Su Niannian replied on WeChat very quickly.
"That was so sudden! Why didn't you say anything in the group chat?"
"Nothing much to say. Just a normal transition."
"You're still the same. No matter what happens, you brush it off in four words!"
Han Luyi smiled at the screen. Su Niannian's way of speaking had not changed at all. She always used exclamation marks when typing, as if afraid the other person would not feel her emotions.
"How have you been lately?" he asked.
"Still alive. What about you? Any plans?"
"I'll take a break first and figure out what to do next."
"Then want to meet up? It's been a long time. We can catch up."
Han Luyi typed a few words, then deleted them. In the end, he replied with a simple, "Sure."
Su Niannian sent him a location.
Bug Café.
Han Luyi paused. The café was near his home, a ten-minute walk from his apartment complex. He went there almost every week. Old Zhou's coffee was not the best, but the place was quiet, the Wi-Fi was stable, and anywhere packed with programmers had a particular kind of relaxed atmosphere.
How did Su Niannian know about this place?
"I found it on Dianping. It has pretty good ratings. And it's close to you, so don't be polite and offer to come pick me up or anything."
Su Niannian said she would be meeting a client nearby tomorrow afternoon and would be done around three. "Perfect time to stop by and sit for a while?"
Han Luyi said sure.
After closing WeChat, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
Two years of silence was neither especially long nor especially short. It was enough time for someone to change jobs twice, for a city to tear down a street and rebuild it, for two people who used to talk every day to become two quiet profile pictures buried low in each other's contact lists.
At 2:50 the next afternoon, Han Luyi pushed open the door to Bug Café.
Old Zhou's café was on the ground floor of a neighborhood commercial building. A black sign hung outside, showing a ladybug holding a coffee cup—a pun on Bug. The place was small, with a dozen or so tables and walls covered in posters full of programming jokes. The most noticeable one read, "It works on my machine," with a handwritten addition from Old Zhou beside it: Then don't touch it.
"Little Han!" Old Zhou looked up from behind the counter. He was a middle-aged man in his forties, a retired programmer with half as much hair as men his age and twice as good a temper. "Americano or pour-over?"
"An Americano first, Brother Zhou. A friend will be coming later."
"Meeting someone? That's rare. You've been coming here for half a year, and this is the first time you've brought a friend."
"A college classmate. We haven't seen each other in a long time."
Old Zhou nodded knowingly and did not ask any further questions.
Han Luyi chose a seat by the window. Sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling glass, turning the well-worn copy of Code Complete on the table yellow.
At 3:02, the door opened.
Su Niannian stood in the doorway.
Han Luyi recognized her the moment he looked up. She had changed, and yet she had not.
Her hair was still long, though not as long as it had been in college, falling to her shoulder blades in slight waves. She wore an off-white knit cardigan over a white dress, paired with white canvas shoes. Around her neck was a white choker with a tiny pearl pendant. A slender silver bracelet rested on her left wrist, with no other unnecessary accessories. She was still dressed in that clean, all-white style, as though she had stepped out of a milk commercial.
She looked a little thinner than she had in college, and her jawline was more defined, but her smile was still the same. Her eyes curved first, then the corners of her lips followed, as though her smile flowed out from her eyes.
"Luyi!"
The moment Su Niannian saw him, she smiled and waved. Her steps quickened slightly as she came over and sat across from him.
"Nian Nian." Han Luyi smiled too and greeted her naturally. "We haven't seen each other in two years. How did you get thinner?"
"Overtime made me thin. Our team pushed out four versions in one month. I practically lived at the office." Su Niannian set down her bag and looked him over. "You haven't changed at all. Still looking like this."
"What do I look like?"
"Just... hoodie, jeans, sneakers. Default programmer settings."
"Which programmer's default settings come with a face as handsome as mine?"
Su Niannian laughed but did not respond to that. She turned to look around at the décor. "This place is so interesting. Is that 404 page on the wall real?"
"The owner coded it himself. He used to be a programmer too. Fifteen years of coding made him go bald, so he retired and opened a café."
"Wow. A cautionary tale is sitting right in front of you."
