carl@fire

"I guess I'm about done with this 150U rack analysis for VP Smythe… Alright, I'll try it."

"I'll pull you out in a minute if it doesn't work."

"Logout." Carl blinked a few times before taking the brain link headband off. He'd logged in just long enough to quickly say the phrase that would exit the game.

Roger stood in front of his desk with an expectant expression on his face.

"Yup, it worked," Carl said redundantly, feeling a little foolish for wanting to double check it. He set the headband on his desk, then stood up. "Thanks, Roger."

"It was a bit childish," Roger said as he started tapping away on a tablet. "I can't apologize enough, really."

"I'm over it," Carl said. It wasn't as though he'd missed his daughter's first varsity basketball game as a starter. If he had, he considered at that moment, he might never have gotten over it. "Any idea what this meeting is about?"

"No," Roger said, sounding distracted as his face screwed up in confusion. "How did you get into our test zone anyway?"

"Huh?" Carl picked up his recently-refilled coffee mug and walked out the door of his office, not bothering to lock it behind him.

His door was always open.

"I was just examining your character to make sure there were no other, ah, issues," Roger said, following behind. "You're in—"

Carl remembered something important at that moment and raised his hand in the air. "Sorry, Roger, one sec." He made a quick right and walked noisily as he approached a certain cube from the rear. "Hey, Adi," he called.

The man in question jerked around as he usually seemed to do—though he was getting better about it. "Hey, Carl," he said, relaxing visibly, "what's up?"

Carl walked closer, taking care not to inadvertently loom. "I just wanted to come by and make sure you knew that I've seen how much work you put in the past couple weeks with that latest Accounting thing."

Adi let out a long breath and ran a hand through his coiffed hair. "What a nightmare," he said. "Every time I thought I got it off all the machines, I found it was still lurking around somewhere. If you hadn't put all the departments on separate networks, I think it might've gotten out."

"Nah, I'm sure you had it," Carl said, giving him a reassuring smile. Building up the confidence of his longest-serving team members had been the first long-term project he'd undertaken, and until today he'd been unable to understand why two such skilled people would always be so down on themselves. "Didn't even log in to check how you were doing."

Adi grinned.

Carl knew the thirty six year-old might have checked the access logs to see if his boss was micromanaging.

Carl never micromanaged. He was there to help prioritize when his team needed direction, to cover for them if upper management or another department wanted something from IT, and to fairly evaluate their performance at the end of the year. Anyone who needed a more hands-on manager after the onboarding period was not someone who would have a good time under him.

He looked back and forth, then leaned his head into the most senior IT team member's cube. "I'm gonna give you some extra PTO," he said quietly. "Just give me a week or two heads up, and then take a week and relax at home or wherever."

Adi frowned, appearing confused. "Can you do that?"

Carl shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. "Just did." He patted the cubicle wall a couple times. "I'm heading off to some meeting with Roger for who knows how long. Seems like a pretty quiet afternoon otherwise, though."

Adi looked a bit stunned.

Carl headed back towards the entrance to the wing of the second floor that IT occupied, leaving the father who had just acquired another week of vacation to his business.

"Sorry, department business," Carl said when he met up with Roger. "You were saying?"

Roger tapped his tablet while they walked to the elevator. "How did you even manage this?" he asked. "Weren't you on live last month?"

Carl shrugged for the second time in the past minute. "I checked out the maps on the network shares." He stopped and pressed the up button on the elevator. "I wanted a big lake with nothing around to fish in. Biggest one I found was, uh…"

"Lake Charus," Roger supplied.

"Sure, that might've been the name. Anyway—"

"No, I'm telling you it is."

"Okay, well it was the biggest one I could find, so I grepped through everything, trying to figure out where it was, and then I added a dev bit to my account and made a new character in the closest starting town."

"In the beta…" Roger trailed off. He stepped into the elevator, followed by Carl, and pressed the button for the fourth floor. "Well, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. That was intended to be one of our early endgame fishing spots for the new expansion."

"Might wanna work on that AI then," Carl said. "Way too easy."

Roger turned to him with an incredulous expression on his face. "Why wouldn't it be easy with the fishing rod you've got equipped?"

Carl frowned.

The door opened, and they stepped out.

"That's supposed to be the weapon of a water god in the game," Roger said, barking a laugh. "It attracts fish."

"It what?"

Roger began to laugh loudly. "You didn't realize?"

Carl thought about it. Fish had been a lot easier to catch since he'd equipped it. They'd practically been throwing themselves at him, in fact.

