Chapter 22. In Which I Deeply Regret Every Choice I’ve Ever Made, Including Being Born
IN WHICH I DEEPLY REGRET EVERY CHOICE I’VE EVER MADE, INCLUDING BEING BORN
The Music and Audio Research Lab is abnormally quiet on Monday morning. Most likely because Luca’s cabin isn’t the life of the classroom for once.
As I watch them from our assigned lab table, Cindy and Samuel stare into space, their dark circles prominent from far away. Luca and Eleanor rest their heads on the table, probably exhausted from losing their beds and everything else they own.
I flick my eyes away.
I have to. The remorse that hasn’t left since last night is like a leech on my heart, twisting it tight and raw.
I have no clue where Luca and his cabinmates slept after the fire.
We rushed to our own cabin, shed our chemiluminescent clothing, and ducked into our beds, acting like we slept through the ordeal until Felix got back.
Maybe Gamma was moved to wherever the guest lecturers and other employees stay. I’ve tried not to think about it.
Because it’s my fault.
Jade knocked over the candle. Jameson left an open flame burning inside a log cabin. But sabotaging that cabin was still my idea. And I was too much of a coward to stop my cabinmates from going through with the plan before it was too late.
Maybe I can tell them the truth now, and we can organize a volunteer campaign to rebuild the cabin. We could replace next weekend’s activity with it, or—
“Last night was so worth it,” Jade whispers, kicking her black studded cowboy boots up on our lab desk. She nudges the tip of one boot against Benedict’s gloved hand, and he flinches. “Look how messed up they are.”
Benedict brushes off his contaminated glove with his other, but he doesn’t summon eight hundred bees to attack Jade’s head like I expect. “I must admit, I agree.”
I glance between the two, confused, but get distracted by the tickle in my throat, thanks to standing in a burning cabin last night.
I cough and take a swig from my thermos of black coffee, appreciating its warmth and promise of rejuvenation.
Mom and Dad don’t allow coffee due to its “sleep-depriving effects,” but today, I need it.
And I only spent ten seconds genuinely concerned that they’d jump out of the woods when I picked it up from the Food Laboratory.
“You really both think it was worth it?” I ask them.
“You don’t?” Jade asks. She grins, which is slightly terrifying due to her bright purple lipstick. “They would’ve kept crushing us otherwise.”
“It’s true,” says Christiana, who’s returning a smile. Although it’s hesitant, full of nervous, shaky energy. “Fantastic teamwork last night, everyone.”
The three break out into giddy high fives. Then they look at me.
Begrudgingly, I high-five them back despite the weight of our crime hanging heavy over our heads. They’re all getting along more. If this keeps up, we may actually get through today’s third test and beat Alpha and Zeta.
I should feel thrilled.
But I don’t. All I feel is empty.
If I told them that Gamma might be innocent, it would ruin the momentum we have. I can’t bring myself to be the one to tell them. Not now.
“Log into your computers,” Professor Moustafa announces, stepping through the door and kicking it closed with his dress shoe heel.
He approaches his desk at the front and slaps the monitor hard enough to rattle it.
“Today, you’ll be making your own RNN wake word listener.
Or, as you may more commonly refer to it: a voice-controlled virtual assistant. ”
Confused stares are traded around the room.
I’m among those staring, but for a completely different reason.
Luca told me our third test would be on virtual assistants, since Professor Moustafa’s PhD thesis was on the same topic.
I doubted he was telling the truth. Why would he tell me exactly what to study when that would give my team an upper hand?
I was right to be skeptical at an intense competition like this one. But another layer of regret still remains in me. If only I’d believed Luca, then this whole week, I could have researched virtual assistants until I knew every known fact in existence.
I should’ve believed him.
“So, you want us to make Siri?” Jade asks, raising a hand halfway even though she’s already talking. “From scratch.”
“More or less,” Professor Moustafa says, rubbing his goatee.
“On your desktops, you’ll find a file with basic Mycroft Precise open-source starter code.
You’ll need to understand that code to process how much work remains to achieve today’s goal.
Which is: to get the software to monitor an audio stream”—he points at a microphone plugged into his computer—“and recognize both a wake word and one specific phrase to trigger an event.”
Worry simmers within me. Code has never been my forte. Movies make out coders to be the most intelligent humans on the planet, whipping out a million lines of code by memory. But since that same code can be found in a second online as templates, I’ve never seen a point in studying it.
Until now.
“Winners for this round will be determined by who in each bracket achieves this quickest,” Professor Moustafa goes on, sitting back in his roller chair.
He picks up his phone to start a timer. “Whatever wake word and event you wish to pursue is up to you. Remember, I can see your monitors from here. No cheating and searching for answers. Begin.”
Yet the room stays silent—the opposite of the second test, when everyone broke into frantic conversations and sprinted for materials. Whether that’s because of last night’s events or because no one knows what to do, I’m not sure. Potentially it’s both.
“So, a wake word and a command,” I say to my team, grabbing the mouse and opening the file labeled TEST 3. We need to get started somehow. “We just have to give the virtual assistant a name that it responds to, then make it do something. Like, tell the weather.”
