but it was so close this time! We were winning for most of it, but Rocky shut down again—.” “Again!?” Kevin was not happy. “Okay, that could have been on me,” I said. I am after all in charge of coding Rocky. To answer Miranda’s question, I can code the best Poker bot. “But I thoroughly checked it, I fixed last time’s bug and went over the code a thousand times.” I tried defending myself, although that was a lie. Well, I had fixed last time’s bug, but I didn’t actually check the code a thousand times. To be quite honest I’m not even sure I actually fixed last time’s bug. I was well aware that whenever I coded something up without proof, it failed more often than not, and I didn’t actually prove my fix for the bug. I didn’t have the time to do so though, it had been a wild weekend in Monaco. “Maybe there was something I didn’t anticipate, I did stay up pretty late looking at the code, I might have introduced some other bugs while coding it up. I’ll take another look at it these next couple of weeks.” I stayed in the garage for the next three days; all of us usually disappeared for most of the day. I usually just went to a couple underground electronics shops to look at the pirated versions of software I originally designed. Some of my company’s products were on display, which honestly made me very happy. I usually bought a couple copies from the local merchants, mostly to congratulate them on their hacking skills— I thought pirating my software was impossible, and yet every single day these guys proved me wrong. When I was not looking at these marvelous hacks, I spent my time at coffee shops buying stupidly underpriced coffee. I loved the vibe, you could see the neon blue and pink signs, the darkness of the place contrasted by the light emanating from the screens of people trying to work on their own coding projects, nothing like anything you’d see near the office. Back at the office, you’d see people code every once in a while, only for periods of thirty to sixty minutes at the time, while the rest of their time would be spent at meetings, commuting, or buying stupidly overpriced coffee. It was like a completely different world, and I loved it. The greatest difference was of course, that back at the office I could afford a weekend trip to Monaco, and while the coding here was great, the legality (or rather lack thereof) made it impossible for most to even get out of the city.
——
Back in day, I woke up at 6 am to get ready for an important client meeting we had that day. It was a very sharp contrast, at night, I’d regularly sleep at 6 am, and would wake up at 1 pm. When I’m in upper Kepla, or day as I like to call it, drinking champagne with CEO’s, I usually see the sun; on the other hand, back in lower Kepla, either in the garage or at a random café, I usually work until the moon sets, and thus this is night. It is mind blowing to think that the garage is only a one hour trip from the office. André, Nate and Bianca have no clue that people like Miranda, Kevin and Andrea exist. I’ve tried talking to them about lower Kepla, but they’ve always dismissed it as a place for the scum of Nabla. They wouldn’t even drive in a 10 km radius of lower Kepla, and yet any one of my night friends could replace their coding skills in a second. Of course, in moments like this where we had to talk a client into a 10 million dollar deal, any one of my day friends would kick night’s ass twice over. While night had the coding skills, they didn’t have the verbal skills required to sweet talk a client, nor did they want to get them. As a matter of fact, they despised people like me, night thought that day was actually full of the scum of Nabla: rich, entitled kids who live off their parents’ work and who don’t actually know anything. I guess they both have a point. It’s quite unfortunate that they live in separate worlds, day will never get to experience coding all night at a shady cafe, and night will never get to experience champagne on a yacht after the Monaco GP.
Our meeting finished a couple minutes ago, and it was a massive success. It turns out that Verante’s CEO’s right hand man is good friends with Nate’s family, and the talks went as smoothly as humanly possible. We began a five year, fifteen million dollar contract, with a lot of options to potentially expand to sister companies and with the option of a five year extension for a second project of theirs. It’s boring work, there’s no getting around that. We set the infrastructure that’s going to enable the creators to work on their tools. At the end of the day, that’s what software engineers are, the workers of our society. We like to believe that we create— and some of us do, don’t get me wrong. Night coders create. Day coders simply build the infrastructure that enables others to create.
“What are you thinking about so much?” Bianca asks.
“I’m just planning what Ubiquitin’s next moves are going to be. We have only been able to stay afloat for the past seven years because we’ve been able to think ahead, you know? Most of the ‘cool kids’ these days think that we’re dinosaurs, that Ubiquitin is bound to fall behind at some point.” It’s not pessimism nor perfectionism speaking now, these are nightgirl’s own words.
“Ah, you’ve got to relax. No one is ahead of us in data analysis, plus you’ve got some of the best coders in the world.” She only says that because she doesn’t know anyone from night. Bianca is actually the type of person from day that night imagines.
