"Carl, ready to go?" Gab asked as she knocked on his door. "Wraps I ordered should be here soon."

Carl sat back and stretched his neck, then stood up. "Yup, all set. Thanks for taking care of the order. I'll get the next one." He headed for the door, following after his much shorter new boss.

"Don't worry about it," she said holding up a hand over her shoulder as they walked towards the elevators. She pressed the down button and looked back to him. "With that said, have you made progress on that network analysis we discussed?"

He came to a stop a short distance away, far enough that he wouldn't be inadvertently looming. "I finished it."

"Oh?" Gab raised her eyebrows. "And?"

The elevator dinged and opened, miraculously empty considering the lunch hour crowd—or maybe not considering how empty the building was with most of Engineering out—and they filed in. Gab pressed the button for the lobby.

"Like you said," Carl began, "it does increase local throughput. It's not a big increase, but it's consistent in all my testing."

"And?" Gab prompted, leaning against the wall of the elevator as it descended.

"And it's got the potential drawbacks that I cited related to security," he continued, "but if that's how you want things to work, I'll make it happen. I still don't think it's a good idea given the risks I've laid out and the time we'll have to spend."

After logg—going to another world, Carl had spent the remainder of the twenty or so minutes before his meeting in deep contemplation over the issue. He'd weighed the pros and cons once more, checked over the analyses he'd done, and then further considered the various insights he'd gotten from people while he was in-game. Ultimately, he'd decided that if he was going to trust anyone, he'd trust his friend, because she'd given the most reasonable advice, and she hadn't been wrong about anything yet—though obviously that wasn't necessarily going to apply to real world stuff and was just incidental to his decision.

The elevator dinged again, and Gab walked out first. They filed through the security gate, and Carl waved to John, who had probably just started his shift. There was no sign of anyone delivering food yet, so they took seats in the lobby while they waited.

"But you will do it?" Gab asked, giving him a piercing stare.

Carl nodded. Worse comes to worst, it's not an awful decision. Has technical merits with sound reasoning backing it up, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

Gab smiled. "Thanks, Carl. You passed."

Carl blinked. "Huh?"

His boss straightened the jacket of her suit. "Carl, do you know what it's like to be a woman in tech? And an executive at that? Even in the current year, it's tough to avoid sexism. I don't have time for it, and I don't have the patience to find out later that the people I need to depend on aren't going to be part of the team. I'm here to do the best I can, and I expect everyone I work with to do the same."

Carl frowned, then he grimaced. "This was a test?"

"Yep," Gab said, continuing to smile. "They told me you were a real straight shooter, but I've had some bad experiences with my managers undermining me in the past, so now I make sure I know what page everyone's on from the start."

"Not really sure that's the best way to build trust," Carl said.

"Ah, that must be ours," Gab said, rising and quick-stepping over to the front desk, where a drone carrying a box with the logo of a nearby sandwich shop was depositing its pre-paid cargo in front of John.

Carl stood up and took a few steps forward. Yeah, not sure this is gonna work out. Might have to start dusting off my resume.

"I booked us a conference room down here," Gab said, carrying the box as she headed towards the side of the floor that housed the rooms. "Neutral ground. No power plays."

Still grumbling to himself internally, Carl followed her through the small break room on the way to their destination.

"Here we are," Gab said, pushing open the door to the largest conference room on the floor. She set the box on the long table and unfolded the paperboard flaps, retrieving a paper-rolled sandwich wrap and a bottle of water before walking around to take a seat on the other side.

Not the best first impression I've had from a boss, that's for sure. He grabbed his own sandwich wrap—buffalo chicken and avocado—and bottle of water and sat opposite from the shorter woman.

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"Mmm, not bad," Gab said after she finished a bite of her lunch. "How's yours?"

"Can't complain," Carl said, talking only about the sandwich and not the situation he was in or anything related to Gab herself, which he was thinking he could likely find varying numbers of faults with depending on which management methodology he was using to evaluate—

"Where were we," Gab said. She rocked back in her chair and set her sneaker-wearing feet up on the table. "Right. Here's the thing, Carl," she said, looking over at him. "I'm not much of a hands-on type of boss. I need to be able to trust that you'll have my back, because if you're in my department, I'll always have yours—barring a truly monumental screw-up, obviously, but you don't seem like the type to make those."