"Oh, I can't wait to tell people," Roger said, his laughter subsiding. "That's too funny."

"It's a cool item," Carl said, feeling the need to defend his fishing r—spear. "It's got that whole magical fishing line thing—"

"Ugh, don't remind me," Roger said. "Getting that rigged up exactly how Greg and Linda wanted was a nightmare."

Carl held the door open for his colleague, and they strolled into what was apparently a moderately full conference room.

"Roger, Carl, glad you could make it," said Terry from the front of the room. The massive screen covering the wall behind her was displaying a photo of a forty-something woman with short, brown hair and a hooked nose who was wearing a suit and smiling the same sort of stock photo smile that was so prevalent in corporate head shots.

Carl waved and took a seat next to Roger in the back of the room.

"You got here just in time," Terry said, fixing her stare on the pair of tech department directors like a schoolteacher displeased by her students' tardy arrival to class.

Terry was a stickler for punctuality, but Carl had figured that being a few minutes late for yet another boring meeting just this once wouldn't be a big deal, especially when Roger had dropped by and invited him to verify that the logout functionality had been restored to his account, thus reopening the possibility of future fishing excursions during lunchtime.

Plus, Roger hadn't seemed too concerned about it, and he'd been with the company for over ten years, so he should definitely know—

"This is Gabriella Blake," Terry said with the air of someone repeating themselves. "Starting tomorrow, she'll be taking over our long-vacant post of VP of IT."

Carl blinked. VP of IT? As in, Vice President of Information Technology? But that would mean she'd be—

"As we've been gradually ramping up our IT department to a more reliable headcount, thanks to Carl's dedication and efforts picking out the especially skilled candidates," Terry continued, "we also need to have someone working to drive our IT strategies at the top level in our roadmap meetings and proactively interface with external companies."

Carl frowned. He'd already been doing those things. Mostly. He definitely did the external interfacing—when necessary—and he attended all the roadmap meetings…

He was definitely at those meetings, even if he was the only Director-level in attendance; even Engineering was represented by VP Smythe, despite the man seeming to have only a tenuous grasp on what he was talking about and repeatedly referring to documents on his tablet throughout most meetings when he needed to speak.

"Carl," Terry said, giving him a look that he supposed was meant to be reassuring, "Gabriella will take over for you in most of the higher level meetings you've been attending as well as some of the other hats you've been wearing. This should lighten your workload and allow you to stop spreading yourself so thin across both roles."

Huh. Carl hadn't even considered the now-obvious fact that he probably shouldn't have been wearing even half as many hats as he'd been juggling for the past year and change.

Terry flipped to the next slide, which was, it seemed, Gabriella's most recent work history. "We also expect her to remain involved in all major decision-making for the department, obviously, and help ensure that we're doing everything we can be to keep our systems running as efficiently as they can."

Carl saw where this was heading. He'd long been incredulous at the total freedom he'd been allowed in his role—a significant factor he'd weighed when deciding to leave his last company, where his boss had been a near-Luddite who had somehow managed to fail upwards far enough to become the VP of a tech department and refused to listen to the advice of anyone else. This, now, was a readjusting of the corporate structure to fix the lopsidedness that had likely only existed because of the anomaly that was Gary. It was something he'd been expecting for quite some time, in fact.

Seeing that Carl was apparently not about to protest the news that he would have someone to report to—which obviously he wouldn't since he was a professional, and even the idea of something so childish was embarrassing to consider—Terry flipped to the next slide, which showed a breakdown of the responsibilities that she'd previously alluded to. "Once everyone is settled, we expect things to look more like this."

Carl nodded along as he read over the breakdown slide. He wouldn't be expected to attend nearly as many meetings, which he was already looking forward to. Similarly, he wouldn't need to hunt down vendors for office hardware, something that had cost him considerable time. It had taken him a whole freaking week to find a company able to provide the exact make and model of network switches that he'd wanted. Having someone around who expected to spend that sort of time on…

He frowned when he reached the final item on the VP side of the responsibilities.

According to this new plan, he wouldn't be coming up with IT policies for the company anymore: he would only be responsible for implementing them.

In a certain sense, he supposed, that might be helpful? Certainly if he had to spend less time…

He rubbed his beard. He was sure this new VP would be a reasonable person who would be willing to hear feedback and discuss matters before deciding on policies that would affect the entire company, wouldn't she? He wasn't concerned that the new VP was a woman—obviously that wasn't an issue for Carl Weathers, a father of two daughters who could be anything they wanted to be when they got older.

