Carl stared at the clock on the AR display of his glasses.

There were three more minutes until potentially something devastating would happen to the company systems, and he was powerless to stop it. He'd gone over every possibility that he could think of, but at best, as of a little under an hour ago he'd circled back to the idea that they just had to shut everything down until they could contract someone to analyze and fix everything, which, given the enormity and severity of the situation, wasn't something he felt comfortable doing.

There was no other option, and it had been a waste of time to imagine that there was any other possibility.

He'd made the call to Gab, dreading how it would go but also being somewhat glad that he didn't have to be the one to pitch the prognosis to the C-levels. True to her word, she'd accepted his analysis without judgment, relating that she'd already spoken to Paul Harding and Charles Massey—because obviously she'd talk to the CTO and CEO in a situation like this—to prep them, and then the call had ended with him sitting at the kitchen table staring off into space.

He'd thought he was doing a good job.

He'd thought he was doing the best he could.

Was he really though? Looking back, if he added up all the time that he'd spent playing New Era at lunch—though he'd ignore the three-ish times that he'd logged into the beta server over the past week, since somehow the time scaling there made all his sessions take exactly three minutes, a matter which he imagined a talk with Roger in the near future would straighten out his understanding of in no time—he'd have had a few more hours that could've been spent probing this very issue, or at least uncovering it.

Then again, considering it from a perspective that made him feel less guilty, which he felt like he needed to do with how today was going, discovering this sooner would've just meant that he'd have been in this exact situation sooner; at best, he might have discovered it at exactly one minute after the time that it began, which would've given them a week to figure it out, but with something like this, he imagined a week might not even be enough time since it seemed pretty sophisticated.

The thing was almost magical in its impenetrability, he might have been inclined to say were he less concerned about the potential impact of his definitely-not-playing-a-game on his current situation, but he was very concerned, and so he certainly wouldn't be saying—or even thinking—anything like that.

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The last call had come back to him just a few minutes earlier, setting him off into full panic mode.

Despite having been informed of the full extent of the problem by Gab, Charles Massey had opted not to heed his recommendation. He'd refused to shut everything down, citing the company's promise of zero downtime, which it had upheld since the game's launch. The man who had once rolled the figurative dice, claiming that "this world is too small, with small people and small ideas, so I'll make a bigger one" at the outset of the game's development when he'd invested every penny he had back into the company to hire more people, was choosing to roll them again in pursuit of his ideals.

It was risky.

It was so risky that it was giving Carl a Massey headache.

Massey was on board with contracting people to perform analysis and then resolve the whole thing, but he seemed set on only permitting the work to be done while the systems were live, which was a staggering display of hubris and also possibly not really understanding how infrastructure worked on a technical level.

At the same time though, Carl admired the man's dedication to his principles. Leading up to the launch of New Era, Massey had done a series of interviews, during each of which he'd said very clearly, "Earth never goes down for maintenance. Neither will Eden." It was apparently something he felt so strongly about that he'd risk the entire company on it now, and, even if it was incredibly risky and almost certainly foolish, it was hard to be upset with someone who stuck with his vision, even if his vision was in direct opposition to the sort of risk-avoiding attitude that Carl lived his own life by.

But now the time had come, and Carl kept one eye on his network traffic monitor and one eye on his inbox, resting his forehead on his hands and his elbows on the table.

What would happen if the crazy Gary thing erased all the drives it was connected to? They had backups, obviously, but it was impossible for Carl to guarantee or even know at this point whether any were unaffected. At best, it was only the on-campus systems, though that would still be devastating. At worst, it was the machines in the data centers too, and the entire company would implode.

A worse overall option, and one that Carl tried to avoid thinking about, was that the goal wasn't to erase the data but to upload and make it public. While the game's code and database would have potential privacy ramifications if released due to account information being exposed, if the brain link storage was leaked, it was impossible to know how screwed everyone would be. That was depressing though, so he stopped thinking about it and went back to a slightly less depressing topic.

He still didn't even know the exact mechanism that was being affected. Clearly it was something involving the running operating system, but to what extent? He had a number of ideas, but it was actually worse speculating about all of it since that led him again down the path of self-recrimination.

The time ticked by, and he continued to wait.

It was going to be a long afternoon.