21
The lecture hall chairs were meant for college students. Not the “hey I’ll go back to school” sort, either, but kids who’d just escaped high school and still had the slenderness of youth. The hard plastic seat was just narrow enough to gouge Dale’s hips, and the metal arm supporting the chair groaned every time Dale shifted his weight.
Dale tried to ignore the droning keynote and the unsettled audience, pulling his concentration and awareness into the more constrained world of a laptop screen. People were hard. People were unpredictable. People exhausted him. But white text on a black background?
Controlled.
Soothing.
Dale brought up the file with the source code changes Surge had examined. The code looked tidy and clean to him, as precise and clear as the last Open Group specifica
