I hated that it had taken me this long to find Meng, that evasive woman. There was no trace of her on the internet, at least not with the search engines I was using. It made some sense—she would also be in her nineties and had likely never used the internet that much, and then there was China’s firewall to contend with. But thanks to grandfather, I have a knack for computers, and halfway through my first semester, I enlisted the computer science lab’s servers to help. I configured scrapers that searched the internet every few minutes for any mention of Meng or the Phoenix Pencil Company. I signed up my bots for Chinese social media sites. I researched different search algorithms, spent hours combing through false positives. I wasn’t supposed to use the department’s servers this way. It’s not like anyone told me I couldn’t, but I guess the scraping generated enough suspicious traffic tied to my username that Prof. Logan noticed.

I had been skeptical of Prof. Logan, to be honest. He’s super young for his seniority in the department, his office hours are always full of fanboys, and computer science fanboys are kind of the worst. But I can only say he’s been nice to me and that instead of reprimanding me, he skimmed my code and offered me a summer research opportunity to work on his project called EMBRS.

It stands for something stupid that I can’t even remember off the top of my head—okay, I just looked it up—Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing. That’s Prof. Logan’s thing: radical sharing. He managed to turn this into an acronym but dropped the second E since that’s what all the cool companies are doing, and he really went all in on the fire theme. At its core, EMBRS is a souped-up search engine that prioritizes not finding information exactly, but “sparking connections” between people. It doesn’t care to index large businesses or medical terms or even news—it only cares about data written by an individual about their own life. Think social media posts, newsletters, blogs, that kind of thing. And because of its status as an academic research project, as well as Prof. Logan’s uncanny number of connections, it has access to more social media posts than anything else out there. By then I was desperate for help finding Meng, so I signed on.