The Settling

“And the thing is,” Sarah said, “the thing is, the whole cohort knew. Everyone knew. Except the professor, who was standing there with the slide up, and the slide had the wrong year on it, and nobody said anything because he’d just given this speech about intellectual courage.”

“What year was it.”

“Five years ago. It was supposed to be this year. Like, the entire dataset. Just, wrong. And he’s clicking through and everyone’s looking at each other and finally this guy in the back, Miles, you’d hate Miles, Miles raises his hand and says, very politely, ‘I think there might be a discrepancy in the timeline.’”