Chapter Two
TWO
Outside, it’s a perfect fall afternoon on a picturesque campus, and if the Grantham College admissions office intern hasn’t been sent out to take promotional pictures for the college’s social media accounts, someone should probably get fired for the oversight.
Sun streams through red and gold and orange leaves, but the air is crisp enough you know you’ll need a sweater by evening.
In the distance I can hear the marching band practicing for tomorrow’s halftime show.
There’s a banner draped over the welcome center: Go Eagles!
But I ignore all that as I put the classic red brick and white pillars of Arden Hall behind me and hustle to Kirwin, one of the newer buildings on campus and home of the computer science department.
Stairs lead down to a windowless basement corridor lit by garish fluorescent lights.
There are other offices here, but this late on a Friday, all their doors are closed.
A.U.S.T.E.N.-C.
Digital Humanities
J. Pedersen, Director
Beneath that is taped a thin strip of cardstock with E.
Bradshaw, Research Team Leader written on it in black Sharpie.
(At least I didn’t put it up myself.) A red square on the center of the door itself warns Authorized Personnel Only.
I reach for the handle, with its built-in fingerprint scanner.
After a flash of light and a hum, I hear the reassuring clunk of the door unlocking.
Only a handful of people share that privilege: Professor Pedersen, the heads of IT and campus security, and me.
The door opens to reveal thousands of dollars’ worth of computing equipment …
and a mess. Not a big mess, or at least, not as big of a mess as I’ve been known to leave.
I study here sometimes, although technically I’m not supposed to.
Scattered about are printouts of documents I’ve been double-checking before I upload them, gnawed-up pens, piles of literary and historical reference books, and a hoodie (so that’s where I left it).
As I scramble to make things look less like the set of Twister, AUSTEN-C hums away behind me.
My actual workstation doesn’t look much different from an ordinary desktop computer and keyboard setup, except instead of one large monitor, there are three sitting side by side, all connected to a sleek black mainframe slightly larger than the refrigerator in my parents’ garage.
Finally, I pull my laptop from my bag and set it beneath one of the monitors.
Like me, my computer really should’ve been done with school last year.
The “More Pride, Less Prejudice” sticker on the lid is peeling along one edge, and the sight of its impending demise pushes a little tch of disappointment from my throat.
The sticker’s deterioration is a symbol of what lies ahead for the whole device.
It’s slow, doesn’t hold a charge, and lately refuses to connect to wi-fi.
“Just hold on a little longer,” I whisper, giving the laptop a gentle pat of encouragement as I plug it into the power strip so I can work on my dissertation later.
By the time Geoff knocks, I’m sitting purposefully in front of the monitor array in a display of competence, with a few well-chosen papers arranged before me and the one pen I could find that I haven’t chewed into something resembling a shiv.
“Oh, hey,” I say breezily as I open the door. “Five o’clock already?”
He’s bearing a cardboard pizza box in one hand and a bottle of wine and two waxy paper cups in the other.
It has all the hallmarks of a peace offering.
I smile my appreciation and usher him in, in open defiance of the three identical paper signs posted on the walls, the room’s only decoration: Absolutely NO Food or Drink! !!
Fisher made and hung them last spring after the salsa incident, though he swears the timing was just a coincidence.
In the interests of avoiding another run-in with him, I set the pizza box on the narrow table on the opposite side of the room from the monitors, the place where I work when I need to spread things out, to look over a printout or check something in a reference book—in other words, as far from the mainframe as possible.
Geoff produces a corkscrew from his back pocket and opens the wine. I drag my chair away from the workstation and sit down on it as he lifts the lid on the pizza box and then makes himself comfortable on the floor.
As he hands me a cup, he says, “Thanks for not telling me to bugger off.”
I can’t help but laugh. “So you did know what that meeting was going to be about.”
“Not the conference, no. But … would you hate me if I told you the Team Leader position is why I’m here?”
I take a deep swallow from my cup. “Only a little.”
Fortunately, he decides that was a joke. “I suppose you’ve already heard that GC is my third grad program?”
