The Copy Gwen Controls

New chapter is on the board.

Suit up. Queens is not getting quieter.

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Gwen could tell which papers were hers by the way she wanted to correct them.

The Oscorp request was in the yellow envelope, folded once at the corner Peter had pressed flat. The legal pad held the words he'd written in the study room and the three questions she'd crossed out before he arrived. Her phone held a photograph of both of them taken by someone outside the library window. She could correct none of those facts by making another copy.

Her ESU notebook was different. It held six weeks of curing-film tests, her own measurements and Priya's initials where Priya had run the late exposure cycle. There were two bad curves from the night Gwen had lost her bench time. If the academic review asked for them, she needed to show the failures as failures, not erase them because everything else in her bag had become dangerous.

She set the yellow envelope in the inside pocket of her bag and closed the zipper. The phone went face down. Only the ESU notebook lay on the table in the records room.

"You've got forty minutes," Marta said from the doorway. "Then I lock this side."

Gwen looked at the wall clock. The library photograph had been taken less than an hour ago. She had walked here instead of following Peter into the street. He had asked whether she wanted him to come. She had said no, and he had let her leave with the bag. Neither of them had made that feel easy.

"I need one review copy," Gwen said. "My project pages. Not the whole notebook."

"Use the project copier. Sign the queue sheet."

"Is the copier connected to the teaching share?"

Marta gave her a look. "It prints paper. It also keeps a job log. I don't administer either network."

"That's a useful distinction."

"It is the distinction I can make while I'm trying to close a building."

She moved on. Gwen had wanted a yes or no because a yes or no would let her feel finished. Marta had given her the part she knew. Gwen wrote it down, with Marta's name, without treating the answer as permission to assume the rest.

The fluorescent light over the copier flickered once, then steadied. She opened her notebook to the run log. Each page had a date, batch code, exposure interval and either a measured curve or an explanation for why there was none. The two disputed ESU entries with Peter's login in their audit trail were outside this page range; she had not relabeled them as her own. None of these leaves held a swab from Peter, his sleeve, his blood, a description of the bite or the name he'd given the thing in his head. Gwen checked anyway. She had written things in margins while tired before. She could not use a reassuring memory as an inventory.

On the page for the missed bench hour, a note read: "second curve unreliable; lamp reached temperature late." The following page held Priya's initials and a reading from the cycle Priya had completed. That result belonged to Priya's work as well as Gwen's project. Gwen marked the page range on a separate slip so Priya's contribution would travel with the number.

The Oscorp material did not belong in this copy. Neither did the swab notes she'd made outside the ESU project. The cheap industrial supplier class might be relevant to Peter's questions; relevance did not turn it into a campus data set. Gwen put that small private note card behind the yellow envelope without reading it again.

Priya came in carrying a stack of blank labels. She stopped when she saw the notebook open.

"Are you doing Friday's review now?"

"Making the copy. Review is still Friday."

"Good. I haven't checked the last film after the humidity shift."

"I included your initials on the late cycle. I won't call that curve mine alone."

Priya set down the labels. "I don't need a dedication. I need the temperature note beside it. Last time you put the note on the back of the sheet and Dr. Vale read only the front."

"It's in the range. I'll check the copy."

"Please do." Priya looked at Gwen's bag, then deliberately back at the machine. "You seem distracted."

"I am."

That was more honest than the bright voice Gwen had nearly chosen. Priya did not ask why. She took her labels to the sink and left Gwen to the page count.

Gwen signed the queue sheet with her project number and her name. The signature exposed her to a mundane kind of inquiry: who copied what, when, under which project. She could have asked Priya to run the pages and hidden behind someone else's access. Priya had already given the late cycle enough of her day. Gwen selected a range of eleven notebook leaves and wrote "project method + raw curves only" in the purpose box.

The copier offered one-sided as its default. Gwen changed it to two-sided, lined up the notebook, and pressed start.

The machine fed three sheets before she noticed the page count. Eleven leaves should have produced twenty-two sides. The display promised eleven images.

She had changed the output to two-sided. Not the scan. The machine was placing one image on each side of paper while ignoring the backs of her notebook pages.

"Oh, come on."

She stopped the job. A sheet slid into the tray anyway. The front showed a graph; the back showed the next front, not Priya's temperature note. If Gwen had stapled it and gone home, Priya's result would have looked cleaner than it was. Not forged, exactly. Worse in a review meeting: incomplete in the direction Gwen wanted.

She took the pages out and counted them against the notebook. Six images had printed before the cancel took hold. The job log displayed her project number and "canceled," but not the missing backs. She could have thrown the bad sheets in the shred bin and run the correct job. The log would still say a job had happened. Anyone who later compared the review packet to that log would have to guess why.

Gwen crossed the purpose line on the queue sheet with a single stroke. Beside it she wrote "first pass: front sides only; canceled at image 6; sheets retained for disposal," then initialed it. She put the six images in the labeled scrap sleeve beside the machine. She did not put them in the public recycling bin. The sleeve did not make her anonymous; it made the mistake traceable to her rather than to Priya's data.

