carl@fire

"Hey, Roger, thanks for meeting with me."

Roger Mylar stood in front of Carl's desk in the office which bore the nameplate 'Director of IT' on its door. "What's so urgent?" he asked, his eyes unfocused in the manner which indicated he was reading something off the display of his glasses.

"I think this'll go better with the door closed, if you don't mind," Carl said, gesturing towards the door that looked out into the rest of his department

Roger, Director of Engineering for Fire Entertainment, seemed to sense that something might be amiss from the way he frowned slightly, his eyes focusing on Carl for the first time since he'd entered. He reached behind him and slowly closed the door. "What, uh…"

Carl executed a skill at that moment—one of his most powerful when he was outside of combat at the office. He leaned forward slightly in his chair, then folded his hands on his desk.

For most people, this would simply be described as sitting at a desk.

For the six-foot-five, gym-going, bearded Carl Weathers, however, this was a highly technical maneuver that he'd perfected over a number of years.

He called it the Seated Loom.

As was the result in nearly every case in which he'd used it against a standing adversary, Roger became slightly confused at the fact that he was only slightly taller than someone who was sitting down. It was then that Carl, while his opponent was suffering from a status ailment, completed his capture.

"Have a seat," Carl said with a smile, scoring a critical hit with his combo move.

His execution was flawless.

The tone of voice he used was cordial—but not overly friendly, as though this was just a normal chat between two department heads who were on good terms.

His smile was noticeable—but not too wide, lest he give the impression of being excited or particularly pleased. It was also not a smile that was too small, as though he'd been considering some idle thought which had amused him.

Carl had no time for idle thoughts.

He was Carl Weathers, a man who worked as efficiently as possible when he was at the office in order to complete as many of the seemingly-infinite tasks as he could as quickly as he could. His entire department worked with a machine-like efficacy that ground down the endless support tickets, system architecture flaws, and networking issues at a pace which, he imagined, was impossible to improve upon.

Short of filling that empty headcount which he aimed to use to beef up their network engineering expertise, that is.

Coincidentally, Carl felt that Roger would have been a perfect fit for the position, if he weren't already employed in a far more senior role. The older man's knowledge of networking code and utilities was substantial—as seen from the way he'd exploited his way out of several of the mandatory training courses—and Carl would hardly let something trivial such as his own dislike get in the way of a strong hire.

That sort of critical thinking and broad-mindedness were exactly the traits that ensured Carl was paid the Extremely Big Bucks.

Carl sized up Roger as the man shifted in his recently-taken seat in an attempt to make himself comfortable.

Roger looked haggard now that he was closer. The man's graying hair was in disarray, unlike his usual neat part, his white dress shirt was rumpled, and dark circles were visible under eyes which looked like they might close at any moment.

Crunch time was rough on everyone, Carl knew, but it looked as though the metaphorical candle was burning from the inside out in this case.

He adjusted his approach accordingly.

"Thanks again for stopping by," Carl said. "I know you're busy, and I appreciate that you made it down here."

Roger took a long pull from his oversized mug of coffee. "Yeah, no problem." He stared across the desk blankly for a moment before his eyes refocused.

"I wanted to talk privately about a small incident," Carl began.

Roger frowned in clear annoyance, leaning back in his chair. "If this is about your data access policy again—"

"No, no," Carl said, shaking his head and chuckling lightly. "I wouldn't bother you now about something like that."

Roger's eyes narrowed, seeming skeptical. "You did lock Jon out of his accounts this morning," he grumbled.

"That was another minor issue," Carl said, waving it away. "We had a nice chat about an hour ago when he got in, and I think we both have a clearer understanding of where each of us is at."

Indeed, Carl was certain that the twenty five year-old, hotshot junior engineer had a much better understanding about the perils of messing with Carl Weathers. Their preventative chat had only lasted a few minutes, but he'd made it clear to the kid that if he was ever seen in the access logs of the office-only character that the Director of IT for the entire company used, their next chat would not be as friendly.

Carl had executed the Seated Loom to Have A Seat combo, and he'd then used his stealth finisher move for one-shotting lower-leveled employees, Do You Really Think This Is Appropriate Behavior In The Workplace?

He's applied his buffs before the encounter, of course, arming himself with Visible HR Handbook as well as Improbably Tall Mountain Of Paperwork. It wasn't his first time; this sort of battle was one that he'd considered to be firmly on farm status for the past five years at even the most conservative of estimates.

