Carl stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

He'd been at the office for a little over an hour already. He'd checked the databases and found that the backup sync on Friday had completed without issue, he'd locked Jonathan's accounts with a personalized error message, and he'd even taken some time to consider what a policy for automating home directory cleanups might look like before discarding it when he realized how much hassle it would be for such a relatively small gain. Instead, he composed a brief document entitled "Home Directory Best Practices" which he deployed in a system-wide email that people could choose to view and consider in their own time.

Carl, the Director of Information Technology at Fire Entertainment, was in a pretty good mood that morning. Sure, he and Annie had spent the previous evening before falling asleep commiserating about the impending hassle that Rebecca was likely to bring—she was staying almost an entire week, ughhhhhhhh—but the entire rest of his weekend had been everything he'd hoped for.

And Friday night had been a whole lot more than that, he recalled fondly.

But now it was Monday morning at… Yes, it was Monday morning at exactly nine thirty seven, and that meant it was time.

Carl stepped out of the elevator and walked towards the break room in the fifth floor.

Did he sneak through the floor?

No, Carl didn't sneak. He laughed at the idea of him, a director-level, sneaking around at his own company.

Stolen novel; please report.

Did he rush?

Was that a joke?

Carl Weathers didn't rush, even when he'd recently had to walk across half a continent in a virtual city, avoiding endless piles of animal dung and paying attention to…

Carl frowned. This game stuff was creeping into his thoughts again, and he didn't like it. Besides, that had all just been a dream, he'd decided. It must have been since the time discrepancy made no sense otherwise. He'd fallen asleep right after putting the headset on or something, and his mind had pulled all the little details he'd unconsciously picked up about the game into a totally weird, bizarre dream.

He entered the break room—which was empty, of course—and moved to the coffee rack, where he scooped up a quarter of the day's "good" coffee packets into his coffee sack. He pulled the drawstring closed, then took the elevator back down to the second floor to deliver his bounty to the rest of his department.

Today was shaping up to be a great day.

He was already looking forward to his meeting with Roger for the first time since he'd joined.

If it were any other day, he'd likely have wondered whether the other director would even be in. Today, however, was the day before the upd—expansion would be released, and Engineering was likely to be working late on their day zero patch to fix last minute bugs which couldn't be deployed into the initial download package in time. That meant Roger was surely in the office, and he would also have gotten a certain email.

Two hours remained, and then he'd definitely get to the bottom of things.