“You know what, you’re probably right. We should celebrate! Are you excited for Berlin this weekend? Anna seems to really have a well put company, I’m looking forward to visiting Varante’s headquarters.”
“Oh God I am. I Love visiting cities that are based on Earth. They have this very chic feel to them.”
I laugh. “You have no idea how much I feel you on that. They’re lovely aren’t they?”
We continued talking for quite some time; these were exactly the type of things that night couldn’t handle, we had to talk about non-technical situations, about administrative aspects of our company, about the gears behind social structures. I loved analyzing all of this, but I couldn’t do this in night. There was so much beauty in day, not only were the buildings better constructed: made by architects who had studied in various parts of the galaxy, oftentimes in collaboration with each other, to get these beautiful structures that were so familiar yet at the same time so new. You worked with some of the best data analytics companies and with the aid of AI to design the best streets and crossings with optimal times. You could feel the law and politics all around you, and the ever so slight hint of innovation, the same that I can feel when I read about Poincaré or Sharp. There was long term thinking in day, and even if it was, as night put it, run by control-freak capitalism scum and dinosaurs who knew nothing about innovation, it worked. And it was beautiful that it did. I loved every second I spent just as much as night.
——
“You’re an idiot! Oh, Gosh, I hadn’t seen such stupid code in ages, who taught you how to do this?”
“Oh shut up, you’re jealous you didn’t write it yourself. It’s so good that you can’t even figure out what’s wrong with it.” That was me replying to nightgirl.
“Aha, aha. If that’s what lets you sleep at night after writing this, then sure, keep thinking that.” She smiled after saying that. I know it was a sarcastic smile. But it was such a pretty smile. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the way she says everything, the way she pays attention when you speak, the way she dismisses me whenever I say something stupid, but praises me whenever I’m insightful. Back at the garage, I only get the former (even if they’re bigger idiots), and back in day, I only get the latter (because it would be very unpolitical for any of them to actually call out my mistakes).
“Oh I sleep pretty well, thank you very much. Here, I’ll show you,” I take my computer out of her hands, and for a very brief moment touch each other’s hand. I’ve shaken hands with executives from all over the galaxy, and I’ve passed robots and computers and all sorts of chips and tools. But this felt different, it felt good. For a very brief moment, we became one, and I don’t know what it was about that, but it felt good. “Look, this was what I fucked up last time,” I said while I set my computer on the table so that we could both analyze my code for Andrea’s robot. “You see, this is what I had before,” I point to the previous version, on the left screen of my vim, “and this is the change I made,” I said while pointing to the new version.
“Oh I see,” nightgirl continued to analyze. “Wait, I see what you’re doing. Uh huh, you’re parallelizing the computation for receiving hits. Wait, but this part right here… no way… does this actually work?”
“In theory it does.” I grab a stack of good old fashioned paper out of my backpack.
“You’re fucking kidding me. Gawsh, I don’t understand how you come up with these ideas using paper.”
“What? I’m old fashioned okay, there’s nothing like good ol’ pen and paper when it comes to inventing new maths.” I’m careful not to bring out my Montblanc, surely nightgirl would think I stole it, if she even noticed that it was an expensive pen, but just to be safe I simply kept it in my bag.
She looked through the stack. “So you’re re-implementing the WORMS system. But rather than tediously moving the brain around, you’re implementing a randomized circuitry change. Every couple of seconds, the brain changes spots. You’re parallelizing parallelization! This should be significantly faster at utilizing GPU than any other method currently used.”
I turn a couple of pages from the stack she’s holding, right to the page where my calculations begin. Our hands touch once more. “It should be faster than any current method to my knowledge, and around 18% faster than regular transformer architecture.”
She continues looking through the pages and through the code. I silently sit there for a couple of minutes, just sipping from my Iced Shaken Espresso. It must be around 3 am by this point, we’ve been here quite a while. “Wait, I think I found something. You see, here” she says while pointing at part of the code, “you’re trying to weigh based on how much load each section currently has; but you’re not leaving enough room for physical memory accessibility error. Rookie mistake software people always make, you see, when the robot is actually moving, it is almost certain that there will be what I like to call electron misses in some of your GPU connections, and the probability that they all happen in the same processor is quite significant in a robot fight. That’s why the error doesn’t pop up in any simulation, but consistently happens in real life.”
“Oh, I see what you’re saying. Can you help me fix it?”
“What, software guy can’t do it by himself?”
