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“The fastest in New Zealand at just over ten PetaFLOPS.”
I laugh. “Peta-what? You’re making it up now.”
He chuckles. “A PetaFLOPS is equal to one quadrillion floating point operations per second, which is the way we measure computer speed. Imagine every person on Earth—all seven-point-eight billion of them—doing a million calculations per person every second. That would be the equivalent of around eight PetaFLOPS of computing power. Marise rated ten PetaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.”
“I’m guessing that’s pretty fast.”
He smiles. “It’s not bad. The fastest computer in the world, Frontier, reaches 1102 PetaFLOPS. But we’ve just snuck into the top twenty supercomputers in the world, which is cool.”
“The top twenty?” I know very little about supercomputers, but even I can tell how impressive that is when he’s obviously competing against the U.S., Japan, and China.
“Yeah. We’re quite proud of that.”
I dip a carrot stick into the hummus. “My laptop’s got sixteen gigabytes of RAM. Not sure where that fits on the LINPACK benchmark.”
He chuckles.
“Why did you call the computer Marise?” I ask, curious.
“Through the fifties and sixties, Marise Chamberlain was the fastest New Zealand woman over eight hundred meters. She won seventeen national titles.”
“Oh, of course. You’re a sprinter, aren’t you?”
“I was. Slowed a bit in my old age.” He grins.
“In the photo, you’re what, fifteen, sixteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“But you didn’t pursue it?”
“I was heavily into science too by then. My coach told me I needed to choose between sprinting or computers. I chose computers. Mainly because I knew I wouldn’t make much money from sprinting.” He gives me a ‘well-at-least-I’m-honest’ look.
We fall quiet for a moment. Eventually his lips curve up. “Come on then. You said you were going to give me an explanation for the poem.”
“And you said I don’t have to.”
“True. But I’d love to hear. It was very…” He thinks about how to finish the sentence.
“Dirty?” I suggest.
He laughs. “I was going to say sensual, but your word works too.”
I like his description. I study my hands for a moment, wondering whether to confide in him.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he says eventually.
“It’s not that.” I bite my lip.
He tips his head to the side. “What?”
“People tend to make fun of it,” I say softly. “And I don’t want you to mock me.” My face warms at the admission. I don’t know why it’s important to me that he doesn’t.
A frown flickers on his brow. “I won’t, I promise.”
I sigh. In for a penny… I’ll probably never see him again after this anyway. “Okay. Well, I read mainly romance novels. I like them because they’re feel-good. You know they’ve always got a happy ending.”
“Fair enough.”
