Carl answered the call. "Oh, uh, hey, Greg—"

"What's going on with the network?" asked Greg McKinsey, Lead Designer of New Era. "Is this one of them AI botnet attacks?"

"No, I'm pretty sure we're safe from that," Carl said, knowing that they were, in fact, very safe from the newer, more harmful botnets that had sprung up over the past decade once machine learning had begun to be applied to malware in more clever ways.

Probably.

Okay, nobody was completely safe from those things given how sophisticated they were getting at uncovering security faults in networks, but he'd spent a lot of time regularly reviewing logs and auditing—

"Well, all my computers have been really slow since I got back from lunch," Greg said, sounding annoyed and also like he was still noisily eating part of his lunch while on the call. "It needs fixed. I've—"

"Dan, we can't do it that way!" Roger exclaimed from his chair, throwing one hand into the air and drinking from his somehow newly-refilled mug with the other. "We just—"

"Look, Greg, I know what the issue is," Carl said, forcing himself once more to not correct the man's very normal Pittsburgh dialect of English which somehow permitted the omission of random words as though it was a legitimate way of speaking in a business environment. "You should—"

"Yes, perfect," Roger said.

"—have everything—"

"Just disable it for now. Nobody—"

"—back to normal within the next—"

"—is going to get that far before—"

"—fourteen minutes or so."

"—tomorrow, and we can—"

"You're sure?" Greg asked, just like he—

"—reenable it when we get it—"

—always did whenever he submitted a support—

"—all fixed up, hopefully by—"

—ticket, which he did at least once every couple—

"—tomorrow, or Thursday at the absolute—"

—weeks when he somehow managed to lose—

"—latest. Good. I'll be back up soon. Guang, how—"

—the internet on one of his devices when he was—

"—is your team doing with—Oh, really? That's—"

—trying to browse from its drawing mode. He—

"Carl, hi, I was just down in HR and thought I'd—"

"—great! I really didn't think we'd be able to—"

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"Oh. Roger, right? Am I interrupting something?"

Carl fired off a quick Just A Minute, which he combined with Dad's On The Phone to the third person that had arrived. "Yeah," he said as he raised a finger with a vaguely apologetic expression on his face, not really paying attention to what he was seeing since he was doing network stuff while vaguely attempting to pay attention to this support call, "go ahead and give me a call back at two if that's not the case, Greg."

"Hi, um, Gabriella, right? Sorry, Carl and I are having our weekly inter-department sync-up—"

"I will call you back if it's not," Greg said, the sound of paper crumpling—likely a burger wrapper, which reminded Carl that he was still kinda craving burgers—coming through faintly in the background of the call.

"Yep, call me Gab. I don't see that on the department calendar?"

"Please just use the ticketing, Greg," Carl said with a sigh, just as he always did when—

"It's more of an…informal thing."

—he, the Director of IT, got a call asking him to personally solve—

"I heard some rumors of tension between my department and yours. You—"

—some trivial issue that honestly could just be solved by giving the—

"—seem pretty at home, though. Glad to see they were just rumors."

—guy a freaking flowchart to follow.

"I'll think about it next time something needs fixed," said Greg.

"Ah, yes, things are a bit more hectic than usual today with the expansion going live in eighteen minutes."

"So I've gathered."

"Sorry, Guang, it's busier down here than I expected."

"Bye, Greg," Carl said, finally hanging up the call. It seemed impossible to believe that he was still—

"Carl?"

"Yup. Really great work, Guang. I didn't think we'd have that issue with the inverted tides fixed so soon!"

Carl looked up again, taking in the state of the room.

Roger was sitting in front of him, a powerful grimace of concentration on his face as he continued working apace.

Gab was standing in the doorway, watching him with some manner of expectation on her face. Then she began tapping at the air in front of her, clearly using one of those full-AR gesture displays that Carl could never feel comfortable with.

"Yeah?" Carl said, feeling like he'd missed something during the time that he'd been reduced to tech support.

"Important call?" she asked.

"Alright, Sarah, what do you have for me?" Roger asked, now speaking in a softer voice which could perhaps be used for golf commentary.

Carl sighed. "That was Greg, our Lead Designer. He has a habit of directly calling me any time he has a problem, even though the policy—"

"Well, we can't have that," Gab said, her bushy eyebrows lowering. "I'll go have a chat with him about it when I leave."

"Really? What about the issue with the unintentional parabolic fireball trajectory?"

Her statement gave Carl pause. "I…don't think it's that big of a deal," he said, not wanting his new boss to step in on such a minor issue and potentially think him incompetent for being unable to solve it himself, even though really he'd just been a bit too busy to go up to the far side of the third floor in person and inform Greg of The Way That Things Were Going To Be.

Gab waved him off. "It's on my way up. Can't have you wasting your…"

Roger pulled out a fourth device at that moment, this one another folding tablet laptop, and began setting it up on the edge of the desk. "Yeah, I can test it here," he said. "Which build are you running? Three one…"

Carl blinked. He wasn't sure where all these devices were coming from, but it was now seeming to him like maybe Roger was significantly more prepared and thorough than he'd previously thought. Also, however, he was growing concerned that the man might next manage to produce some manner of folding desk.

"I'll… I'll be… I'll be around…" Gab said, seeming just as awed as Carl when Roger managed to somehow still continue drinking from his large mug while operating two tablets and two laptops almost simultaneously.

"We've still got sixteen minutes—fourteen if we count getting it up to all the CDNs in time…"