“I don’t think I can, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, I guess I can help you fix it. But for a price, of course.”
“Agsh, what do you want now?”
“Take me out to dinner.” What? My heart suddenly starts to beat faster, so much I can hear the blood flowing through my ears.
“Where do you want to go to dinner?”
“How should I know, I always have my dinner here.” “Ain’t that right Larry?” she shouted to the owner, who was also coding behind the counter. “Oh, I should know, ever since you were fifteen.” “Ah, no way, fifteen. That’s like, only ten years, come on.”
“Well, I think I’ve got a place in mind. Okay, it’s a deal. Does Friday at 8 work for you?”
“Aw you look so cute asking me out like that”
I blushed a bit. “I’ll pick you up Friday at 8 then,” I said while I grabbed my stack of papers off the table and into my backpack. She grabbed my computer and added herself to my code repo. “Ubiquitin? Why do you use some capitalist trash’s software to host your code? They’ll steal it from you if they detect something they like, it’s in their terms and conditions you know?” Nightgirl seemed pretty weirded out when she realized that I used software from Ubiquitin. “I’m pretty sure you should read those again, I think their software works pretty well. And if they do steal it meh, my ideas still live in my head. Maybe they’ll recruit me some day” I said. She gave an annoyed sigh, “as you wish,” nightgirl said while she passed me her laptop. Our hands touched yet again. “Also, was that a yes?” I inquired.
“Mm, yes. But only because your code is so bad that you really need me to say yes.” I headed back to my day home that night, I had a lot of stuff to think about, plus I had to wake up in four hours’ time to get to the airport for Berlin. In any other situation I wouldn’t have slept at all, but I just felt like I wanted to dream that night
——
What had I gotten myself into with nightgirl. It was exciting, but at the same time daunting. To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t actually been emotionally open with anyone before. I mean, for starters, everyone knows at most fifty percent of my life. There is not a single person whom I told about my day life and my night life. When nightgirl mentioned dinner, my first thought was to take her out to Yamato’s. It was my favorite sushi restaurant in all of Kapla, right in downtown upper Kapla, a restaurant in the seventieth floor of the Bringham Tower. The view was insane, you could see all of south upper Kapla, it was amazing.
I keep fantasizing about my date with nightgirl. But this week I had to focus on Berlin, I had to be as sharp as possible in Verante to be able to come up with a strategy for our work for the company. I don’t understand how the people in day kept sharp, you have to admire this. I code and code all night whenever I’m in night. When I’m in day, it seems to all be meetings and traveling and meeting people and organizing and administering. I never have time to actually work, and I admire how people like Nate and Bianca and André manage to stay so sharp amidst the distraction.
I slept for a whole two and a half hours before waking up to go to the airport. We call it an airport, but it’s really a shuttle port. Interplanetary travel had been a hassle for the first couple of years of Ubiquitin, but by this point it had become so routine, and we had worked on a few contracts with some of the shuttle port airlines, that passing was so much easier by this point. We got on a shuttle and set for the Berlin Planetary System, it was just a couple hours away. I slept the whole way, I needed to recover some sleep, and woke up when we got to Berlin. Our work began immediately.
The first thing I noticed was the speed of the traffic lights. Then I noticed the number of bikes on the road, I calculated the ratio of bikes to cars. All of these metrics helped me gauge the ecosystem of the city. Then, I could use this information to inform my company level decisions. Whether installing a shuttle or removing car parking to add bike parking would work at the employee level. Of course this was a rough heuristic, but it helped me design attention based models. While software alone was extremely powerful, the reason to which I attribute Ubiquitin’s success was our ability to integrate human level observations into our models. It sped up the training significantly, and managed to reduce our costs and produce better output for our clients. It was all a very complex web of ideas, that we had to carefully manage to be able to create infrastructure. Then, Verante could create as many therapeutic nanobots as they wanted. They cured Alzheimer’s. We made sure they were efficient.
