Alice opened her eyes. Server 251’s grid reflected back the same high activity.
‘Hey,’ she said to Larry. Larry also reported to Tara, and he and Alice were supposedly on friendlier terms due to sheer proximity, though in reality Larry wasn’t close to Alice or anyone else on the team. The infrequent times Alice saw him with others it was always the same Chinese and Pakistani engineers, huddled in gloomy circles in the break rooms; occasionally they power walked around campus, arms swinging in tandem. Once, when Larry was feeling chatty, he’d leaned over and informed Alice in Mandarin that he believed she and he to be a similar type of person, given that they were both Chinese and held degrees from prestigious universities that in the hands of an assertive white man would have already land
