carl@fire

Carl sighed. He'd stayed a little later at the office than he'd wanted given his wife's pleading for him to Get Back Here And Help Me Out She's Driving Me Crazy, but he hadn't been able to accomplish everything he'd set out to do in that time, despite what he'd told John on his way out of the building.

First, the email servers. He'd managed to unravel the convoluted, obfuscated maze of cron jobs which executed shell scripts which then executed other shell scripts which ran stripped binaries which, he'd discovered, used a REST API to communicate with some gateway server tucked away in one of the basements in order to determine whether and when to deliver and receive mails based on the value of a "good boy points" attribute that each employee was tagged with; Carl was somehow the leader in said points, and Terry, it seemed, was quite deep into the negatives. He was vaguely certain that his removal of the entire thing—including the gateway server—and somewhat hastily-deployed open source mail server—running off his own desktop for the moment, to be safely migrated first thing in the morning—would resolve the issues that the head of HR and others had been complaining of for a long time but that he'd never quite had the time to sift through.

It was a total victory.

Except that the excision of the mechanism had triggered something which deleted the mails of everyone at the company.

Carl hadn't expected that.

He had, however, been prepared for data loss. He'd deployed the most recent backup snapshot of the company's mail database, which had been last synchronized at noon, and sent out a company-wide mail providing an incident report.

There had been a couple annoyed reply-all mails, but nothing too bad.

The entire sequence of events had given Carl pause. He'd never expected anything so malicious to trigger when he'd set to work resolving one of the longest-lived items on his to-do list.

He was much more careful when he began poking around at various systems to see if he could discern the cause of the Thursday slowdown.

Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to uncover any leads.

There were no rogue cron jobs, no scheduled tasks from the other side of the network, and no hints that he could find in any of the logs from the previous week.

It was a mystery, and it was Carl's experience that mysteries in his field usually indicated risk.

Carl didn't like risks.

Carl's full name was, in fact, Carl Low-Risk Weathers. He planned to legally change it any day now, as soon as he could come up with a way to justify it to Annie. She thought "Theodore" was a perfectly fine middle name—cute, even—and he hadn't yet found the proper method of convincing her that sure, it was a fine name, but it wasn't a functional one. That was an important distinction to Carl, who had inadvertently scuppered her one-time idea to get a dog by declaring that he would name it Barker and teach it to eat at the table while sitting in a chair like any other member of the family.

No dog of Carl's was going to be average, obviously.

But they hadn't gotten a dog, and so he'd put away thoughts of teaching his future canine companion to sweep the floors and various other trivial tasks that he'd imagined a dog of his could surely be trained to do with some effort and proper motivation.

Carl's luxury car came to a stop in the garage, announcing its arrival to him. He took a deep breath, deciding that he would perhaps try to get to the office a little early the next morning in a final attempt to make some headway, then let it out and focused again.

It was time to deal with an entirely different type of annoyance.

He got out of his car and walked through the garage, past his wife's car—naturally he would insist that she park closest to the door into the house—and over to the door that led into the house. He put his hand on the knob and took another breath before pulling it open.

"—any time, and we can go car shopping after!" Rebecca's voice carried over to him.

"Really?!" Sammy sounded excited.

Too excited.

"I'm home," he declared, removing his loafers and setting them on the appropriate tray next to the door.

"Hey, Dad," Sammy called from somewhere out of his line of sight.

"Carl, you're back," Annie said, walking towards him with a certain amount of haste, her straightened blonde hair pulled into a loose ponytail that hung forward over her left shoulder.

"Been a while, Carl," Rebecca said, moving to lean against the wall of the small hallway in a manner that was probably not ideal for the low-cut top she was wearing.

That was the other thing about Rebecca. Annie's thirty three year-old, perpetually-single-ish half-sister was a self-proclaimed hedonist, and she dressed and acted to fit the part, regardless of her surroundings.

Carl returned the hug his wife gave him, then leaned down and planted a deep kiss on her which left her blinking her pretty blue eyes repeatedly while she tried to recover. "Sorry I'm a little late," he said, giving her his full attention.

"How, uh, how was work?" Annie asked, seeming discombobulated by his unusual display of affection in front of her sister.

"Wow, look at you two lovebirds," Rebecca remarked.

"Work was…fine," Carl allowed, giving his wife a gentle squeeze on her side. "Traffic was crazy again since the smoke was worse than usual."

"I've been saying you should move for years now," Rebecca said. "Get a bigger house while you're at it. How do you even live all cooped up like this?"