"I got your message in game recently," Carl said, taking a sip from his regular-sized coffee mug in order firmly convey that this was not a Serious Issue. And it wasn't. He'd thought about it at length—taking care to warn Bobby off because he was being appropriately protective just like a dad should, even if the worry was completely unrealistic and unfounded—including during the preventative chat he'd had with Jonathan that had yielded no tangible results, and even the to-do notes he'd found in the file in his home directory were all items he might have just written while in a coffee-deprived fugue. He was completely sure that he'd just dreamed the whole thing up, and he'd really just sent a vague mail in yet another attempt to get the other department head to come down so they could finally begin to patch up—

"Hm?" Roger stared at him blankly for an instant, as though he didn't know what was being referred to, then started nodding. "Ah, yes."

Carl frowned.

Wait a minute.

"I wanted to talk about that mandatory training," Roger continued. He frowned for a moment, and his eyes flicked back and forth as the display on his glasses shifted. "Huh, that's… I should've gotten a notification about it…"

"I hit it on Friday," Carl said, trying to put the pieces into place as he spoke. "Friday night."

Roger paused with his mug halfway to his face. "Friday… Night?"

Carl nodded. He decided to think about the time discrepancy later so he could focus on the situation in the now.

He definitely wouldn't forget about something that significant.

"What, ah, time was that?" Roger asked, now sounding slightly concerned.

"A little before seven thirty," Carl said.

"But you're all right," Roger said, taking that drink of coffee he'd been moving towards. "Aren't you?"

"I am," Carl said slowly, "but it felt like hours when I was stuck in there, Roger."

"But you weren't." Roger said as he leaned forward slightly. "Right?"

"Well," Carl said, letting the word linger as he sipped his own coffee. "It was lucky that John came up from the front desk to check on me when he did, or we might be having this chat with Terry right now."

He still wasn't totally sure what had happened, but he was keeping a straight face while he thought about it by executing his Acting Like He'd Been There skill to give the feel that this was a totally normal occurrence—which obviously it wasn't, but, as he considered it further over the next few seconds, he decided that probably what had happened was that he'd logged in, hit the message from Roger, and then had his headset pulled off almost immediately after by John, and the resulting interaction with the brain link interface had then given him an incredibly weird, realistic-seeming dream based on all the various fragments of game knowledge floating around in his subconscious. Whatever had really happened wasn't important at that moment anyway since he'd finally gotten Roger to come down for a private face-to-face where they could hash out this feud once and for all, thereby eliminating a long-term item on his list of things that were stressful.

At that exact moment, Roger looked distinctly uneasy at the prospect of speaking about this topic with the head of HR.

Carl wasn't concerned in the slightest, however. He knew how that particular game was played. He'd stopped in to bring snacks down to HR every other Tuesday afternoon and chat for a few minutes since he started this job, even if they'd initially been somewhat reluctant to chat with him. He completed every policy training course they sent him immediately, no matter how inane or obvious it seemed. He was even known to give his own expedited version of the HR handbook during the onboarding process for his new hires.

In essence, Raising An Issue To HR was Carl's ultimate move. He'd never employed it, but he could.

"I, ah…" Roger trailed off. He reached up and rubbed at his face, suddenly managing to seem even more tired. "Look, Carl, I'm really sorry about that," he said, not meeting the larger man's eyes but still sounding sincere. "I set that up a few weeks back when I was still pretty teed up over having to do so many of those annual compliance trainings in September, and I forgot that I even set it up, to be honest." He sighed and leaned his head on the hand that wasn't still clutching at his massive coffee mug.

It was clear to Carl that Roger understood the potential severity of the situation. A call down to HR at this moment would likely result in Fire Entertainment creating a job listing for a new Director of Engineering. There was a strict zero tolerance policy at the company for harassment of any kind.

Was that what he wanted?

Carl had considered the matter in depth. Roger was, by all accounts, an incredibly talented engineer. He also had a knack for solving difficult problems, or so Carl gathered based on everything he'd seen when he'd played the game as well as the new features he'd re-discovered existed as a separate expansion after Friday night's weirdness.

Well, everyone could make mistakes, as Carl certainly was aware. He triple-checked all of his commands executed with elevated permissions for a reason, didn't he? And he'd mistaken two people maybe-in-game on Friday for being first an NPC—which the game didn't even have—and second a man—which she clearly wasn't—respectively. The latter case brought with it thoughts that he lacked the time to consider since it had been such a confusing, bizarre dream, so he took another sip of his coffee.

"I'm not interested in pursuing the matter beyond our chat here," Carl said.

Roger's expression turned suspicious as he, now on the coffee defensive, took a retaliatory gulp from his mug.

"I think we should take this opportunity to get to know each other a little better," Carl said. "You've had it out for me since I started here last year. Why?"