I shake my head, in part to feign ignorance of the gossip and in part because, in one version of the story I’ve heard, it’s his fourth.
“I started out near where I grew up, in Kent. It … wasn’t a good fit.
They’ve very rigid notions of the future of literary scholarship back home.
So I transferred to Stanford.” Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to offend him when my eyebrows shoot up my forehead.
“The idea of being far from England appealed to me at the time,” he explains, “and it doesn’t get much more ‘out there’ than the American West Coast.” He pauses to take a sip of wine, and afterward, he wipes his lips with his thumb, leaving behind nothing but that crooked grin.
“Unfortunately, my advisor had a health scare and decided to retire early. On his way out the door, he offered to write a letter to his old friend, Julia Pedersen, to ask if she had a spot for me.” Well, that explains why he’s not starting on the bottom rung.
“Told me he thought I’d quite enjoy the rugged landscape of Minnesota.
” He leans closer and lowers his voice. “I confess I’d never even heard of this place. ”
That’s not entirely a surprise. Grantham is small, and most schools its size don’t have graduate programs, especially not PhD programs, which require resources like labs and libraries that small schools can’t afford.
But years ago, GC made an arrangement with the University of Minnesota regarding research facilities and in the process, carved out a few niches for itself, including a highly specialized doctoral program in the digital humanities—the cornerstone of which is Julia Pedersen’s database.
Ordinarily a semi-snide remark like Geoff’s is the kind of thing that would make me hope the person who said it doesn’t survive his first winter here, but it’s hard to stay mad at Geoff.
If Pedersen is planning to promote him next year, she must believe he’s already paid his dues.
I tell myself it will be good to share the workload with someone while I’m finishing my dissertation.
Geoff and I are already colleagues. Maybe by the end of that New York trip, we’ll be friends.
“So this is AUSTEN-C.” He scans the room as he reaches for another piece of pizza. “Somehow, I thought it would be bigger.”
My hackles rise at that, just a little. “Well, I think it’s pretty impressive when you consider that Pedersen started all this on her home computer with an NEH grant of $7,500.”
A low whistle escapes between his teeth as he takes a second look around.
As we eat, I explain how the project grew from that to this.
“She kept pushing for more grant funding, and eventually the provost saw some potential in the project and gave us a room. Once the database moved to a subscription model, money became less of an issue.” Other universities, libraries, and independent researchers around the globe pay a hefty annual fee for access to AUSTEN-C.
It’s not ideal in terms of sharing knowledge, but it keeps the lights on—and also pays for our assistantships.
“We upgraded from a pretty janky set-up to the mainframe a few years ago. Even if it’s no longer the latest tech, it still does everything we need,” I insist. I assume I don’t need to explain budget realities to him.
“Having our own server makes access more consistent for users and doesn’t limit the size and type of files we upload.
It’s also less of a drain on GC’s computing resources. ”
He nods along as he chews. I hope he’s realizing he has a lot to learn.
“Wanna see it in action?” I ask when it’s clear neither of us wants the last slice of pizza left in the box.
“Please.”
I wheel my chair over to the workstation by dragging my heels across the floor, not thinking about the fact that my cup is still in my hand. Geoff hoists himself up and follows, peering over my shoulder to watch. “We’ll start small. Earlier today, Pedersen sent me a new file to upload—”
“Hey, that’s mine,” he exclaims as a short, plain-text document from 1782 pops up on the monitor to my far left.
“You’ve been doing excellent work in the archives.”
“Anything for you, Elle.” He punctuates that assertion with a flip of his dark blond, shoulder-length hair, which makes it difficult to avoid his blue, blue eyes.
But I dutifully focus my attention on the center monitor, where the real work happens, as I make the formatting modifications that allow the document to appear a short while later on the monitor to my right, now as a blue hyperlinked title at the bottom of the long, indexed list of file names: the AUSTEN-C database as the world sees it.
“That’s bloody brilliant,” he says as he watches a manuscript he rescued from obscurity be transformed into something thousands of people can read and use. “Too bad it’s about embroidery. God, I’d love to find something marvelous the whole world’s forgotten.”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, Who wouldn’t?