All cooped up like this, as Rebecca put it, was living in a four thousand-something square foot house. It wasn't the largest one around, but why would a four person family need a larger house than this?

"Good to see you too, Rebecca," Carl said, using her full name because—

"It's Becca," Rebecca said in the same annoyed, childish tone she'd been using to correct him for twenty years.

"Whoops, it's been a couple years, and you know how I am with that kinda stuff," Carl said.

In fact, Rebecca didn't know how Carl was with that kind of stuff, or she would've long since realized that he was intentionally trying to annoy her; bantering with Annie's younger sibling was generally an improvement over making any attempt to engage in normal conversation.

Also, Rebecca had never liked him, so there was that. When she'd been much younger, there had been a number of attempts to drive a wedge between her sister and Carl, and he'd never quite been able to look past it.

"Dad, Aunt Becca was just saying she'd take me to get my learner's permit this week and then buy me a car!" Sammy seemed barely able to contain her excitement.

"Did she now?" Carl said, now getting pulled into the kitchen proper by Annie, who was maintaining a death grip on his right hand.

"She did," Annie confirmed.

"A sixteen year-old needs to be able to get around," Rebecca said as though that was a normal thing to offer a child without consulting the parents. "And if your parents can't aff—"

"Not everything's about money, Becca," Annie said, visibly growing even more annoyed.

While this was certainly true, it was a time-tested attack vector which Carl recognized as having a high probability of failure. "What kinda car were you thinking of?" he asked, turning to give the interloper who thought she could buy his daughter her first car his full attention.

Rebecca looked like Annie in many ways. She had blonde hair, she had blue eyes, she was roughly the same height—slightly shorter if he was being objective. Unlike Annie, however, her hair fell in a fashionable, naturally-wavy style around her shoulders, her eyes flicked between his chest and arms rather than looking at his eyes, and, again being objective, her figure was slightly fuller, and her low-cut top and skirt which ended just below mid-thigh aimed to flaunt that distinction.

Carl had no issue with someone who wore these clothes. He could appreciate the appeal of such things, and that wasn't the point of what he was getting at. What he was getting at was the fact that these clothes were being worn in his house by the woman who had always tried to present herself as the cool aunt to his little girls. If his daughters wanted to dress like that… Well, he'd think about that if it happened, but he didn't want someone encouraging them to do it. The next thing he knew, they might be asking him to meet a boy—or a girl, of course, because Carl was totally okay with that, as he was similarly okay with whatever else was going with gender in the new age of modern bioengineering and various developments related to all of that which he struggled to keep track of and definitely did not have any problems with.

The point was, Carl thought as he reoriented his thoughts, he thought Rebecca's choice of apparel was a little much for lounging around the house.

Her nipples were almost visible! Not that he had a problem with nipples, obviously, because he had a pair of them himself, but—

"Dunno," Rebecca said with a shrug. "Figured we could just drive around and see what caught her eye."

"I have a list of cars I've been considering," Carl said. "I began compiling it two years ago, and—"

"You what?" Annie said.

"—I started with a field of twenty three," Carl continued, holding up one hand to begin ticking off items on, "which I ranked based on safety, part failure rates, expected longevity—"

Sammy's expression went from excited to covering her face with one hand, mimicking her mother.

"—and, of course, cost," Carl finished.

"But not how it looks?" Rebecca said, sounding skeptical.

Carl's expression grew even more skeptical than his sister-in-law's. "Do you sit on the outside of a car when you're going somewhere?"

Rebecca didn't have a reply to that, instead giving him a blank stare.

Obviously this was a stupid question for Carl to ask. He knew that. He fully understood the value of a car's appearance. He also understood that it was insane to have begun considering cars for his daughter years in advance, something that he had not actually done since it would be a waste of time. But when Rebecca was around, Carl always played up being a little too Carl because it tended to confuse her. For the sake of Annie's continued familial harmony he couldn't directly challenge or confront his obnoxious, bratty sister-in-law, but he could act in such a way that defused and deescalated conflicts in a different manner.

He referred to this mid-level stealth technique as Carl Mode.

Sammy giggled. "Dad, how would that even work?"

"Well," Carl said, pushing up his glasses in the manner that he only used when he was about to explain something completely ludicrous to one or both of his daughters with a straight face, "the way that it works is there's this long seatbelt that goes all the way around and under the car…"

Sammy's laughter grew louder as the explanation continued, and Carl finished off the bit by asking whether Rebecca knew where to buy such seatbelts.