Losing Everything

Chapter 5.1: Then

The first time Lucy and Erica kissed, the first time they’d ever admitted anything of how they felt, to themselves or to each other, was in the Bitmo offices, late one night when they had both stayed behind to try and finish an especially complicated software component.

Lucy was in a terrible mood. She had spent the whole day trying to integrate proper networking into their software, and she hated writing networking code because it always got so messy. Worse, they were using a new open-source API which had seemed like a good idea at the time, and probably was in the long run, but which right then meant Lucy was stuck and there was no proper documentation and Erica was having to trawl the internet for hints to pass to Lucy. It had to be Erica, because it had to be another programmer doing the hunting, someone else who could actually understand the documentation she found. There wasn’t documentation though, not really, there was mostly only notes, blog and forum posts put up by people who had already done the same kinds of things as Lucy was trying to do, and who had then written up what worked. Erica read those notes, and then tried to summarize them for Lucy, which was tricky, because mostly the notes weren’t very clear. Mostly, they were half-finished or disjointed, and fairly sparse, because that was how bleeding-edge developers wrote up their notes, if they did so at all. And a lot of the notes were just wrong, too, or related to earlier versions of the software, or other platforms, and this wasn’t always obvious until Lucy tried things and found the API calls she needed were missing, or the results that came back were different to what she expected.

Lucy was exhausted, and frustrated and confused as well. This, what they were doing right now, was the single worst thing about open-source development. The single worst thing, which sometimes made her want to give up entirely and just buy in big bloated pre-coded components from database and web server companies.

She never did, but sometimes she wanted to.

She was frustrated, and stuck, and aware they weren’t getting anywhere, and was worrying about deadlines too, so when Erica said that maybe they should stop for the night, Lucy had just that snapped that no they wouldn’t. That they’d stay here until they were done.

She had snapped, and then realized right away that was bad. That it was unfair and wrong, and she shouldn’t speak like to Erica that.

She had snapped without thinking, because she’d been concentrating on something else, and had simply spoken the way she talked to other people sometimes without really meaning to, people who interrupted her while she was thinking. And as soon as she had, the very second she had, she realized that she shouldn’t have, and that it was wrong. That this was Erica she was speaking to, and not just some annoyance who had interrupted her. Erica, who was actually a friend, and who deserved far better, and who had stayed late to keep helping her, too.

She had looked up, realizing she had been unfair, and had been about to say sorry, to thank Erica for helping and to take back what she’d just said.

She had looked up, apologetically, but by then it was too late.

Erica was angry. Erica was furious.

She glared at Lucy, annoyed, glared for just long enough to make sure Lucy had seen the glare and knew there was a problem, and then she had walked out of Lucy’s office.

And slammed the door.