“Or the time,” Christiana offers.
“Let’s make it read Benny’s Wikipedia page,” Jade says. “It can tell us how many fingers he has. Or whatever he does.”
“Fuck you,” Benedict says.
“Teamwork,” I remind them.
They nod, falling quiet again. They’re already listening to me better than last time.
“We need a cross-platform text-to-speech library, first of all,” Benedict says, leaning closer toward me. “Which should come prebuilt in Python.”
“Same for speech recognition,” I say. “We’ll need that to convert audio into text for all the processing, right?”
“Date and time come prebuilt, too. That would be the easiest command.”
I return to the computer and type in the basic imported libraries.
Soon enough, Benedict joins my side again, helping me define a listen function to activate our microphone, then convert the audio to text in the form of a string.
We start to struggle with the respond function, which can convert a string to an audio file to be played by the computer.
But Christiana and Jade jump in, instinctively working together without needing to speak, and we’re finishing in no time.
Only thirty minutes in, and we’re onto the last part: the wake word.
“Think of a name for this thing quickly,” Benedict says as he writes in the proper function to register a wake word. He taps the microphone plugged into our computer. “Once we do, we can turn this in.”
My focus is pulled toward Cabin Gamma across the lab, even though we aren’t competing directly against them.
They’re quietly huddled around their computer.
Luca sits at the center seat, controlling the mouse and the keyboard despite the exhaustion on his face.
As for how far they’ve gotten, I can’t tell.
How is Luca doing?
“Christiana,” I whisper, leaning toward her. “Do a lap.”
“W-why?” she says, giving the lab a once-over herself.
“To spy on the others.”
“Who? Cabin Alpha and Cabin Zeta? Anyone else?”
Benedict taps me on the back. “What’s the name?”
“Luca,” I say to Christiana, who nods and rushes off. Then I turn to Benedict. “I don’t care. You pick.”
On the computer, a sentence pops up in execution output, big and bold.
My name has been registered.
Benedict and I stare at the computer.
“What … name,” I say slowly, turning toward Benedict.
“I was having it listen to you,” Benedict says just as slowly. “To convert your audio into text and implement the name.”
“It didn’t pick up the first word I said, though.”
“I think it might have.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I told you to hurry up—”
“Luca,” Jade says, leaning into the microphone.
“Hello, how can I help you?” the computer responds.
Another silence falls among us, heavier this time.
Mortification seizes control of my motor skills like a puppeteer, dragging my fingers over to the keyboard to start pressing random inputs. “We can change it,” I say despairingly, borderline bargaining with a god.
“There’s no option to rerecord written in the code,” Benedict mutters irritably. “We would need to delete it and begin from scratch.”
“Then we will.”
“We don’t have time. We can turn this in now.”
I don’t care. I keep typing. There must be a way.
“Rory,” Christiana whispers behind me. “Cabin Gamma is super behind. Samuel keeps falling asleep. Although a lot of other cabins are, too. Theta and Chi and Delta all look lost. No one may win their round. Zeta is the same. But Alpha is ready to submit any minute. They have all the right functions, too.”
Benedict knocks my hand off the keyboard. “You hear that? One of our direct opponents is ready to submit.”
“Professor Moustafa, we’re finished,” Jade calls, waving her hand in the air.
Professor Moustafa observes us curiously from his chair. He leaves his desk and saunters over to our own, then claps three times in a row. “Everyone, pause!”
The other teams look his way.
“We have our first team to submit their results,” Professor Moustafa says. The lab fills with shocked whispers and groans. “Omega, please present.”
I trade glances with the rest of my team—a silent conversation about who will step up as the leader. All eyes land on me.
The one and only time I sincerely don’t want to be.
“Okay,” I say unsurely, stepping forward. Then I start manually running the program instead of using its wake word. “What’s the time?”
“The time is 9:56 a.m.”
“Where’s the other half of the assignment?” Professor Moustafa asks.
Everyone else stares back, too. Including Luca.
“You see,” I say slowly, “there was an accident with the wake word—”
“It’s not finished?”
“No, no, it is.”
“Then carry on swiftly.”
I stifle my irritation with my approved go-to smile, then clear my mind enough in hopes that I black out.
Monks can allegedly detach themselves from the external world.
Right now, I need that. If I can’t, then I’ll go with another tradition of the monks: self-immolation by setting oneself ablaze. I’ve recently gotten good at that, too.
“Luca?” I finally say into the microphone as quietly as I can.
“Hello, how can I help you?” the computer says.
A few snickers come from tables around the room. My lowered tone didn’t save me as much as I prayed. Out of the corner of my eye, I can still make out the outline of Luca’s body, but his expression remains a mystery.
Good. I don’t want to know.
“I knew they were a thing,” Esmeralda whispers from Cabin Chi’s table.
“I can’t believe it,” Jason says next to her.
“I don’t know,” another voice comes nearby. “Him naming his robot after Luca isn’t exactly romantic. It’s just kind of weird.”
My heart shrivels into a prune.
Self-immolation it is.
“Congratulations, Omega,” Professor Moustafa says. “You win your third round.”