Carl was having a rare late afternoon at the gym halfway between his home and his office. As a forty nine year-old husband and father of two, when Carl wanted to think, this was pretty much the only place that he could manage it anymore without getting interrupted—not that he disliked it when Bobby raced down to excitedly tell him about whatever new boss she'd just fought for the first time, or when Sammy wanted to practice layups or tried to wheedle something out of him, or when Annie wanted to do something, or go somewhere, or just talk, or, family aside, when he realized he had something he needed to be reading up on or doing for future-Carl's benefit. No, all of those things were part of his life now, and he wouldn't give them up for anything.

But sometimes he did need to think a little.

This was not one of those times.

When Carl wanted to clear his mind, the only place he could manage it was when he had to focus completely on not being crushed by very safe amounts of weight.

He set the barbell back on the rack in front of his chest. A hundred and thirty five pounds on a seated overhead press might not be a large amount of weight, but that was fine with him. He took it slow, doing over a hundred warm-up reps before reaching even this modest weight, and then he did ten steady sets of ten. He wasn't as young as he once was, and there was no need to push himself too hard.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Carl didn't particularly enjoy how crowded his gym was at this time, but that didn't directly affect him. The shoulder press bench he was using was set up off to the side of the gym in a corner, likely for the same reason why Carl had yet to see another person use it: few people enjoyed working out on a shoulder press bench.

Carl did, however, and he'd left work a little earlier than usual for the sole purpose of coming to the gym to work out here. There was something about holding a bit over half his body weight over his head that cut off the nagging voices in his mind droning on and on about network traffic analyses, and other methods he could be using to compare the two network organization strategies, and the obvious security benefits of not flattening the networks—which Gab must be aware of, since she seemed like she was pretty on top of things from their discussions—and then there were the absolutely minuscule performance improvements that the flattened network brought in certain circumstances, which really shouldn't be significant enough to justify the switch, but he wasn't entirely sure that she would see things his way, which meant he was gonna have to spend some time carefully thinking about how the heck to present everything in such a way that it was really clear for any…

Carl grimaced and lifted the barbell off the rack again.