Roger tipped back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting out a deep sigh as his hands finally came to rest. "We've done it," he said weakly, sounding as though the words were being squeezed out of him.

Carl took a sip from his coffee, frowning slightly as the three words tickled a memory that he couldn't quite place at that moment. Then he continued going over the network traffic snapshots that he'd produced by running the computers from most of the departments that were not Engineering on transparent test networks that he'd thrown together and begun generating packets to and from servers inside and outside the test networks. The results were—

"Alright, you ready for that meeting?" Roger asked, suddenly reanimating after a couple minutes of staring blankly at the ceiling.

"Huh?" Carl plotted yet another graph with the data sets.

"The thing I—Oh, I didn't actually tell you about the meeting, did I."

Carl decided to relinquish his focus on the network traffic reports given that they seemed to all be showing exactly what he'd expected, which meant that now he had to figure out how to effectively break the news to Gab that there was, in fact, only the most minimal of performance benefits to her idea at the expense of measurable security effectiveness. He'd have to deal with the fallout from that later, but… "Yeah, I think we both got a bit sidetracked," he said, giving his beard a brief scratching before he took another sip of his coffee.

Roger set his mug on the desk for a moment while he folded up his laptops and put them back into the pockets of his jacket which, now that Carl examined it a bit more thoroughly, seemed to actually be more like a somewhat stylish lab coat with a number of large pockets. "Sorry about that. We had a number of bugs on the tracker that kept getting pushed back since they weren't game-breaking." He brushed a strand of gray hair that had escaped from his part back into place before nodding his head towards the door. "Let's head up to the fifth floor for a few minutes. I have something I want to show you."

Carl figured this was as good of an excuse as any to not have to get back to the network de-segmentation analysis project that he wasn't exactly avoiding so much as he was not actively completing it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

There was a difference, and Carl could definitely explain what that was, but he was apparently late for a meeting up on the fifth floor.

"Yeah, sounds good," Carl said, locking his screens and rising from his seat with his mug. He stretched for a moment, feeling the usual pop from his ankle cracking, then made to follow the other department head out the door, not closing or locking it because of course he didn't.

He was Carl Weathers.

His door was always open.

"Any particularly crazy bugs?" Carl asked as he caught up.

Roger was, for the first time since they'd made their peace, not walking while actively working. "A few," he said. "There was this weird one where the ocean tides sort of reversed," he pressed the up arrow on the elevator, "and it ended up creating these massive whirlpools between the continents."

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

"Would have ruined the game for all the players who like spending time on the beach, or going out to fight sea monsters, or, more importantly, trying to take a ship across an ocean," Roger said, seeming unusually upbeat. He let out a breath, and shook his head a few times while grinning. "I can't get over how good it feels every time we get through a release like this."

"That good?" Carl asked, his eyebrows raising in surprise at the unexpected show of emotion.

"I know you're not a big gamer or anything," Roger began, "but knowing that I'm part of shipping the type of game I wished I could have played when I was younger is a great feeling."

Carl frowned. It was true that he wasn't much of a gamer now. And he hadn't played games much in the past twenty years or so—that was also true. It wasn't like he'd been wanting to play games that whole time either, especially considering how busy he'd been spending time getting to know Annie on the deepest of emotional levels, working to further his career, and raising his daughters, but after the past week or so with everything that was going on in his life, he was really starting to feel like maybe playing games a little—and only a little, of course, since he was still a responsible father with a life that he enjoyed very much—was sort of the safety valve he needed since most of his other hobbies as well as his social life had naturally decayed in the course of growing older and devoting himself to his family and career.