She took another bite of her wrap, which looked like it could possibly be some sort of tuna fish type thing, though he wasn't sure since lab-grown meats all kinda looked the same. "I'm sure you've had bad experiences with idiot bosses before," she said after she'd swallowed. "We all have. Too easy to fail upwards, especially in this industry. Lot of men I've worked with get that impression about me because I'm a woman, and it can be hard to shake, even after a longer period of time. But I hope that at this point, you at least trust that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to technical stuff."

Carl frowned as he chewed. Can't say I really thought about it from the sexism angle. Not something I'd have experience with, though I've always made sure my departments are free of that kinda stuff. We did have some pretty deep technical discussions about network architecture and benchmarking strategies over the past couple days. And she actually found and read through all my documentation…

"On the flip side, we've both had bad experiences with subordinates too, I'd imagine," Gab continued. "Having someone on the team who isn't pulling their weight, someone who's claiming their work is done but really just slapped some tape on the problem and pushed it off for someone else to deal with in the future…" She took another bite of her wrap.

Carl nodded. Yup, been there.

"I'm not big on time wasting, Carl," Gab said. "That includes wasting time getting work done, wasting time doing work that doesn't matter, and wasting time tip-toeing around when I see problems."

Carl was nodding along despite his misgivings. Wasting time was very much something he was against.

"Also means I don't like wasting time getting to know people I'm working with," Gab said after finishing another bite, which was somehow the last of her wrap even though Carl was only halfway done with his—though in fairness, he'd gotten a larger wrap with extra meat when she'd asked what he wanted, but it was still impressive considering she'd been talking and eating while he'd just been eating. "So now we're here, and we're going to get to know each other, and by the time we go back to our jobs, we'll be getting along like a house on fire. I guarantee it."

Carl took a moment to wipe a nonexistent piece of food out of his beard, but in reality he was masking his execution of his low-level Beard Stroke technique, which gave him a short-term stealth buff that would increase his thinking capacity by a small amount, enabling him to exceed his limits in this important meeting. "I'm still not sure I understand this test," he said, opening the discussion diplomatically.

Gab ran a hand through the hair on the side of her head over her ear, and Carl's eyes narrowed slightly.

If he wasn't mistaken, she'd just performed a Hair Tuck, which was an equivalent skill from a different job tree.

"Just a little exercise to let us learn a little about each other," she said with a shrug. "I read through your architecture docs, learned that you were highly skilled, and found something that could be a plausible change, and then I got to see how you handled being given a directive you didn't agree with. You got to see that I was knowledgeable in the field and able to hold a discussion instead of falling back on the classic Because I Said So defense that everyone hates."

"I…guess that's true," Carl said. He took another bite of his wrap while he thought more.

"So it wasn't work that doesn't matter in that sense." She took a drink from her water bottle. "But I don't particularly care about the issue. Keep it segmented or don't, I'm not interested in micromanaging."

Carl blinked. "Uh, what?"

Gab took her feet off the table and leaned forward with a small smirk. "C'mon, we both know it'd be a huge waste of time to reorg the existing config like that, not to mention the disruptions everyone would be complaining about. I never said your setup wasn't competently done."

Carl paused pre-bite. It was certainly true that she'd never said that, and she was right about the time it would require to do the change…

"Let's level," Gab said. "We both know it didn't take you much time to blast some packets around a test network that you probably set up in like, five or ten minutes. You let it run for a while to build data while you did something else, then you threw together a script—or used one you already had—to do some calcs and print out some numbers, and maybe you did that a few times to be thorough. All told…" She bobbed her head from side to side. "I'd guess you probably spent a couple hours at the absolute max, but if you're as good as the C-levels say you are, probably half that or less. How am I doing?"

Carl frowned. That's almost scarily accurate. Other than the time spent discussing things, which was a bit longer, but I guess that was kinda worthwhile for the reasons she said. Spent a lot more time procrastinating than I did actually working on it if I'm honest with myself.

"I'm here to do the high-level work with Paul and the other C-levels so you can focus on keeping everything running smoothly in the meanwhile," his boss continued. She took another swig of water. "We're both going to have our preferred methods of doing things that maybe one of us won't like, and that's fine. I believe in letting the best ideas win, even if they aren't the ones I come up with."

With the last of his sandwich wrap firmly in his stomach, Carl crumpled the wrapper of his wrap and tossed it back into the box. He took a drink of his own water while he thought. Seems like she knows her stuff. Not sure I buy this whole test thing though. Then again, I guess if I'd taken Rex's suggestion and lied, she'd have known right away and had her answer too, so from her perspective it kinda makes sense if I think about it that way.