"My hair is perfectly healthy, thanks for your concern."
Old Zhou came over carrying two cups of coffee. Han Luyi had his Americano, while Su Niannian had not even looked at the menu before Old Zhou set down a signature latte for her.
"Little Han rarely brings friends here. This one's on me." Old Zhou smiled at Su Niannian.
"Thank you, boss!" Su Niannian accepted the cup with both hands.
After Old Zhou left, Su Niannian took a sip of the latte. When she looked up, a bit of milk foam clung to the corner of her mouth.
"So what have you been doing since leaving Dingsheng?" Su Niannian asked.
"Taking on some freelance work, writing code, thinking about what direction to take next."
"Freelancing?"
"More or less. For now."
Su Niannian nodded. "That's good too. Your skills are there. You won't starve."
"You have quite a lot of faith in me."
"Of course. Everyone in class knew you were the king of grinding." Su Niannian's tone was light. "During sophomore year, you built the operating systems course project all by yourself. You even baffled the professor. He said he'd been grading assignments for fifteen years and had never seen an undergraduate project with that level of completion."
Han Luyi laughed at her words. "Your memory is way too good."
"That was just too classic." Su Niannian held her cup in both hands, her eyes curving. "And that competition in the second semester of junior year—you led the team through three all-nighters, then after the competition, you fell asleep right on the computer lab floor. The cleaning lady woke you by poking you with a mop—"
"All right, all right." Han Luyi waved a hand. "Can you talk about something that makes me sound handsome?"
"You have stories where you look handsome? I don't remember any."
"That's harsh, classmate."
They both laughed.
The conversation flowed easily, like a computer that had been shut down for two years suddenly receiving power again. The system files were still there; it only needed to reboot. They talked about the college cafeteria, gossip about their roommates, and their teachers' catchphrases.
Every topic was safe territory.
They both understood that without saying so.
Han Luyi felt that Su Niannian had changed a little. In college, she had been more direct, saying whatever came to mind. Now, she paused at certain moments, as if filtering her words in her head before speaking. It did not feel fake. She had simply matured.
"What about you? How's being a product manager at Beaver Technology?" Han Luyi asked.
Beaver Technology was a second-tier internet giant in China, mainly focused on short videos and local services. It had gone public in Hong Kong last year, with a market value of over two hundred billion. In the internet industry, Beaver was known for "brutal overtime, high pay, fast promotions"—the sort of place new graduates fought desperately to get into, then desperately wanted to escape after three years of work.
Su Niannian's expression shifted slightly.
"It's okay. Same old." She took a sip of coffee. "I've been working on an AI-related project lately. It's pretty interesting."
"What kind of project?"
"An AI code review tool. The kind that helps development teams automatically assess code quality, find bugs, and offer optimization suggestions."
Han Luyi became interested. "AI is pretty hot right now."
"Exactly, so our boss is in a hurry. He wants to be first to launch." Su Niannian sighed. "But what our technical team has made... how should I put it? It works, but it's not good enough. It has no real competitive edge against similar products on the market, and the feedback from user testing has been mediocre."
"How mediocre?"
"The kind where users say, 'GPT can do this too.'"
Han Luyi laughed.
"Even more annoying," Su Niannian said casually, "I'd been pushing this project from the start. I wrote dozens of pages of requirements documents and handled the user research too. Then last month, a director got parachuted in and immediately replaced the project lead with one of his own people. I became 'assisting with advancement.'"
"Isn't that..."
"Yeah, the same script as yours. You played the technical version; I played the product version." Su Niannian laughed at herself. "So when I heard you'd left Dingsheng, my first thought was, well, there goes another one."
"Fellow sufferers?"
"Fellow suffering is a social motive too." Su Niannian's tone returned to its easygoing rhythm. "I just wanted to see you. It's been two years, after all."
When she said that, she looked out the window, her tone casual, as though she were talking about something insignificant.
Han Luyi did not respond.
He lifted his Americano, took a sip, and was silent for two seconds.
"That AI code review tool of yours..." He set down his cup. "Who are its core target users?"
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