Chapter Text
“Greetings, [email protected]. You’re invited to collaborate on a FO Doc! Click here to access: SK Release Signoff.”
Every time Rey saw her First Order email address a little annoyance slid up her spine and narrowed her eyes. How careless did you have to be to assign someone whose legal name was Kira Rey “kren” instead of “krey” as she’d requested? But then, of course, how much did it even matter for a contractor limited to a year term of no more than 20 hours a week of rating and labeling tasks? Fuck First Order anyway. Such a terrible gig, but money was money and she’d run out of contract terms for their competitors who paid better. Rey shrugged and clicked.
The result of her click was an error page. “You don’t have access to this document. Click here to request permission.”
“Why did you invite me if I wasn’t allowed to see it?” she whispered to the computer, even more annoyed now. The bedraggled-looking man using the terminal next to her in the public library looked up at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him. This was time she could have used to earn, like, maybe fifteen entire cents. She clicked the link and closed the tab.
Not fifteen seconds later she got a chat.
“Who are you and why did you just request access to that SK doc? It’s restricted to fulltimers,” said one [email protected]. She hated this person immediately as one always hates a person with a very similar email address.
“someone sent me an invite? idk.”
“Ugh, look at your email address. Must have been a mistake. I bet you got included in the release owners group. I’ll track this down.”
“u sure? i’m pretty important, probs need to see that release signoff. u own it? can u approve me?”
“Definitely a mistake.” What a tool.
“cool username btw.”
“I’m going to file a ticket to make sure IT stops issuing duplicate usernames across the firstorder and firstorder-ct domains. This is ridiculous.”
“idk dude maybe its legit. im rey btw.” She was just trolling him at this point.
To his credit, he knew it. “Leave me alone.”
Christ, what an asshole. On the other hand, she’d now forgone more like an entire dollar in possible income. Back to labeling. Today they were having her draw little bounding boxes around numbers in blurry photographs.
Thirty minutes later she got another email, inviting her to another document. This one was called “Digit detection preliminary results.”
“bro do u work with data from raters,” she shot off to her new, grouchy friend.
“Why do you ask? By the way, they’ll be addressing my ticket shortly. You should pick a new username. Do not call me ‘bro’.”
“im a rater, just got invited to a doc about digit detection and i’m totes DOING digits rn. small world right???? and btw i didnt even want this email i asked for krey@ and someone messed it up if u can get em to change it for me thatd be amazing. i asked and they said no.”
“I’ll see what I can do. I’m blocking you."
“naaa cmon don’t be like that i wana know what its like using this data. how does it work??? i’m trying to learn programming in night school rn please i don’t really know any real actual coders.”
“No. Enjoy your class.”
“pleeeeease”
Your message was not delivered, read the chat window.
“Asshole,” Rey said aloud.
“Missy, if you can’t be quiet I’m going to go speak with the librarian,” the unkempt man next to her said.
“Mister, if you can’t - ” Rey began to retort, then remembered she was on strike two at this library. “Sorry, sir,” she corrected herself. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. Just a minor disagreement with a work colleague.”
“I don't care if you're having a major disagreement with the Dalai Lama, you need to do it quietly if you're using a library computer.”
“Now you're being just as loud as she was,” observed an enormous man with full-sleeve tattoos on both arms who was using the computer on the other side of the table. “Let's all be considerate in the library.”
“God, this is the most obnoxious library in Queens. I'm out of here before you jerks get me another strike.” Rey picked up the plastic bag she used as a purse and stormed out. A librarian raised both eyebrows at her as she left.
It was time to catch the bus anyway. Rey had not been strictly honest with her new work chat acquaintance. She was not currently taking programming classes, per se. However, she had enrolled in Intro to Computer Science and Programming in Python at Queensborough Community College, it was going to start that very same evening, and she really was feeling earnest about making it to class. It was going to take a long damn time on the bus from her place in Corona though, so she knew not to get her hopes up too much. She’d been burned by big dreams before of figuring out some way to get a toehold on the American dream - she’d gotten her GED, that was great, that counted, but once she had that she hadn’t figured out anything else to do that didn’t require some kind of enormous up-front investment, with an uncertain payoff years down the line. Part of her knew she should really just try and pick up a shift at Mr Plutt’s terrible pawn shop tonight instead of deluding herself that this class was going to be any different than the last few times she’d tried to finagle her way into one educational scheme or another.
