Lisa stared at Andrew with hazy kind of look that seemed intended to convey a mixture of confusion, contempt, pity and the fact that her day had actually commenced at 7:30am two days previously.
'Why do we need another club?' came the words from her direction, though she wasn't entirely sure if she could take the credit for having uttered them.
'Because,' Andrew said, before pausing to squint at the heathenish sunlight pouring through vertical blinds into the almost empty student common room. 'Because,' he continued, 'I think... we,' he added carefully, and then set about mulling over the adequacy of the reason he had in mind.
Light glittered off abandoned chip packets and various metal chair legs, some still loosely attached.
'...have a really cool name, and we can't afford to not have a club attached to it!' he concluded triumphantly.
Lisa frowned in incomprehension, and then remembered that she was having a conversation.
'That's open to debate,' she countered. 'In my professional opinion, it is perfectly possible not to have a club called the Church of Bovinity.'
Andrew waved a finger vaguely at her, and said, 'We'll see about that,' before blinking a couple of times and adding, 'Don't you have an exam now?'
'Oh yeah, that's right,' Lisa muttered, and then calmly shuffled off to the 10am Distributed Algorithms 331 exam, evidentially undaunted by the fact that it was now a quarter past 11. She emerged at noon, again evidentially undaunted by the sneers of the exam supervisors and the slightly panicked looks on the faces of those still working.
Andrew looked up as she entered the common room again.
'Did you pass?' he asked, eyebrow raised suspiciously. He was met with a blank stare. 'The exam?' he added.
A look of realisation washed over Lisa's face, but she waved his question away, sat down at a desk, slumped forward with her chin pressed against the surface and gazed up at him.
'You've been talking to my lecturer, haven't you?' she said.
Andrew felt like he was being accused of adultery.
'W... what?' he stammered.
'He kept talking about cows. In every example, there were cows. Apparently the cow god commissioned me to build a distributed propaganda machine.'
'Okay, but this is Farrington we're talking about here.'
'Who?'
'Your lecturer! He's obsessed with...' Andrew trailed off. 'You didn't turn up to single lecture, did you?'
A couple of post-exam weeks went by in their usual festive manner. Lisa had managed to sleep almost as many times as it had gotten dark. The old physics building had been hit by an unidentified flying object, which had apparently left a nasty mess inside from which police investigators were deriving tremendous amounts of sadistic amusement. The incident had received passing coverage in the local media, before being pushed aside by the even more amazing news that the Dockers had beaten the Eagles by 2 goals, with no less impressive an array of sporting clichés to match.
Now Lisa was standing in the office of the Dean of the Faculty of Computing, shortly after having received a call from someone who was apparently too confused to tell her what was going on, and merely resorted to informing her that she should go and see the Dean.
'So you're here to see me, eh?' said the Dean.
'So it appears,' Lisa confirmed.
The Dean glanced up at Lisa, removed his reading glasses, glanced back down at the note in front of him and failed to read it. Slightly irritated, he put his glasses back on and handed the note to Lisa anyway. It read - Police report: cow DNA and organs identified at the scene. Flying object believed to be bovine in nature. Lisa blinked several times to try to make the writing disappear, or at least rearrange itself into something rational, but it stubbornly persisted. She handed the note back to the Dean, who sighed heavily.
'Andy Farrington was in the old physics building at the time of the incident,' he murmured. 'He wasn't hurt, but he's been taken to the Fadden Institute for the Psychologically Incapacitated.'
'Just because he saw a cow fall from the sky?'
'He was under a lot of stress. Apparently he nearly cracked just marking the DA331 exams. He'd only just finished.'
'What was he doing in the old physics building?'
'That's where he was marking them. He liked the relative quiet, until the cow smashed through the ceiling and deposited itself in the waste-paper basket. I can imagine you might be a bit upset. I mean, he was your lecturer and all.'
'I've never met him.'
A puzzled look crossed the Dean's face, but he left it to go about its business.
'Anyway,' he continued. 'Since the unit runs in both semesters, we need to acquire a replacement.'
A small piece of her brain was now reminding Lisa to look out for her own sanity.
'I presume you're aware of the fact that I'm an undergraduate,' she stated for the record.
The Dean nodded gravely.
'The problem is... which we're having difficulty, you see, because... it's a bit of a sticking point, and we can't really...' he informed her. Lisa watched on, as the Dean let out an enormous cough.
'Nobodyseverpassedtheunitbefore,' he muttered quickly in the wake of the rather emphatic bodily function, while looking past Lisa to an intriguing discolouring on the wall opposite.
'I beg your pardon?' Lisa said, shattering the Dean's vague hope that the discreteness of his remark would have obscured its absurdity while, at the same time, allowed its factual content to proceed unhindered.
'Except you,' he elaborated. 'You know - passed, gotten above fifty percent, received credit for...'
'Nobody - has - ever - gotten - above - fifty - percent,' Lisa repeated, just in case the Dean had a habit of quietly engaging in random acts of lunacy during meetings with students. The fate of Farrington now suddenly made a lot more sense.
'Well, no. In fact, the highest mark on record was, if I recall correctly, twenty two percent.'
'Can you tell me what I scored?'
'Ninety six.'
'Damn! I knew there was something wrong with those grass input routines...'
'I'm sorry?' the Dean inquired, as another puzzled look crossed his face and threatened to conspire with the first.
'Oh nothing. You're saying I scored more than four times the next highest mark?'
'The next highest on record. The next highest mark for that exam was six.'
He passed her another sheet of paper, with a very long, thin graph spanning it lengthways. There was an extremely dense cluster of crosses at one end. Well, actually there were just seven crosses, but they represented more than two hundred data points. At the other end, a single, lone cross stood as testament to the... well, to something.
'Okay, sign me up.'