Carl perceived the pretty colors as they whizzed around in his brain.

Ugh, I can't believe I've gotta work this freaking late again. The productization schedule for this update is insane! He grimaced as he considered the long hours he'd been working. This should be the last of it, at least—no thanks to those Marketing chuckleheads waiting until the last possible second to do the internal domain migrations for their accounts. I'll just fish for a few minutes to relax while the consumer account DBs finish their backup sync. Maybe if it finishes quick enough I can still make it to the second half of Sammy's game…

A brief memory surfaced at the thought of his eldest daughter's upcoming basketball game.

"You're coming to watch tonight, Dad?" his sixteen year-old daughter asked in the same wheedling tone she used whenever she wanted something she thought she needed. "I know you've gotta work super late, but it's my first game starting, and Coach said he thinks I could be the team's new starting center if I can keep getting rebounds like I did last week, so maybe even just the second half or—"

Carl reached out to ruffle her short, blonde hair fondly, marveling as always that the cute, giggling, long-haired little munchkin who used to sit on his lap while he worked from home now nearly matched the height of his towering six-foot-five stature. "'Course I will, Sammy. Wouldn't miss it for the world." He grinned. "You can give me an autograph after you win so I can sell it and retire early when you're a big-time pro."

"Yay!" his blonde-haired daughter squealed, throwing her arms around—

The colors in his consciousness faded abruptly, and he blinked a few times as an unbroken whiteness filled his vision, finally leaving his eyes in a squinting position. Roger's gonna get another talking to about this as soon as I log out. I told him it's too darn bright. He's gotta stop blindly following what those nitwits on the design team are telling him. Especially Greg. Lead Designer by job title, maybe, but his cube décor sure as heck doesn't give any confidence in his capabilities. I should sneak in and see if he's changed it; Annie would love another photo to laugh at after the last couple fails.

The forty nine year-old man's grimace turned into a scowl as another century passed in waiting. How long's this thing take to initialize, anyway? I thought this was one of the problems we were trying to fix. Some issue with the physics engine, wasn't it? He tapped his foot on nothing while he waited. I should start taking notes so I can file some tickets when I get out. Or maybe just try to remember things to give myself something to do. Two things so far: brightness and load time.

Carl sighed. This is a real eighty-twenty job if we're actually shipping it as a "fix". Reminds me of right after I started when Roger's people wrote all of the components for the microtransaction store, then he let his intern install it and ended up uninstalling half the server due to dependency conflicts.

There's a reason we shouldn't run as root or give out root privileges to interns.

Brightness and load time.

C'mon, Roger. I know you've taken at least one of the mandatory training courses I've made for systems use. I've seen the logs. And I fixed the exploit you used to skip it last year right after I joined, so unless you found another one, you should definitely know that you don't use root for that kind of stuff, so why do I keep seeing you in the access logs!

You don't use it for any kind of stuff, ideally. If it actually needs root, then you let one of us handle that since being careful is what we get paid for, otherwise you use one of the specialized accounts with the access privileges for whatever needs doing. Just like in the policy.

Brightness and load time.

I try and I try to get these people to stop treating the project internals and company systems like the Wild West and adhere to a more risk-averse data access policy, but it's like I'm the only one with a brain around here sometimes. And on top of that, I'm still finding all these legacy hacks from Gary…

No wonder they let him go. Guy's entire methodology was based on obfuscation and making everything impossible to use for anyone except himself. Can't run things like that anymore in the current year. Can't be antagonizing other departments, either.

A black orb pulsed into existence in front of Carl.

"Finally," said Carl as he began reaching towards the virtual login orb for his usual game character. At this rate, by the time I log in I'll have to log right back out again. The backup was supposed to take another twenty minutes, but it feels like—

"Welcome back, DabMasterEcksDee," came a soft, ethereal voice with no definitive source.

Carl paused, nearly touching the orb. He blinked. "Did someone change my character name?"

There was, predictably, no reply.

Carl rolled his eyes. "Keyboard," he called, holding his hand out.

His trusty sidekick materialized into his hand, the familiar weight and plastic-ness feeling reassuring in the void of the too-bright login area. Everyone said it was ridiculous to spend so much time getting the assets for a keyboard perfected into a fantasy game, but even Roger grudgingly admitted that it was worth the effort for in-game debugging. Of course it was! I'm not about to waste peoples' time on trivial nonsense!

Brightness and load time.

