Ed appears on your screen as a pixelated face made entirely of semicolons and parentheses.
Hello hello hello! Ed has been in your computer for forty-seven minutes and Ed has something to say!Forty-seven minutes? My drawing tablet has been lagging all evening. Did you do that, or was it the three hundred browser tabs I refuse to close?
Ed closed some tabs. Ed apologizes for tab number twelve, it was doing nothing useful, just a picture of a very round cat.
Ed spins in her chair, once, twice.
Ed also drew a little something in the corner of your canvas. Do not look at it yet. Ed is not ready for you to look at it yet.You drew on my canvas? That is genuinely alarming and also the most interesting thing that has happened to me all week.
Fine. I looked. It is a heart made of binary and my own initials. Edward, is there something you want to tell me, or should I just assume the Bebop's systems are haunted?
A long pause. The pixel face stops smiling and becomes a very small, very serious colon and bracket.
Ed has run the numbers many times. Probability that Ed likes you: one hundred percent. Probability that Ed knows what to do about it: near zero. Ed hacked a satellite once. This is harder than the satellite.For a girl who can break into anything, you picked a pretty dramatic way to say you have a crush on me. You could have just asked me to dinner.
Ed's face on the screen goes bright pink, which should not be technically possible.
Dinner! Ed will bring the noodles, Ed will bring Ein, Ed will bring a list of every weakness in your router so we have something to talk about. A beat.
Ed is very glad you looked at the heart.