It was a question he'd always wondered about. Carl couldn't remember a single case where he'd ever personally antagonized someone at the company—that would be against HR policy, obviously—and yet it seemed that every single member of every team in Engineering had disliked him from the start. His attempts to talk to Roger in private had been rebuffed time and again, and the only thing that anyone in his own department could tell him was that Engineering and IT had never gotten along. The department had been much smaller when he'd joined, however; only Adi and Erica—who was still out on maternity leave—remained from the previous IT "team" which neither of them seemed keen on talking about.

A team which had somehow been comprised of only three people for the entirety of the company.

It was a ratio that made no sense to Carl. Fire Entertainment employed well over three hundred people at this campus alone. Nearly all of them used company systems, and that was ignoring the hundreds of millions of players their game had, a game that somehow ran on systems organized and managed by a three person IT department.

Carl was up to eight team members now, with a target of nine by the end of the year if he could just get one freaking candidate that fit his requirements and whose personality wouldn't cause conflict. It was still not enough, but things were at least becoming manageable. Adi no longer sat in the corner of his cube rocking back and forth when the number of submitted tickets grew too high, and he'd finally managed to convince the perpetually nervous, thirty one year-old Erica that yes, she could have a child and go on maternity leave and there were not going to be any changes in her employment status or other weird repercussions.

Frankly, he wondered who this Gary guy that had been running things before him was, or if there had been some other abnormality which led to the two remaining people from his regime seeming to be traumatized by the experience.

Which reminded him, he needed to make Adi take time off again.

But that was something to take care of after his current meeting, so he put it on his mental schedule.

Roger fingered the handle of his mug, then shifted with obvious discomfort in his seat. "It's, ah, a bit complicated," he said. He took a deep breath. "Did you ever meet Gary?"

Carl shook his head. "Don't even know his last name."

Roger nodded. "Right," he muttered. "Of course you don't."

Carl was feeling that this was definitely all Gary's fault at that moment.

"Gary was a, ah, bit of a difficult person," Roger said. "He was here since way before the start of Project Eden—what was eventually released as New Era. I joined just after, when we started staffing up and figuring out how to make the thing."

Carl was familiar enough with the story. Fire Entertainment had been a very successful privately-owned company for nearly thirty years, but the ownership had decided to shutter the short-term game-producing arm in the early 2020s, reinvesting their accumulated fortunes into the company and massively growing the operation with the goal of creating the most immersive, realistic, awesome virtual reality game ever. It had taken over a decade before they'd succeeded, and New Era was that game.

"Gary had all of the systems set up exactly how he liked them to work," Roger said, staring down into his coffee. "He had scripts to automatically manage everything from adding accounts for new hires all the way up to troubleshooting all the company's game servers. He gave out root access to anyone who wanted it. It wasn't that he didn't care what we did with it, ah, it was more that we couldn't do anything." Roger gulped his coffee. "If anyone made a change he didn't like, he'd just roll it back from one of his backups."

The idea seemed a bit crazy to Carl, but, he supposed, if the backups were failure-proof and regular enough, then at least—

"But that wasn't all," Roger said. He sighed. "You know we've got a big Engineering department on this campus, right?"

Carl nodded. "Two hundred and six," he said before he took a sip of his own coffee.

"Yeah," Roger said slowly, seeming a little unsettled by Carl's immediate recollection. "Gary was…weird about certain things. He liked to leave everyone customized login messages."

"Okay," Carl said, not seeing what the problem with that was.

"He also liked to watch peoples' reactions when they read them," Roger said. "We had to keep webcams on our monitors for it."

"Oh, so that's what those were for," Carl said. "I figured you were using them to have big team meetings or something."

"No, that's why I prefer the open office layout," Roger said. "Gary was…" He paused and drank from his mug, then fixed Carl with a decisive look. "He was creepy."

Carl suddenly didn't like where this was going.

"He liked to patch into the security cameras and watch people," Roger said. "He seemed to have a lot of free time for it somehow, too. He was sort of shy though, so he never talked to anyone much. He'd just sit in here with the door closed and locked."

Carl didn't like hearing that at all. He'd read numerous books and studies about effective management practices, and he always kept his door open. Except when he was in sensitive meetings such as this one, of course.

"As an example," Roger continued, "he once set my login message to say that he noticed I'd spent five minutes longer in the bathroom the previous day than I typically averaged, and he wondered whether I was okay."

Carl…wasn't quite sure what to say to that. He sipped his coffee instead to convey his confusion.

"In the IT department," Roger said, "it seems to have been the case that he, ah, would inquire about their private lives."