We worked all day Sunday through Wednesday, and of course we took the chance to go around Berlin. We also partied of course, but even when we partied, it was with very specific people at very specific clubs. Maybe Jessie and Liam did actually partied, but it was clear to Nate, Bianca André and myself that we had to study and network as much as we could while in Berlin. We each had to create a mental map of the city and a mental graph of the important people of the city. We never actually agreed on anything, but everyone understood that as soon as we landed back in Kapla we would extensively brainstorm on everything we saw. That was the only way we were able to train our models as efficiently as we did. And that was exactly what happened, as soon as we arrived at Kapla, we four went straight to the office and started brainstorming. This was always exciting, it was the closest thing to the garage that I ever got to experience while in day. Of course, it was in a well lit room, with a fortieth floor view of the city, while we were all in fancy suits and fancy dresses, which gradually became dress shirts with folded up sleeves and leggings, to be able to freely and comfortably move around (at one point, I had worn one of nightgirl’s dresses; she was telling me how much she despised them and I argued that they couldn’t be that bad— they were that bad, you couldn’t sit down comfortably even if you wanted to).
Friday afternoon came. I left Ubiquitin early to prepare for my date with nightgirl. By this point, I started to prepare a safety coping mechanism in case she didn’t show up, although for some reason I really wanted her to actually come with me. During my free time in Berlin I decided that I actually wanted to open up with her, actually be myself, tell her about my life in day and night. It was a risky move, but I was going to have to tell her anyway eventually, so why not do it now. I knew that she was going to dress like she always did, leggings for comfort, a super flashy skirt with some linear combination of neon pink, blue and black, with an exotic shirt about a band I hadn’t heard of (or maybe one that she had already told me about), and a slight hint of makeup (because while she didn’t believe in the beauty industry, she did look like a badass whenever she wore it). I would usually get to Yamato’s in a fancy suit with a fancy watch, but I decided to wear my night clothes. The BM was already going to be a statement, and I’d rather keep the rest pretty normal. The clock hit 8pm, and I decided to leave towards lower Kapla, I couldn’t deal with my nerves any longer.
“What the fuck?”
“You like it?” Her reaction to my car was exactly what I expected.
“I didn’t know you had the engineering in you to steal this beauty,” nightgirl looked at the BM, amazed. She loved supercars, which was part of the reason I had convinced myself to bring the BM.
Remember, be confident. “Oh, this is actually mine.”
“Shut up, I won’t tell anyone you stole this. But let’s get out of here before anyone sees this and gets the same ideas you had.”
“Sure, get in! I’mma take you somewhere amazing.”
“Ooh fun, can’t wait.”
——
We talked during our ride to upper Kapla about her week. She had actually been debugging my code. I had gotten constant notifications in Berlin whenever she pushed code to the repo, so I had a vague idea of what was happening, until the commit messages inevitably became “AHEYF” or things like that.
“Okay, so I know I trash talked your code the other night, but oh my fucking God, you’re a genius. Everything I thought that could go wrong you had already foreseen, once I understood your theory, everything made perfect sense. The code was systematic, logical, cohesive, and most importantly, it worked. Well, I made it work. I went to Andrea and we had a couple nights testing it. She could Obviously feel my improvements, nothing like an engineer at software to give some actual perspective on what actually works in real life.”
“I can’t thank you enough. When Andrea wins next month, I’ll make sure she mentions you in her winning speech.”
“Oh don’t worry, we’ve already arranged that. We’ll keep you out of the speech.”
“Why I would love that, I only developed the theoretical basis behind everything, and code that worked sufficiently well for all but one situation impossible to anticipate, yeah it wasn’t that much.”
“I’m kidddiinngg my God, why’d you get so pressed. How was your week anyway? Where were you, I didn’t see you at the café at all.”
“Just browsing through the store. Well, actually— I’ll tell you the full story when we get there.”
“Where are we going by the way? It’s been almost an hour, sure you have this fancy car, but if a camera notices the stolen plate we’re toast.”
“You’ll see, we’re almost here.”
“Upper Kapla? Only snobs come and dine here.”
“Oh, then I guess we’ll be snobs tonight.”
“You’re kidding right? You know I can’t afford this.”
“Relax, it’s on me. You’ve done plenty with the code already.” I said while getting out of the car. Nightgirl got out of the car too, and I gave the key to the valet. We entered the building and went to the fourth elevator, the one that had floors 61 - 80. I hit floor 71 for Yamato’s. Nightgirl was visibly tense, for the first time in my life, I saw her look around at the other people there, with their fancy chips and their fancy dresses and their fancy shoes. I somehow sensed that she could feel how only the accessories they were wearing cost more money than what she had seen throughout her whole life.
