Margaret made the cake while she was working. She made herself some miso and noodles for lunch. There was some cucumber left and she cut that up into the bowl once the rice noodles had softened. The cake was in the oven and she ate the noodles at her desk while she read through code. Back and back and back. Something wasn’t working somewhere. She hadn’t run it for ages. Why had she not done that? The mistake was somewhere. She’d run it through a parser, but it wasn’t picking anything up so she had to go back through the whole thing. It was like getting chewing gum out of hair or finding a needle in a haystack. Margaret had never seen a haystack.

The oven timer went off and she went into the kitchen. She pulled the cake half out of the oven and drove a sharp knife into it which came out clean. She pulled the cake all the way out and set it on the bench to cool.

The Tamagotchi phone beeped. Wen ru coming, it said. She wrote it in the spreadsheet.

She couldn’t find the mistake. She should have worked all night, cancelled dinner at Heidi’s and kept working, but she didn’t. Instead, she wrote a message saying it was more complicated than she’d anticipated, and she’d have it by tomorrow. She wasn’t sure she’d have it by tomorrow, but she knew she wouldn’t have it by tonight, because she didn’t stay up all night anymore. It wasn’t for her, it was for everyone else. She was modelling healthy work behaviour. That’s what they’d talked about years ago. She wrapped the cake, tin and all, in a clean tea towel and put on a jacket. No one needed to work all night. Working all night was reinforcing the power imbalance and it needed no help from her. She put the Tamagotchi phone in her bag, under her wallet so it couldn’t be seen. She couldn’t leave the monster alone around dinner time – it got hungry. She’d take it into the bathroom with her after she’d been at Heidi’s for a while and feed it then – she’d done it plenty of times before.

When she got to Heidi’s house, it was only a couple of minutes after seven. Bisi opened the door and Margaret walked in and popped the cake on the bench in their big open kitchen. Ash was playing Overwatch in the lounge. Margaret watched for a while. Ash changed avatar because they needed healers. Then someone else became a tank. The players did it all without talking to each other. People said the games were isolating, but in this one the players were acting like one mind. Everyone was thinking about the goal, not the individual kill, and happily playing one game in multiple bodies.