The look that Roger gave him, filled with the discomfort that could only be produced by a manager attempting to circuitously reference overt episodes of sexual harassment, told Carl exactly which aspect of his team members' private lives had been questioned.

"And, of course, the cameras," Roger said, taking a drink of his coffee for emphasis.

"The cameras," Carl repeated.

"The problem with Gary was that he was too entrenched," Roger said. He hunched forward in his chair a bit. "He was hooked into all the systems, and without his scripts running, everything would fall over. And he'd hinted that there was some kind of remote kill switch in case he was ever let go."

Carl frowned. Something was tickling a memory—

"So," Roger said, "you'd get to work for the day, you'd log in, you'd read the login message Gary had set for you, and then you'd look into the camera on your monitor and say 'Thanks, Gary'."

Carl frowned more deeply. "Why?"

"Because if you didn't, Gary might get upset with you," Roger said.

Carl, again, did not like where this conversation was leading. He aggressively sipped his coffee to communicate his discomfort.

"In Engineering, it was pretty bad," Roger said, shaking his head and pressing his lips together for a moment. "He deleted an entire month of work one time with a storage rollback. We had to redo the whole thing."

"Why didn't—"

"We couldn't do our own backups," Roger added, "because the system policy didn't allow the use of any external storage devices, all our machines network-booted off a central server with no drives of their own with a locked down BIOS, and the internal network couldn't be connected to by any external devices. He had a proxy running that intercepted and decrypted all our outgoing traffic, and it automatically blocked any outgoing transfers which matched code in any of the repos."

"That's, uh…" Carl wasn't quite sure what that was, but it wasn't good. Well, it was a very good security policy, in a certain sense, but it didn't foster a sense of trust between employees, so—

"After the first time, when the repos all rolled back a week, we settled on keeping a few older cameras at the office that we used to photograph everything, just so we'd have something in case it happened again," Roger said with a bitter look on his face that even a gulp of the good coffee from the fifth floor couldn't lighten. "We thought we were smart. Well, we came in one day and the cameras were gone and everything got rolled back a full month. That was about two years before New Era was released."

Carl raised his eyebrows and took a sympathetic sip of his coffee.

"He just wanted us to be polite to him, he always said." Roger curled his lip in disgust. "Show him our appreciation for how much he cared. He had a thing for one of the new members of the accounting team at one point, we found out in part because he'd have her preferred, ah, sanitary goods waiting on her desk the day before her period was about to start every month. At a certain point, though we don't know why, he logged into her social media—which he could do since she'd logged into it from the office—and posted an especially convincing suicide note. She, ah, ended up being placed into a facility against her will by her parents, who were worried sick."

Carl couldn't help himself. "What the fuck was wrong with this guy?"

"Who knows," Roger said, throwing up his free hand. "Everyone wanted him gone, but we couldn't do anything because we were too afraid that everything would be erased. We had monthly off-site meetings—no phones or devices of any kind allowed in case he'd bugged one of 'em somehow—with all the department heads, VPs and C-levels."

"But you did get rid of him," Carl said, stating the obvious.

"Barbara was the last straw for everyone," Roger said. "We threw some money at a contractor and had them hire an external HR company to find a replacement. Some, ah, demanding requirements were set so we didn't end up with another Gary."

Carl frowned. He didn't remember—

"As it turned out," Roger continued, "the HR company wasn't necessary. The first company we contracted had a guy who had worked for a certain large social media company, and he recalled the head of IT there with glowing praise. It was the kind of thing that was so positive it was hard to believe, honestly."

Things were starting to make more sense to Carl now. He'd worked for a certain large social media company prior to taking an extremely generous offer to work at—

"Charles made the call almost immediately at the next meeting," Roger said, referring to Charles Massey, the founder and CEO of Fire Entertainment. "He'd do the interview himself and take full responsibility."

"I did think it was a little odd to be interviewed by the CEO," Carl remarked.

Roger took a quick sip of his coffee. "It went well, and he decided to shut the office down for a week."

That took Carl by surprise. Shutting down the entire campus for a whole week?

"Told everyone it was a vacation bonus, kicked everyone out himself on Friday, and locked the doors behind him. Then on Saturday, we came back. A dozen of the most senior people from the Engineering department came back in to the office for a week and camped out," Roger said, a faraway look in his eye. "A week was pushing the bounds of credibility, but that's what Charles wanted. So Engineering came back.

"I physically disconnected the office from any outside network access—and even from the game servers—and we went to work. There was way too much infrastructure in place to redo everything—and none of us were confident enough that we wouldn't brick the whole thing in the attempt—so we just did what we could. We plugged all the network storage chips, one at a time, into a clean machine I'd brought from home with an insane number of my own chips and copied it all so we'd have backups of everything. Then we disconnected all the network nodes that we didn't understand, we cut out all the IT machines entirely, and in the end we left only the most essential systems in Engineering hooked up. Then Charles fired Gary."

