"Hey, Carl, got a minute?"

Carl held a finger up, executing his low level Just A Minute skill as he finished writing yet another quick throughput analyzer script for network packets, because somehow this was now the most important item on the schedule of Fire Entertainment's Director of IT, who had a bajillion other things that were actually way more important, and, while he was obviously gonna stay on the same page as his new Vice President and not run off like some kinda loose cannon on the day that she started—which would make both of them look bad in the end—he really wasn't—

"If you're busy—"

"No, just gimme…" Carl trailed off, definitely typing in just the last few keystrokes to complete the script he was working on for the test networks that he'd hastily set up using some machines he'd hastily pulled out of…

Carl paused, looking up his visitor.

Roger stood in the doorway, juggling his oversized coffee mug and a tablet while seeming slightly less frazzled than he had the day before. He looked up from his tablet. "Done? Come on, I have—"

"Uh, sorry, Roger, just gimme a sec. I just remembered…" Carl returned his focus to his computer, having just remembered that the machines he'd hastily requisitioned for his test networks had been from Engineering, because they had five hundred and twenty three freaking machines up there, and he'd figured probably nobody would notice if he borrowed a few of them—a few dozen, really, because he needed the tests to be accurate—for test networks comparing identical machines over flattened and non-flattened networks for an hour at lunchtime. "Hey, uh, how busy would you say you are up in—"

"We're launching the expansion in an hour, and everyone's losing their damn minds trying to get this zero-day patch finalized," Roger said in a half-mutter, alternately looking at his tablet and whatever was being displayed on his glasses.

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"So," Carl said slowly, "nobody's on lunch break right now?"

"No, it's patch day, Carl," Roger said, sounding a bit exasperated to Carl's expertly-tuned ears as he managed the impressive feat of using his coffee mug to tap the display on his tablet while taking a drink from it. He let out an annoyed sigh. "Hold on. Answer call three." He entered the room and sat down in the chair in front of Carl's desk, placing his mug on the desk and crossing his right leg over his left, setting the tablet on his lap. He then pulled out another tablet from a pocket in the light jacket he was wearing and began furiously tapping away on both tablets at nearly the same time.

Carl stared, momentarily distracted by the older man's prowess as he again managed to somehow continue to drink from his coffee mug without losing time on either device.

"No, we can't ship that today," Roger was saying when he came out of his daze. "No, too big. Needs—No, Guang, I know it's a serious issue, but—What?" He came to a stop, staring down at his devices.

Then he pulled a third device out of a pocket on the other side of his jacket.

"Alright, get…" Roger looked up as he unfolded the tablet laptop and began clipping the two tablets to the sides of its display to fix them into place. "Sorry, Carl, I'm going to have to push back our meeting."

"Uh…"

"Get Cinoo and Jack," Roger continued, now beginning to type on the motion keyboard that the laptop's sensor provided, his fingers moving with lightning speed over the small platform in front of the screens. "We're going to hash this out right now. And tell everyone else we're pushing back the meeting until this is over."

Carl wasn't sure how he felt about his office suddenly becoming their office, but, now that he considered it, this was almost like a LAN party at work, wasn't it. He returned to his task, quietly reinserting all the machines he'd borrowed from the Engineering network to their previous routing configurations. He didn't really need those machines in particular, now that he thought about it, and Engineering did seem pretty busy today. No, the machines he could probably use were the ones from Accounting, and HR, and Design, and…