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Rollie drives out to the rest stop along the freeway.
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He parks his car and then walks over to the covered picnic table.

He sits and stares for a long time. This rest stop is at the top of a
hill and from here, sitting on the picnic table, Rollie can see across
the land for miles. This is far enough outside of town that there isn't
much to see... just miles and miles of brown rolling hills. It is summer
now and the grass faded away. This is empty land. Not enough water for
very much of anything to survive out here.

Rollie stares at it for a while. Then he talks aloud. "I'm sorry, Leo! I
couldn't make it work."

Rollie realizes he's crying. He stares for a long time.

Then he sees Ivan's beat-up old station wagon pull into the same parking
lot. Ivan gets out and sees Rollie and holds up a big paper bag and
starts walking over.

Ivan yells "Rollie!" with a grin.

Rollie waves and then wipes his runny nose with his hand and smears his
hand on the table.

Ivan sits next to him also on the table, also facing the highway and the
desert beyond.

"Hey, man, you haven't come here in forever! I got four cheeseburgers
and normally I eat all of them, but do you want one?"

Ivan hands one over, wrapped in white wax paper. They eat in silence.
Ivan speaks up while unwrapping his third burger.

"Hey, you OK? You seem stressed lately."

Rollie, still eating his burger, replies, "I have been stressed. Work.
Remember the old guy I used to talk about? The one that died? I've been
trying to get this computer program that he wrote to work again. It's
hard to explain, but it was kind of his life's work, and it wasn't
finished, but it is maybe the most amazing thing I've ever seen, and the
assholes that are taking over the company want to shut it down."

Rollie continues talking while eating, "It's glitchy, but they gave me
the last six weeks to prove that it could figure out the freight traffic
better than this other system that they want to install. But that's not
the big deal. The old guy's program is for lack of a better world, well,
it's alive."

Rollie can never tell if Ivan understands what he is saying when he
talks about computers, but it feels good to explain it.

"OK, you know how I work on shipping freight.. turns out there's like an
infinite number of ways to get all the supplies and equipment to all the
places that need the stuff. Not exactly infinite, but like, more
combinations than we can ever check, and each one costs a different
amount.

"We've been feeding into this software organism all sorts of information
about freight routes, and trucking costs, and then sometimes, this thing
will spit out new suggestions for how to schedule freight. And a lot of
times it's just trash, but sometimes it figures out these weird amazing
combinations that end up making tons of money, and no human being would
ever be able to figure it out. And I had a meeting today to show the
results, and they weren't any good. So, tomorrow, they'll kill the
program and they'll replace it with this overpriced trash they bought.
This program is the last thing remaining on earth Leo did and I feel
like trash that I couldn't finish it."

Ivan scoots a little away from Rollie, smoothes out some of the wax
paper, and then dumps out a heap of fries. "You want some fries too?"
Rollie scoops up a few. Instead of eating them though, he waves them
almost like a pointer and kept talking. "See, Leo designed this program
based on how microorganisms like yeasts and slime molds spread through
the soil to find food. These tiny creatures have like zero intelligence
but they somehow extract and transport resources efficiently."

Ivan replies. "Sounds like... ants"

Rollie smiles. "Yes! Same idea! So, this program Leo was writing, well,
it figures out weird ways to load freight trucks with all the supplies
going to all the different customers on its own. Before Leo died, one
time we got these routes from the system and we just about tripled the
earnings. But it's glitchy as hell too, and a lot of the recommendations
are just absurd, so I gotta go through them and check them and only
share the good ones."

Ivan now leans back on his elbows and has a smile that reflects his full
belly. "We used to come here all the time in high school, remember? I
love this place. I'll never understand why people don't just do more
shit to relax. I get a few burgers and come here almost every day."
Rollie realizes he is barely hearing Ivan. Instead, he's replaying the
code in his head, trying to make sense of why it wasn't working this
morning.

"But It's over now. In the next week, the server's hard drives will be
wiped clean, reformatted, and then the new system will be installed.  It
is really hot today, but they are sitting in the shade, and up here high
on the hill, the wind blows enough to make the wax paper with the fries
start sliding. Rollie grabs it and wads it up.