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Chapter 2 – Fractured Bonds

The door shut behind him.

And it was over.

Jenks looked around for Emily; the hall was empty. At one end, the sun streamed in through the faculty’s stained-glass window. All the colours of the rainbow gleefully scattered across the floor. Jenks turned his back on the glistening colours of the light and slouched his way to the gloomy stairwell.

The last… Jenks checked the time on his phone… four hours… had felt all too short, and all too long. Jenks thumbed out a text to Emily, ‘U @ home?’

Send.

The voices of the faculty members hummed in his ears. He caught the odd word again, felt its barb, its pain, afresh. He’d tried to get them to see, to understand, to grasp the whole picture. Sometimes he felt they’d come with him, and then seconds later it was like the tide had gone out.

‘Courtyard, by our apple tree,’ came back the text.

Jenks paused by the handrail at the top of the stairs and looked back to the stained-glass window. The intense colours started to fade and dissipate… Jenks huffed to himself, pursed his lips, and then trudged downwards.

He knew what Emily would want to know; what had they asked him? And rightly, he couldn’t say, except the Dean kept saying, ‘Now here’s a simple question…’

But simple questions don’t need simple answers; things are nuanced. They need context. ‘And what did you say?’ she’ll quiz him.

Like he needs another four hours of interrogation. And what had he said? ‘No. No I am not a cheat. No, I didn’t steal others’ work. No. I’m not a liar.’

That’s the core of it all; sure, there were lots of variations of those. And his attempts to show them… but with three (or was it five) of them firing off questions constantly, never really listening to his answers, cutting across each other. Had he really ever got into his stride?

The gloom of the base of the stairwell sucked Jenks in. He looked down another deserted, now dark, corridor. And then to the double doors, out. Jenks chewed on the decision. Then, letting out yet another sigh, Jenks slapped at the doors. With a loud clunk they relinquished their command of the outside; and let the light flood in on him.

*                                  *                                    *

In the courtyard, Emily had reconstituted a facsimile of their first date picnic. Just some simple fare, a slab of cheese, an overly crunchy baguette, some grapes, own-brand tortilla crisps, a pack of dips, and the cheapest carton of wine money could buy. She’d even liberated a couple of cups from the water cooler. Emily’s final flourish was the shiny red apple. On their original date, Jenks had shinned up the tree to get her the best one off the top. The poor thing had twisted and bent under Jenks’s weight, and then, in revenge, thwumped him onto the ground. He took risks, she loved him for that, but she’d been scared when he didn’t move after his graceless fall from the apple tree. She’d shed a tear over him – only for the ungrateful arse to start laughing at her as he offered up her prize. A somewhat bruised red apple.

‘That for me?’

Emily swung around to see Jenks, and cleared a half tear from the corner of her eye. ‘I got… guessed you would too… so I…’

Jenks follopped onto the bench. He pulled on, what he felt passed for, a smile. One of thanks. But his eyes screamed of his exhaustion. Emily unscrewed the carton of wine and poured Jenks a wobbly cup full. Without a word, she passed it to him. He tried to take it with some grace, but its thin walls made its contents bob up and down like the waves on a stormy sea, as Jenks struggled to contain it all. Emily took a sip of her own wine and watched him intently. Jenks flicked away the excess of his wine waves that had spilled on to his fingers.

Across the other side of the courtyard, a couple of students came in, chatting noisily. Their chat was all about the new tech labs being sponsored by Hathaway’s company. They fizzed with excitement, their steps bounced with the possibilities, their laughs accentuated their glee. Until they saw Jenks.

It was like witnessing a balloon pop with the sound off. Eyes jabbed accusingly at Jenks, the lack of noise sucked the thrill out of them, and their feet fell heavily on the path. Jenks wearily waved an acknowledgement to them. Their snarls of disapproval leapt across the space at him. He expected to flinch… but this time, he didn’t… this time, he felt nothing.

‘FUCK OFF!!’ came the scream from Emily, ‘You know nothing!’

Jenks toasted Emily, ‘Eloquence personified.’

Emily smiled.

Jenks tore some bread and offered her some.

They ate. They drank.

Somewhere in the middle of the picnic, Emily’s patience paid off, ‘Of course I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Did Ford invent the wheel? Course not. But the bloody Model T wouldn’t have been any use without it. Was that ‘Use without attribution?’’

‘So… you did use Hathaway’s code?’

‘It’s not like that, I used open-source code, I had to!’

‘Had to?’

‘Course, the deadline was looming, I just needed some workarounds.’

‘Workarounds?’

‘Come on Ems,’ Jenks felt that Emily had put him on her psychiatrist couch again and it grunkled him, ‘I didn’t have time to read all of it.’

‘Read all of it?’

‘Thousands of lines of code,’ Jenks squirmed, ‘it worked, so I used it.’

‘so… you used it?’

‘IT’s Not Cheating, everyone does it.’

‘It’s Ford’s tyres…?’

‘ ‘xactly!’

‘So the supplier got their compensation, and you trusted their code lineage?’

Jenks didn’t reply; his eyes shifted around looking for the way to help Emily understand the community he worked in. People pick up snippets of code, write pieces in certain styles, they ‘borrow’. No harm is done. If you put it out there it’s fair game…

_{© Lewis Webster 2024 – all rights reserved}