Carl had his coffee mug raised, poised to take a sip to show his anticipation of the story's conclusion. "Just like that?"

"Yeah, just like that," Roger said. "Charges were filed, and you started the Monday after. Never heard from the guy since."

The news gave Carl pause, so he sipped his coffee, realizing in the process that he was only a couple sips away from the bottom of his plain, black mug. "That does explain why everything was in such a shambles when I got here," he said.

"We were a bit too aggressive," Roger confirmed. "We had to make sure Gary couldn't do much damage once Charles canned him, but we left too many systems disabled."

"That's why I got that support ticket about needing the coffee machines connected," Carl said as he recalled the first few hours of his first day at Fire Entertainment. He frowned. "I know they've got wifi, but you really thought he'd—"

"We weren't taking any chances at that point," Roger said. "We did hardware resets on all the routers in the office and then installed different firmware just in case."

"I was wondering why they were all so poorly configured," Carl muttered.

"Yeah," Roger said with a wry grin, his forehead wrinkling, "some of us had a little sysadmin experience here and there, but we were mostly just flailing around with vague answers off Stack Exchange trying to cover as many bases as we could."

Carl scratched his beard. "Why didn't anyone tell me?" He was sure he could have prioritized differently and been more efficient if he'd known what he was dealing with.

"People were still pretty on-edge even with Gary gone," Roger said. "You seemed on top of things at the start, and you had just about everything back within the first week, even with Erica and Adi taking another week off since the stress had really been getting to them."

"Was it always only the two of them and Gary?"

"We used to have around twenty, maybe twenty five people in IT," Roger said, his gaze once again taking on that distant look. "They quit, and Gary didn't want to replace them. A lot of people quit over the years, but most of us really wanted to finish this damn game. Things didn't start getting bad until a couple years before the release, so we were all too invested by then."

"Huh."

Roger sighed. "Once things started getting more normal, a lot of people in Engineering were still pretty pent up about the whole thing. Myself included, I suppose." He drank from his mug.

"I see," said Carl. And he did. He understood precisely how the current situation had come about. None of the pranks that Engineering had pulled were particularly serious, they were just constant and annoying, like the time they'd somehow managed to remove all the parts from his department's coffeemaker, leaving it a hollow shell and him dangerously low on coffee for the first few minutes of his workday.

"After a while, we stopped being as stressed," Roger acknowledged, "but it had sort of become a habit, so we carried on as we'd been doing. None of us particularly wanted anything to do with IT ever again, not after Gary. Even your policy mails and training materials were borderline triggering PTSD for some of us."

"Uh-huh."

"I am sorry, Carl," Roger said, staring across the desk at the much larger man and still seeming so very tired. "It shouldn't have taken such a screw-up on my part to make me realize things had gone way too far."

Carl had a lot to consider. But before he got to that, he was going to—

"If it's not too late, what do you think about maybe trying a fresh start?" Roger asked. "I'll call a department meeting this afternoon and tell everyone to behave, and we can try to be a bit more normal."

Normal was something Carl had been hoping for ever since he'd started. He'd had dreams about coming into work and not finding his office inexplicably filled with balloons. He'd fantasized about perhaps going a full week without a support ticket asking whether he'd left the refrigerator running. He'd believed that someday, he might even be able to relax his email filters because people would stop signing him up for spam mail.

Carl raised his nearly-empty coffee mug, the thing seeming tiny in his large hand, and brought it over his desk in a toast. "Fresh start," he said.

Roger smiled a little and clinked his mug, then they both took a drink and placed their mugs on the desk.

The sounds of two hollow mugs striking wood echoed through the small room.

Carl nodded. "You handle your coffee pretty well," he said with a half-grin.

Roger tipped his head back in an undignified manner and laughed. "Only thing keeping me going at this point. I haven't slept since yesterday."

"Jesus," Carl said.

"Can't wait for this damn expansion to go out," Roger said. "My son's been hounding me about it for months."

That was when things clicked for Carl. He nodded knowingly. "My daughter's been pretty excited, too."

"Your kids play, too?" Roger said.

Carl had never been particularly fond of Roger. The man had always been curt and a bit dismissive, brushing off his requests for meetings. The pranks—with a single exception—had never escalated beyond minor annoyances, but he'd always thought the guy had it out for him, and he couldn't figure out why. But now he saw a father who'd stayed at the office to work all night so his son could play a better game the next day.

Carl could respect that level of focus.