He'd just had bad experiences with upper management in IT departments, that was all.

But that was all in the past. His new job was great, and he was sure they wouldn't hire someone like Vice President Jacob Fischer from his last job, who'd believed that the "superadmin" account Carl had created especially for him was, in fact, the account with the highest privileges in the system.

He'd believed it right up until the day that Carl had left, the Director of IT for Fire Entertainment mused. Yeah, there was no way this company would hire someone that incompetent.

He was sure they wouldn't. They'd hired him, after all.

"That wasn't what I was expecting," Roger commented as they headed back towards the elevator.

Carl grunted his agreement. His new boss was expected to start the following day, which meant he had only one more day of absolute freedom.

His mind was already spinning furiously trying to figure out the most critical issues he needed to resolve before they might need to be Discussed.

A random, unrelated thought popped into his head. "Why are there so many people in the beta zone, anyway?" he asked absently while he continued to think on much more important matters. He pressed the down arrow next to the elevator.

"You really don't pay attention to anything related to our product, do you?" Roger asked, shaking his head as he continued to tap away on his tablet, some sort of debugging interface visible as it had been through most of the brief meeting they'd just attended. "We sell early access to parts of the expansions for a couple hundred bucks starting a few months before the release when we shift into bug fixing mode. It gives access to most of the new content—minus the big parts like the highest level dungeons and such—and makes us a ton of cash."

"Huh." Carl frowned. That was pretty ingenious. "And, uh, I guess a lot of them go to that Charus City place?"

"Yup," Roger said, his tablet flickering as he stepped through an animation in slow motion. "Got a lot of complaints over the years that there weren't enough places for immersive, ah, romantic experiences in the game, so we put in a full zone for it." He looked up at the taller department head. "I'm a little surprised you went there. Didn't seem like—"

"I didn't know it was that kinda place," Carl said, rolling his eyes. "People really just role-play all the time there?"

"Well, we have a light touch policy on all the player interactions—real hands-off—but the players seem to have fit into various roles there from what I've heard." Roger tapped away incredibly fast at a series of dialogues. "My husband and I prefer the more action-adventure parts of the game when we play with our friends, so I can't say from experience."

"Huh," Carl said once more.

Seconds passed in silence.

These elevators took forever to come back from the top floors.

He should have taken the stairs.

Time was wasting that he could be putting to use on something useful, he was sure.

A new thought struck him. Roger was probably the one who'd overseen the implementations of a lot of the mechanics he'd seen in action the times he'd played, not to mention the things he'd ended up briefly researching. Despite all the bugs he'd found along the way, he felt his respect for the man grow. It had been pretty immersive at times, and the depth of the immersion had been pretty substantial, though he was still pretty sure at least some part of it had to be a dream given the duration and weirdness of his trip. Even verifying the basic sensory inputs that the game must have in order for people to behave like they had would have been a tedious and…

Carl frowned. How would he have done that, anyway?

"My son—he's twenty six already—he's really looking forward to this version of Charus," Roger said, still looking down at whatever he was debugging. "Wants to take his girlfriend there."

Maybe it wasn't a specialized system for input data serialization like Carl had originally thought. Maybe the brain link headband just tapped into the brain's idea of what things should feel like in some complicated…

They did have a few neuroscience people on payroll, he supposed. It wasn't something that seemed impossible to do if people were smart and clever enough to—

The elevator chimed and opened. Carl looked to his side to bid his goodbyes to the shorter director, but Roger was already gone. He frowned, then struggled to recall the last minute or so while he'd been wrapped up in his thoughts. He vaguely recalled Roger saying he had to get back to his team for something or other and leaving to take the stairs.

Carl had waved his farewell in Auto-Carl mode while he continued to ruminate.

Hm.

Carl stepped into the elevator and reached down to press the button for his department's floor. Given what he'd recently learned of his predecessor, the remaining cron jobs which were somehow integral to the continued functionality of the company's email server seemed more ominous than confusing. Similarly, the system-wide slowdown at exactly one thirty seven every Thursday afternoon felt threatening. And he hadn't done a completely thorough audit of the systems for this type of threat, he'd only done general examinations in the process of segmenting and reactivating all the department networks during his first week.

As the elevator descended, Carl realized he needed to make some very important decisions regarding the allocation of his remaining time in his current dual role.

He just needed to refill his coffee mug first.