We entered the restaurant, and the waiter greeted us with a very bad look. “Sir, madam, I’m afraid we have a very strict dress code we must enforce, and you unfortunately are breaking it. As such, I am not able to let you in.” “Let me speak with Gray, I’m sure he’ll let you know that as of a couple of minutes ago, the dress code need not be enforced.” “Sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you and the lady to leave this establishment immediately.” The scene had become quite a bit louder than what I was anticipating, and so Gray came by to verify what had happened. “Grey! How have you been.” “Oh God, what are you wearing? My friend! Oh come on Bernie, don’t you know we’re talking about my friend from university here! None other than Ubiquitin’s CEO himself!” “Sir, I’m so sorry I caused any trouble. Please, follow me.” “Thank you Grey, don’t forget we’ve got our meeting in a couple of weeks.” “It’s been marked on my calendar since the day we scheduled it! Of course I won’t forget.” “See you then!” Nightgirl had been uncharacteristically quiet during the whole interaction. Back at night, anyone who even talked to her like that would be on the floor, begging for mercy by this point. She would be forcibly removed from the poor man’s face, and we’d end up going to her usual cafe. Something was clearly off.
“Hey, you haven’t talked in a while, all you alright?”
“Why? Why did you go to the cafe?”
“Sorry? What do you mean, why? Because I wanted some coffee? What are you talking about.”
Nightgirl was sobbing a bit. “You clearly can go anywhere you want. You can go to the fancy Sanofi cafes, or probably leave to another planet to taste their signature apple juice or whatever. Why would you go to my café?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, you didn’t mean to. Ubiquitin’s CEO, of course you are. I thought you were like me. But you aren’t. You lied about everything. Do you even care about Andrea? Kevin? Miranda? You hang out with them so much, do they know who you really are? I talk about the piece of shit dickheads that run this place, and it turns out you’re one of them? Ah, how could I be so stupid”
“I’m sorry, I can explain, I don’t understand why you’re so upset, I just—” I wanted to cry so badly. Had I known this would hurt nightgirl so much, I never would have done it. Nightgirl interrupted me.
“And to think that I was actually starting to fall in love.” There was a deep silence. I didn’t know what to respond or how, I was still trying to process what had happened. For a moment, I started going back, thinking where it all started to go so wrong, was it with the car? Was it when I talked with Grey. Fuck, if only Grey wouldn’t have showed up, would it all be different. “I guess I have my answer. I’m out of here.”
“No wait, I can—” by that point, nightgirl had stormed out of the restaurant. Again, I should have followed her, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what had just happened. I was in shock, and by the time I realized, she was long gone. I wanted to go back to night so badly, but I knew I had to fix things back home. I had received a text from André about our Berlin contract, and I decided that I needed to clear my mind that day, and went to the office to work.
I’m really not sure what happened over the next couple of months. I tried going to the garage multiple times, but it was empty. I had no idea about what had happened with Miranda, Kevin, or Andrea. I tried texting, but the messages were not going through. I went to nightgirl’s café, but she was nowhere to be found. Larry acted like he had never seen me before. I strolled through night, looking at everything I used to find joy in, and feeling sad about it. I decided to take a break from going to night, for a while, but whenever I came back, the feeling of sadness and emptiness simply came back. I haven’t been back in over a year, and I really miss it, but I dread the feeling. I now call it feeling X, and it comes back every once in a while. I’ve tried to focus on my day life, but it just isn’t working. It’s full of meetings, and traveling, and noise. I haven’t coded since I last went to the garage. Ubiquitin has also been on decline. André, Bianca and Nate all noticed the moment I started looking off my game, and started plotting a shakedown. A couple weeks ago they left the company to start their own, and they took more than ninety percent of our clients with them. I’ve got a lot of non-competes and conflict of interest suits I’ve got to file, but I get X every time I want to start. I miss nightgirl. Every night, I think about what could have been. How could I be so stupid to lose her like that. Things could’ve stayed the way they were. If I had simply taken her to the burger place we loved. If Grey hadn’t showed up and the waiter would’ve kicked us out, maybe I would have been able to gradually introduce her to my day life. If I had said something— and this is what kills me every night— if I had said something when she said she loved me. If I hadn’t been in shock. If I had followed her that night. I haven’t seen nightgirl in over a year. I don’t think I’ve felt anything other than X ever since that night. The things I’d give to retry that night. The things I’d give to erase that night. I get mad every once in a while. I think that it’s not possible that one person made me feel this way, and I start to get my life back together again. But I grab a book, or I start to try to prove a theorem, or I open my computer to code, and the memories of what could’ve been start flowing back again. Motivation by anger is so much weaker than motivation by love. I now realize that I loved her. I just wish it wasn’t too late now.