It was so fucking hard to be poor in New York, and so much fucking harder to figure out how to go be poor someplace cheaper. At least here she knew how to manage herself. She knew which food banks to go to on which days of the week, which bills she could be late on and which had to be on time. If someone figured out her social security number was fake she knew where she could get another one; if someone noticed her ID was fake, that too. She had a terrible little studio in a dilapidated building but at least she knew the neighbors were okay and sometimes the landlord gave her a break on rent if she did odd repair jobs that came up. And if her parents ever came back, they’d find her in Corona, just where they’d left her so many years ago. If none of her other reasons were enough, well, her parents were enough. Even if they hadn’t left her with much more than a single name.
But in the meantime, it wasn’t much of a life. She looked around the bus and saw ten, thirty, fifty years into her own future. And she clenched her jaw and said to herself, in just the smallest little whisper, “I am going to make it to every fucking session of this class, and I am going to learn to code.”
But she didn’t really believe it.
--
She was on time, if only just, and sat down in the middle of the front row with her shiny new notebook and her pencil. There was one other person in the front, a neatly pressed fellow with skin the color of milk chocolate who shot her a radiant grin as the instructor walked in and began.
“Welcome to introduction to computer science. My ID says Assistant Professor Dameron, but I expect and hope you’ll feel comfortable enough to call me Poe. This is my instructional assistant, BB-8,” he said, holding up the leash of a complacent-looking corgi who made a little warbling yip in response to the class’s laughter. “You should consider BB-8’s opinions on your code and written work to be as important as my own, if not more important. Down, BB-8. Good girl.” The dog snuggled into a little orange-and-white ball and promptly dozed off. “Okay. So, what do we expect to learn in this class? I’ll point at you, say the first thing that pops into your head if I do.” He started pointing his finger wildly around the lecture hall.
“What does computer science even mean?” shouted one student.
“How to program!” said another.
“Maybe something about fixing my computer?”
“How to get paid mad bank to sit at a desk!”
From the back, “Loops and shit - sorry - stuff.” The class laughed.
“Hacking skills!”
He pointed at Rey. “Oh, I - I want to know how they use crowdsourced data. What it’s for.”
Then he pointed at the other guy in the front row. “I want a reason to move to California.”
“All great reasons to be in this class. Some we’ll get to, some probably a little less. I hope that you’ll be conversant in ‘loops and shit’ once we’re done with the semester, at least. Might take a few more years before you make it to San Francisco, friend, but never say never,” the professor said with a wink in radiant-grin-boy’s direction that might have been described as saucy. “But we’ve got to start with our ABC’s before we’re writing the Great American Novel. Who remembers hearing the word ‘variable’? Maybe in high school algebra?”
And so class proceeded. Rey took notes. She was pretty sure she got what was going on. Maybe computer science was going to be all right! The lecture was drawing to a close and it was time to find out whether they had any homework and whether she’d be able to do it without a computer of her own. And then Professor Dameron said the dreaded words she was hoping she wouldn’t hear. “Find a homework partner.”
Rey sank a little bit into her seat in dismay. She was not someone who had ever done well when partners were required. Her life was a little too hard to explain, her social skills a little too rough around the edges. She was about to raise her hand and find out if it was okay to work alone when the radiant-smiling man a few seats down got up and held out his hand.
“Hey, do you have a partner yet?” he asked.
“Do I look like I have a partner?”
“No, you don’t,” he said, his smile only growing wider. “I’m Finn.”
“Rey,” she replied. She noticed he was still holding out his hand, and decided he probably expected her to shake it, like some kind of vice president. She ignored the hand and he put it down.
“Nice to meet you, Rey. Boy, I’m so glad you looked as uncomfortable as I felt! I don’t know anyone in this whole school. It was cool what you said about wanting to know what they do with crowdsourced data. I wish I’d thought of something smart-sounding like that.”
“Thanks. But I bet everyone in class wants to be your partner. You sounded honest and down to earth. Because of course most of us are here looking to code ourselves out of - well, out of New York, or out of - something.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you trying to code your way out of?”
Luckily, Professor Dameron chose that moment to call the class back to order. “Everyone find someone to pair with? Raise your hand if you didn’t.” He did some quick matchmaking. “This semester you’ll be pair programming with your partner for all sixteen weeks. If conflicts arise, let me know, but a big part of coding is being able to work together as a team, and getting your heads around these concepts is going to be annoying sometimes. Having a partner who has your back can make all the difference. I’ve posted the first assignment on the course website. It’s due right before the next class - don’t worry, it isn’t too long. Just getting your development environment set up, and showing you can run a simple program. You won’t even have to write anything yourself. Just follow the instructions.”
He dismissed the class and turned his attention to Rey. “Hey, I hate to break it to you, but we probably won’t get to what you wanted to learn in this class. That’s a more advanced topic than most people get to cover in an associate’s degree, let alone an intro course. But please come to my office hours sometime if you can, I’d love to talk to you about it. I know it’s a pretty hot topic lately.”
