[to the sound of rapid typing and potato chip-crunching in the background]

You're on with Topher. Sure, fine, leave a message if you have to.

As a 24-year-old boy genius with two PhDs under his belt, Topher didn't find it difficult to line up job interviews that interested him. For the most part, they were all the same: interesting at first when they tried to woo him, but then inevitably also boring; nothing could hold his interest past the second round of getting-to-know-you bullshit ( Read more... )

"Dude, Aleida, it's only twenty microliters of the ethidium bromide for this variant on the gels," Topher called as he walked briskly through his lab, pausing only to flick the lab assistant in the arm. "Are you trying to sabotage my whole life and authorship and future livelihood? You're better than that ( Read more... )

The reason it had taken Topher so long to leave was because he just wasn't a hundred percent sure of where he was going after this. His parents wanted him to travel, but Topher just wanted to play video games and nap between now and Stanford's September 15 start date. So it had taken him some time to sort that out with his parents (video games won ( Read more... )

It was a little dishonest, Topher thought, to claim that this whole Admitted Students Weekend was a true immersive experience in Stanford student life and then have prospective students stay in hotels. On the other hand, he had had more than enough of dorms over the past four years, and a rare opportunity to sleep without some rando from Kansas ( ( Read more... )

Topher should have been packing, but instead he was doing something much less productive: watching and rewatching the Manticore Era III game trailer and writing an email to his graduating class.

To: Class of 2014
From: c.brink@fandomhigh.edu
Subject: Party

Grads-only party on the sixth floor after the ceremony on Saturday. It's my birthday ( Read more... )

"Deal with it, fucker," Taylor sang into her headset as she took a multiplayer companion's head off on her laptop screen. The squawk of outrage from the dudebro across the country - central Wisconsin, to be exact; Taylor had checked his IP - was music to her ears. The guy had had some truly worthwhile gender-specific comments to share about Taylor' ( Read more... )

Thanks to a series of events that he would prefer not to recount, thank you very much, Topher now had a slight pea soup problem on his Stanford hoodie, and his generally bad clothes-washing practices meant that he was just going to order a new one online and keep wearing this one until the new one arrived ( Read more... )

Topher was annoyed.

He had had a Creepy Construction Worker communicator (which in itself was cool) and access to the network that it ran on (which was much cooler), and now he didn't. All thanks to Riley.

Well, mostly thanks to Electroclash, if you wanted to get technical. The point was that Topher didn't think it was his own fault. But he'd ( Read more... )

There was one thing that no one had warned Topher about before he left for his college interview on the mainland, and that was the matter of what to wear. So out of a desire to avoid being judged childish by the alumni interviewer, he had gone all out and put on a suit. After lint-rolling away the glitter still lingering on the shoulders from the ( Read more... )