carl@fire

Carl finished the last of his rice and ground beef. Mmm, I know this is almost the fourth time I've eaten this in a row, but it's still pretty good. He sat back in his chair and took a long pull from the gallon jug of water he kept under his desk. Ugh, what a day. So freaking annoying. Now I've gotta put all these perf analyses together to justify why we don't wanna move to Gab's new system instead of doing real work? This is the worst.

He'd spent nearly the entire morning up in the office of the new Vice President of Information Technology for the company. Their discussions had been intense—heated at times, even—but they'd managed to remain cordial.

To an extent.

Can't believe she really wants to flatten out the networks. Why would anyone ever wanna put an important system like Engineering in with Accounting? Adi wasn't wrong, that porn malware could've gotten out if he'd screwed up. He didn't this time, but everyone makes mistakes. If that had gotten into Engineering, who knows how much time we'd have lost…

I guess it's just a difference in our angles of approaching the problems? She's way more worried about performance, but she's starting with all the micro-optimizing that's probably gonna give questionable gains at best.

He sighed. Yesterday it seemed like things were going so well this week. But Rebecca's more annoying than ever, Annie's all wound up because of that, Sammy's pretty stuck on getting her learner's permit suddenly, Bobby's giving me those looks because she wants that sleepover LAN party really bad, it takes over a freaking hour to get to or from the office, I've got this Thursday afternoon thing stumping me, and now Gab's doing her own audit and probably gonna tell me everything I've done is all backwards because of some kinda performance thing that could easily be solved somewhere else, and it's barely even noon…

Carl's eyes were drawn, not for the first time since he'd sat down to eat lunch, to the black headband dangling off the handle of one of his desk drawers. I need a break. He nodded to himself. Yeah, today's a good day for it. Already tested it yesterday so I know the logout works, and I imagine if I do anything else before those analyses then Gab's gonna start getting annoyed—not a great look for the first day of having a new boss. I'll just fish for a little while. Gotta still be right near that lake since everything after was some kinda dream.

He set his glasses on his desk and picked up his company-issued headband, then navigated to the game launcher on one of his computers—the one each employee had which was used solely as a thin client for launching the game off the office's internal server farm to encourage engagement with their product during break times. He put the headband on and clicked the button which—

Carl immediately touched the glowing black orb in front of him in the endless plane of grayish-black that comprised the game's login screen. Hey, it's darker here now. I guess Roger really did take my feedback into account. Maybe a little too dark, but whatever. At least it doesn't feel like my eyes are getting burned out of my head anymore.

His surroundings fuzzed.