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next her giggled. Indigo glared at the freckled
co-ed until she turned away. Professor Sakamoto stood up from his computer,
walking down the aisle toward the two of them.
    “Anything I can help with?” he offered.
    Indigo nodded to the flashing box on the monitor.
     “The stupid scene won’t export.”
    The professor’s eyebrows rose above his thick glasses,
blurry eyes confused.
    “It crashed again ?”
    “Didn’t even get halfway through this time,” she answered.
“Just hit ‘start queue’ and got an error.”
    Professor Sakamoto shooed her away from her computer, taking
her chair and clicking through a variety of screens. Indigo waited in silence,
hoping desperately that he’d have the magic touch as he so often did. This
project worried her. Each student had to create a documentary on his or her
life. The problem was, Indigo didn’t haveany pictures of her childhood,
and given the makeup of the class, she really didn’t feel like explaining why .
Struggling with that revelation, she’d tackled the final scene – her life as a
university student – first, using every image and video she had on her cell
phone.
    With that single scene fighting her too, the urge to quit
was overwhelming.
    “Hmm…” the prof muttered, closing the last of the pop-up
boxes. “I’m not sure what it is.” He stood, walking briskly to his desk. “Give
me a moment and I’ll get someone down here to look at it.”
    Indigo glanced at the clock. Break was in fifteen minutes.
Unless this tech guy was faster than the last one had been, she was going to
miss her coffee break.
    “Just fucking great,” she muttered. This time she made sure
her words were low enough that only she heard them.
    : : : : : : : : :
    The call to the Tech Center came in just before one. Jude
was at one station while Marq sat with his feet tossed up on the main call
desk. Onscreen, images of soldiers staggered past. Marq’s face flickered blue
and orange under the light of virtual explosions as the troops surrounded him.
    “Kinda busy here,” Marq grunted, “can you…” he paused, keys
tapping in rapid staccato as he took out another two enemy fighters, “…get that
call, man?”
    Jude grabbed the handset and lifted it to his ear.
    “Tech Department, Jude Alden speaking.”
    “Yes, hello,” came the reply. “This is Professor Sakamoto in
the New Media Department.”
    “What can I do for you, sir?”
    “Well, one of my students is having some trouble with a
video export.”
    “Did the error have a number?” Jude asked dryly. He always
found it funny how much of his job could be Googled for an answer.
    “No,” Sakamoto answered, “no error number. Just a failed
export.” The voice faded for a moment and Jude heard the muffled sound of him
calling out to someone in the room. “I have the student right here,” Professor
Sakamoto continued. “If you could just talk her through the issue, I’ll give
her the phone.”
    “Professor, just wait a—” Jude began, but he was too late.
He grimaced, his eyes going to the poster on the wall: Bad planning on your
part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
    Students were the worst to deal with. Everything was
drama with them, and they never followed his directions. He sighed as
the phone changed hands, the sound of the classroom rising and then falling
like rushing water.
    “Hey,” a woman’s terse voice announced. “So can you fix it?”
    “Maybe,” he said blandly. “Have you tried ‘saving as?’”
    “Already did.”
    “Have you tried saving the project to a new location?”
    “Yup.” Her reply came too fast.
    “No,” Jude said sharply. “I don’t mean just save the project
somewhere else, I mean—”
    “Yes, I did!” she snapped.
    Jude frowned, then started up again.
    “No, listen. What I actually mean is, did you delete the
render folder and then—”
    “Moved all the individual files to the new folder, copied
all the original videos there, relinked all the