Jason adjusted his chair, the motion ingrained within him after months of practice. His body knew the routine better than his mind at this point—back pressed against the mesh, arms settling onto the desk, fingers poised over the keyboard. The dual monitors bathed his face in cold light,while his brown eyes reflected the screen. His shoulders ached, begging for a break, but the work demanded his attention.

Lines of code scrolled past, dense with logic, each function a puzzle demanding to be solved. His faint reflection ghosted across the screen, merging with the glow. His dark hair, slightly unkempt, hung over his forehead just above his eyebrows, longer than he usually let it grow. No matter how often he ran his fingers through it, it always fell back into place, stubborn in its own way.

Across from him, Arnon reclined in his chair, tossing a stress ball in the air with a slow, absentminded rhythm. The faint thud it made against his palm had become part of the office's background noise—alongside the distant hum of servers, the muted clicks of mechanical keyboards, and the occasional murmur of coworkers deep in their own battles with uncooperative systems.

Jason exhaled. "You know, if you stare at that code any harder, you might bend reality."

Arnon, still not looking up, extended a slow, exaggerated middle finger.

Jason smirked and returned to his screen. The lines of code blurred for a second, his tired eyes struggling to refocus. A shadow loomed behind him.

Sophia wandered over, arms crossed, one brow arched. She was effortlessly put together, her presence exuding the kind of quiet authority that made even the worst IT fires seem manageable.

"Still stuck?" she asked, nodding at his screen.

"Still stuck," Jason confirmed. "Deadline was yesterday, and this thing is fighting me every step of the way."

Sophia leaned against the desk, scanning the code. "Jason, repeat after me—the IT mantra: It's always DNS."

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Jason chuckled. "I've got Arnon for that. If I crack, he'll finish the job."

"Not if I crack first," Arnon muttered, returning with two cups of coffee. He slid one toward Jason, fingers briefly tapping the rim before letting go.

Sophia smirked. "With you two in charge, we'll either fix the system or burn it to the ground."

Jason raised his mug in a mock toast. "Here's to burning it down."

The day stretched long, the hours blending together in a haze of debugging and caffeine.

Jason tackled the high-priority tasks first—patching a security vulnerability, deploying a hotfix, clearing his inbox. The small victories kept him from sinking too deep before rejoining the team on the real problem.

The virus.

It didn't act like the usual threats. No ransomware pop-ups, no stolen credentials flooding the dark web. Instead, it did something stranger.

It changed things.

Step by step, they worked through the containment process:

1. Isolate infected endpoints. Jason and Arnon pulled compromised machines off the network.

2. Collect logs. They sifted through access records, system events, and network traffic from the past 48 hours.

3. Sandbox testing. Running the virus in a controlled environment, watching its behavior unfold.

Most malware followed a pattern. This ones pattern was to keep them on their toes.

Jason frowned, scrolling through altered logs. Some timestamps didn't make sense—files edited before they were created, login attempts from accounts that didn't exist.

It was as if someone had rewritten reality in digital sense.

That was when he noticed Arnon had gone silent.

"Earth to Arnon," Jason said, waving a hand.

Arnon blinked, as if resurfacing from deep thought. "Huh?"

"You spaced out."

Arnon hesitated, something unreadable in his expression.

"You've been following breaches, right?" Arnon asked.

"All morning," Jason said slowly.

Arnon exhaled, rubbing his jaw. "Yeah. But this... it's different. Too deliberate to be random attacks."

Jason tilted his head. "You think it's targeted? Like corporate sabotage?"

Arnon's jaw tightened. "Maybe. Or something else."

Jason studied him. Arnon was always the one who noticed patterns others ignored. Usually, it was harmless—quirks in code, minor security flaws. But this felt different.

"You were looking into this before it hit us, weren't you?"

Arnon shrugged, his expression too neutral. "Just following breadcrumbs. You know how it is."

Jason wasn't convinced. "Arnon…"

"Relax," Arnon said, forcing a grin. "I'm not hacking into government servers or anything. Just poking around."

Jason sighed. "You poke too much, and one day you'll find something you can't handle."

Arnon chuckled, but the humor didn't quite reach his eyes. "If that day comes, I'll let you bail me out."

Jason shook his head.

Then, when no one was looking, he powered off his computer. As the screen faded, something caught his eye—his cursor flickered backward for a fraction of a second. Like an undo command.

His breath hitched.

He stared at the monitor, until it went blank , reflecting the empty chair he was sitting on, and quickly stood up, stretching, and slipped out before his manager could corner him.