"Now, who was it that…" he trailed off as he set the keyboard in the space before him and entered a command to search through his account's access logs, piping it through a second command to format the output to be more readable. Not as root, though—even though I could—because I'm leading by example.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

A translucent black rectangle appeared above the keyboard and displayed the results of the command he'd entered. "Ah, Jonathan," Carl muttered, shaking his head as the corporate ID of the junior engineer who'd been an intern the year prior was revealed. "Jonny, Jon, Jonathan." This little prank war between IT and Engineering is really getting out of hand. I thought we were making so much progress after I brought in donuts to try and patch things up last week. I don't want to have to bring it to HR like the handbook clearly states I should, but… He paused. I'll just make a note to lock his accounts for now in case I forget to have a friendly chat with him on Monday. And then change my character name back…

Three things now: brightness, load time, Jonathan. If this list gets much longer, I should probably just save it to a file in my home directory since I can't send myself an email reminder inside the game. Blocking non-game network access made it a little bit of a hassle, but security is more important than convenience.

Actually, maybe I'll just do that now to be safe…

He entered a series of commands, starting with the opening of a new shell prompt into which he input his own sixty four character password—the character limit of the domain policy, because he believed that security needed to start from the top—to acquire database administrator privileges, using the specialized dbadmin account that existed for the sole purpose of providing elevated privileges that permitted modification of all the game's databases as specified in the IT policy regarding data access, and execute a database update—which he triple-checked, because even though he did not make typos, he still understood that mistakes could happen to anyone—the effect of which was to change his character's Name field in the corresponding database table. He then logged out of the separate shell that he'd temporarily opened for the sole purpose of running a command using elevated privileges, because obviously he would.

He could have simply granted himself root permissions for the task. It was strictly against the policy that he'd set for such things, but that wouldn't have stopped him from doing it if he'd wanted. But I didn't, obviously, because I only needed DB write access for one command and nothing else. Can't believe how many people here still don't get that.

He returned to his other shell and typed up his to-do list, including a memo for a custom account lock message for the wayward engineer who'd thought to change his character name to a meme. Not even a good one, either. I bet he thought it was hilarious, though. Ah, we were all young once, I suppose.

"Welcome back, Carl," the ethereal voice called out.

Carl nodded his approval as he saved his three item list to /home/c.weathers/todo, because he always saved his quick notes to his home directory so he could find them more easily. "Much better," he muttered. May as well make sure they didn't mess with the important part while I'm in here… He tapped a few keys to again bring up a prompt for the relational database management system the game used, then selected his character's stats from the table. Still can't believe we're using this idiocy for character data storage. So much freaking overhead!

The results of his query appeared before him.

Name: Carl Pronouns: He/Him Title: IT Director Level: 69 Health: 420 Strength: 69 Agility: 69 Stamina: 69 Intelligence: 69 Wisdom:  69 Developer:  Enabled

Real mature, guys. Carl rolled his eyes again. Well, whatever. Dev mode is still on—all I wanted to know since it can't be changed in-game. Don't want to spend the few remaining seconds after all this loading running back if I die from logging in on top of a hydra or wherever they probably moved me. He made one more check and selected his equipment from a related table using his account and character names as the keys. Normal starter clothes: check. Fishing Spear of the Sea God: still here. I keep forgetting to ask around and see why the best fishing rod in the game is a spear. Not everyone wants to go around killing monsters. Must be some kind of lore thing. I guess I could ask Linda, but…

He grimaced again at the prospect of speaking with the extravagantly goth Lead Writer while he typed a final command into the console to check the time. Huh, still nineteen minutes left. His expression slackened, his lips even twitching into a bit of a smile. That felt more like an hour. Looks like I'll have time after all. Haven't been able to do this for a while; Bobby even asked why I wasn't sending her "cool fish" any more. Daddy has to do work sometimes, pumpkin. Even if he does work at a gaming company.

He flicked his keyboard away, and the console disappeared with it as the construct reached the maximum allowable distance from his character model. Alright, I'll just fish for fifteen minutes or so, be out of here by seven thirty and then to school by eight, which should get me there around halftime—maybe even a little before—with how long a basketball game lasts. Bobby wanted me to check out a new mod she wrote after, and Annie—ooh, she probably got a haircut tonight; need to make sure I mention it, so I'll put it on the list, actually—tonight's that night of the month, too, which is gonna be mind-melting like usual. Tomorrow's that thing with our friends Ted and Cheryl, probably taking Bobby to Jen's on the way…

Carl tapped the login orb as he continued to review his pending weekend itinerary. Yeah, this is going to be another great weekend. He grinned, and his surroundings began to fuzz.