“Well, speaking of hacking the system,” Solly said. “I think we are all here?” He was referring, as everyone knew, to Sophia’s thesis committee. This was a big and strangely diverse committee for a mere senior thesis. But it had all got a bit complicated, and so there were reasons why all three of these men were in on it.

“Yes, let’s go,” said C-plus. Enoch signaled his assent by raising his pint and nodding.

“You’ve been busy,” said Solly, swiveling his chair to face Sophia.

Sophia sighed. “I’m glad you see it that way.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“My classes—my grades—”

“Those are formalities that the university has set up to make sure students don’t go off the rails, because of inattention or laziness or whatever.”

“A safety net?”

He laughed. “A safety net for the university. A danger net for the student. As the one person in this meeting who is supposed to be paying attention to such things, let me say that I see you as having cleared all of those hurdles a year ago. Your senior year has effectively been graduate school. That’s how I can say with confidence that you’ve been busy—because I hear about your efforts from Corvallis. From Enoch. And from my graduate students and my postdocs.”

“My efforts,” Sophia snorted. “Mostly asking them questions.”

“That is as good a metric of effort as any. Better than tests and grades, certainly.”

“I’m glad you see it that way. The grades I have received during the last year are the worst of my life.”

“The only thing that matters is whether you can clear the bureaucratic hurdles required to graduate,” Solly pointed out. “No one gives a shit about your grades, Sophia. No one will ever look at them again.”

She looked at the screen. Both Enoch and C-plus had politely averted their gazes. “That’s kind of mind-blowing,” she said.

“Because you’ve spent your whole life on the academic treadmill. Now you’re stepping off of it. What matters, from here on out, is your work. Your holograph. In the non–three-D–graphics sense of that word.”

She shrugged. “Okay, should we talk about that?”

“Yes. This is your so-called capstone project. Or keystone. Whatever you want to call it.” Solly glanced out the window of his office for a moment, trying to access the relevant memory from the tiny compartment of his brain where he kept track of administrative minutiae.

“I believe ‘senior thesis’ is the term they’ll be looking for,” Sophia ventured, since Solly appeared to be looking in the direction of the dean’s office.

“Very well. You incubated it last summer, during your internship in Seattle.” Solly glanced at the screen, eliciting a nod of confirmation from C-plus.