“Yeah, okay,” Rey said, thinking privately that she probably would not do that, even though she knew she should. “Thanks.”
“Seriously, I can see you think you aren’t going to come to office hours, but I don’t bite and neither does BB-8.” The dog woke up as if she’d just heard herself being discussed, and Professor Dameron fed her a treat as he packed up his things to leave.
Rey turned to Finn. “Do you want to just do the homework now? Do you have time?”
“Uh, sure,” he said. “Do you want to use the computer lab, or do it from home?”
“I don’t have a reliable computer, so I’d rather use the lab. Otherwise I have to do it at the library, so if I have to install anything I’m screwed.”
“Got it.” Rey admired how Finn took the news of his inconvenient partner in stride. “So what you you think is the story with that dog? What kind of a name is that, BB-8?”
“Maybe he lost BB-7.” It wasn’t really funny, but Finn laughed anyway. Rey scowled at herself, a look Finn didn’t see as he walked beside her.
“You’re funny. Where’s your accent from?”
“I just talk weird,” Rey lied. “Speech impediment. I’ve lived in Queens my whole life.”
Rey had taught herself to fake a British accent in uncomfortable social situations at a young age because she found people assumed she was smarter, older, and more sophisticated and independent when she sounded like that. Having a posh-sounding accent had come to her aid in more situations than she could count. It was easy to look past a little grime on someone who sounded like a rich lady from a movie. At this point, it was a reflex to use her British voice when she felt nervous or uncomfortable, which was most of the time.
“Lucky! It sounds classy.”
“Beats a stutter, I’ll give it that. Do you live nearby?”
“Not too far. How about you?”
“Far enough. I’m going to do my best to make it to every class, but it’s like an hour on the bus.”
“Ugh. That blows. Look, I’ll let you borrow my notes and everything if you can’t make it a few times, but you have GOT to stay in the class. I don’t want to have to find another partner. You seem really chill and normal and just - just the kind of person I think I can work with, and I have to admit I wasn’t sure I was going to find anyone like that in the class, so you really better just...just don’t drop it, all right?”
Rey had never before been called either “chill” or “normal,” but Finn’s rambling run-on sentence touched her heart. She snorted. “I’ll do what I can. But, life happens. You know.”
“I do. But, come on, let’s make a deal. We’ll look out for each other. We’ll make sure we finish the course. Deal?” He held out his hand.
Rey looked at it for a second, not sure. Then she made a decision, and she shrugged. “Deal.”
“You’re supposed to shake on it.” What was with this dude and handshakes?
“I - fine.” She grabbed his hand, jerked it once, then dropped it like a red-hot poker. “Let’s go do our homework.”
The homework was as straightforward as the professor had implied, and they finished going through the steps, which mostly consisted of typing arcane commands into a little black box on the screen, copying and pasting meaningless text with a bunch of punctuation into files on the computer, typing more arcane commands, and then copying and pasting what showed up in the box. “This is computer science?” Finn said. “I thought it would be more -”
“More empowering,” Rey said. “I thought I was going to learn something I could use right away.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe next class,” Rey said with a wan little smile. “Do you want me to run this ‘turn_it_in.sh’ the assignment talks about?”
“Sure, I think we’re done.” Rey typed the command and hit enter, and the script chugged along and emitted a happy “ALL DONE” message. “Want to get some food?”
“No thanks, I’ve got plans later.” Rey did not have plans later. But dining out wasn’t in her budget, especially not this month given how she’d stretched to pay her student fees. She had some beans and rice at home with her name on them.
“Cool, okay! See you Tuesday.” Finn left the lab whistling.
Finn was nice and Rey kicked herself for not being friendly. She promised herself she’d do better next time. She logged into her personal email and then, out of curiosity, checked her First Order account as well.
She was surprised but not that surprised to find that when she signed in with her username, she was redirected to sign in with [email protected] instead. She’d gotten a few more document invitations with cryptic names and a couple of completely incomprehensible emails, but they’d stopped coming a few hours after they’d started. Whatever mixup had crossed the streams between her and the grouchy jerk from chat had clearly been resolved.
What really surprised her, though, was the most recent email she’d received. [email protected] had sent her an email called “Since you were curious…” that contained a single link. When Rey clicked it, it took her to a free online course called “Introduction to Machine Learning,” taught by a professor called Andrew Ng. He’d also emailed her a second time in a reply to his own email.
Rey,
Happy to answer questions if you have any after you’ve worked through the course. It’s very much worth your time.
-Kylo
Huh, thought Rey. What the hell.