The flat had become, somewhere in the last two weeks of capstone crunch, a kind of unofficial war room — laptops colonizing every flat surface, a whiteboard Sugar had produced from some unknown origin now covered in Margaret's handwriting, and a rotating cast of takeout containers that Sugar had taken to referring to, with mounting despair, as "the ongoing archaeological dig."
"I found a container from a week ago Tuesday," Sugar announced, holding it aloft like evidence at a trial. "It has achieved sentience. I think it's paying rent at this point."
"Throw it out, then," Reese said, not looking up from her laptop, deep in the specific, focused stillness of someone finishing a financial model an hour before a deadline.
"I'm afraid to. What if it's important to the ecosystem."
Margaret,