"Problem?" Priya asked from the sink.

"I scanned simplex and printed duplex. Your note disappeared."

Priya dried her hands. "You caught it?"

"Before I called it a packet. The first six images are in the scrap sleeve. I wrote the correction on the queue sheet."

"You don't have to narrate the whole failure to me."

"I'm not asking you to fix it."

"I know." Priya's voice softened by one degree. "I'm asking whether you want a second set of eyes on the page count."

Gwen considered. She wanted the help. She also wanted to keep her bag closed. Those were not opposing needs unless she made them so.

"On the ESU pages, yes. Nothing else."

Priya glanced at the sealed bag pocket and looked away. "I can count."

They laid the notebook flat. Gwen selected two-sided originals this time and copied the eleven leaves. Priya read the page numbers aloud while Gwen checked the sequence and the reverse sides. Eleven fronts. Eleven backs. The temperature note sat beside the late cycle, not on a page that a hurried reviewer could miss. Gwen stapled the copy only after Priya stepped away. Priya had verified the count, not assumed ownership of Gwen's file.

"Can I put my initials next to the cycle on the review copy?" Priya asked.

"They're already on the original. I'll keep them visible. If you want a correction, make it on your own entry and tell me before Friday."

"Fair." Priya picked up her labels. "I wasn't asking to edit yours."

Gwen felt the rebuke. Her first instinct had been to hear every question as an attempt to reach across a boundary. Peter had done that to her in the library, deciding what she should not carry before asking what she intended to do with it. She did not want to repeat him just because fear made the shape familiar.

"Sorry," she said. "I answered a bigger question than you asked."

"It sounded like you did." Priya opened the door with her elbow. "I'm here until the humidity chamber finishes. You know where to find me."

Gwen watched her go. The copy in her hand was a little heavier than eleven leaves ought to be. She had made its limits clearer and bruised an ordinary working relationship in the process. Both things were true. The next conversation with Priya would have to be about the work, not a speech explaining why Gwen had been sharp.

At the desk by the records-room exit, Gwen found the ESU request pad. She had come in with a question large enough to swallow the room: Who could see anything she touched here, and how could she stop it? There was no form that could answer that honestly. There was also no reason to put Peter's name, an Oscorp request or an anonymous photograph into a campus ticket to ask about a copier.

She wrote a narrower question on a blank slip before using the form: "For an ESU student's own project notes, who can access copier job logs and canceled-job images, and what is the documented process for retaining or deleting a failed copy?" No sample code. No person other than the student who would sign. No claim that the job log itself contained the image.

Marta returned with her keys. "That's for the records office tomorrow," she said, seeing the pad.

"Can I submit it tonight?"

"In the box, yes. You won't get an answer tonight. They may ask which project."

"I can give my project number."

"Then they'll know you asked." Marta's tone was practical, not ominous. "It's a signed request."

Gwen held the pen above the signature line. She had spent the afternoon wanting names off other people's documents. Here was a document she could own, and owning it was an exposure she could not delegate. If the records office decided the canceled job needed review, the first name they would see would be hers. She signed anyway. Her academic work had been on the machine. Her error had created the extra job. Priya should not have to answer for either.

Marta dated the request and slid it into the locked intake box. She did not promise a response time or a purge. Gwen kept the small receipt with the request number and its exact wording. It proved only that she had asked.

Her phone lit up when she picked up the bag. Peter's name appeared above a message: "You don't have to tell me where you put the copies. Just tell me you're somewhere safe."

The wording was careful. She could still hear him at the library table saying he did not get to make her choices smaller. She also remembered how quickly he had stood when the photograph arrived. He wanted safety and an address; she wanted not to turn every place she worked into another route somebody could draw from his phone.

"I'm at ESU. I'm leaving now. My own project copy is with me. No personal material from you went into it."

She read the message before sending it. It told him enough to know she had acted and too much to let a stranger with his phone know where she was. ESU was broad; the room number was not there. She sent it and turned the screen down while she waited for the reply.

"Okay. Did you ask about the photo?"

"No. I asked about access to my own copier jobs. The photo is still an unknown sender with a copy I can't retrieve."

Three dots appeared and disappeared. Then: "I wish I could fix that."

Gwen rested her thumb on the edge of the screen. "I know. I didn't ask you to."

She did not add that she had made a bad first pass, or that Priya had heard her snap, or that the records office now had her signature. None of those omissions made Peter safer. They were her account to give when she chose. The rule she had made in the library required him to tell her when his life put her name in a file. It did not make him the owner of every file she made herself.

Outside, she stopped under the ESU awning and checked the review copy one last time. Priya's temperature note was there. The failed first pass remained logged and sleeved for disposal, not silently vanished. The yellow envelope was still closed. Her phone still held the photograph. No copier could take the last two things out of the world, and she had not asked it to.

The request receipt went into the front pocket of her bag, apart from the project pages. Gwen walked toward the station carrying a copy with her name on it and a question that might bring more attention to that name. She knew exactly which part of the risk she'd chosen. The rest still belonged to people she could not see.

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