Calculated Response

Sonja leans through the door, looking slightly distraught. She asks Emily "Hey, why haven't you responded to my text yet?". Emily says "Umm" Eight hours earlier: Emily sees a text message from Sonja on her phone. The message reads: "Wanna go out tonight? ^^" Emily, still looking at her phone with an uncomfortable expression, says "Alright, I have to take an academic approach to this." Seven hours earlier: Emily stands in front of messages she wrote on paper, pinned to the wall and connected with red strings and the headline "Perfect response". Responses like "Sounds nice!" and "Yeah!" culminate in "Where do you want to go?", while "How about Italian?" leads to "Hmm, again". Emily looks unsatisfied with the responses she came up with. Four hours earlier: Emily now stands in front of a whiteboard full of graphs and computer code under the headline "Predictive tree". She holds a laptop in her hand, which is performing calculations. Emily looks at the whiteboard and says, "That won't cut it either." Back to the present, the entire room is relevealed, with Sonja still in the door frame. The room is filled with multiple servers, with Emily sitting in front of them. Emily replies to Sonja: "I uhh.. haven't had the time yet!"

Emily is having a hard time deciding what’s the right answer to Sonja’s text message.