The lights were still on in the electronics lab. On the top floor, Brice had a beer in one hand and twirled a whole triple cheese pizza. It spun and then flipped, landing cheese-side-down on the breakout room rug. Brice just shrugged and let it lie there and plunked himself down next to George.

George might have stopped what happened next but his phone rang. An irate neighbor was calling about his George’s grandmother – there was noise coming from her apartment. Again. He was trying to sleep. George knew she was probably gaming. Loudly.

“I’m sorry, I'll get her to turn down the noise,” he told the neighbor as he accessed her sound system. The guy kept complaining as he did it.

“Okay Sir, her sound is down. Thank you again for ringing, it’s great she has caring neighbors.”

“She’s not fit to be left alone,” the 'caring' neighbor said as he disconnected. Well, George thought, it wasn’t the first time he’d been woken by her, but he was also kind of mean. And he lived in a campus town! George tagged his calendar to call in on his grandmother tomorrow.

He looked up in time to see Evan stumbling toward him, wearing their engineering project. He’d put on the Crown to show how he could navigate the lab while inebriated. Inside, George knew, was a demo world of waist high grass. Evan lurched along taking exaggerated steps. The safety features gave him an outline of the breakout room. The three of them thought it might be a good mode for exercise simulations. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d wear to cross a busy street but it gave some nice mobility in a safe area.

Then Evan stepped on the upturned pizza.

It was like those old cartoons when someone slips on a banana peel, George thought, helpless to do anything but watch. The triple cheese mostly stuck to the rug, while the crust moved forward taking Evan with it. Evan was thrown off balance. He stumbled, turned, lost his precarious grasp on location and finally pitched over and head-butted a wall.

Solder cracked, wires tore and circuits shattered. Their delicate masterpiece, the reason for the party, was as useful as the pizza, some of which still stuck to Evan’s sneaker.

Evan, reeling from the collision, dropped his beer on an empty chair. The wet spreading stain looked a lot like someone had peed while they sat there. But nobody was looking at the beer stain.

"Oh bro!" called out Brice, sobering up in that way people do when something gets broken. In one week investors were coming to see their Masters project.

"We have backups right? Tell me this isn’t too bad?" Evans voice was plaintive as he focused on the room he could now clearly see. He slowly moved his head back and forth and scattered more prototype like popcorn.

Stolen novel; please report.

Three seconds ticked by before George felt guilty enough let him off the hook. George, the guy that followed plans. George who documented stuff. George who found the bugs, and who did all the work back in their undergrad group assignments.

"Yes, we have copies.” He nodded back into the 'building site' behind two solid swing doors. “You bozo,” he added.

Where here it was chaos, in there it was order. No coffee, no food, no visitors and a well-defined area to playtest their device. Usually, nobody took anything out of the lab.

"I'm sorry George, I'll clean up okay?" Evan glanced at Brice, his buddy, and Brice nodded.

George was feeling woozy and now, annoyed. He didn't drink much usually. He wanted to get going, get some sleep. He had a lot more work to do before the investors came, plus visit his grandmother. He eyed Evan, still swaying. He probably didn’t have a concussion.

Evan would sober up, feel bad and get stuck back in to the project. Brice, well Brice wouldn’t think his pizza had anything to do with wrecking one of their prototypes, he’d be late in on Monday and ask the other two for an update. But Brice had landed the clients. He had a major in marketing and he flitted round engineering looking for start-up gold. It was his idea to make the Crown look like actual gold. That was pretty much his major design contribution, that and the idea to make the investors a place to explore. George sighed, it was a good idea but it was going to take some work. He stood up.

"Make sure all the wrecked parts go in the compacter guys."

He grabbed his coat and felt for his security pass. As the elevator door closed he looked at the chaos that beer and pizza could create. He wondered what the cleaning crew would think when they came up.

Brice and Evan didn't hang around. Their version of cleaning up was to peel the flipped pizza off the rug and place it in the sink. Both had grown up with people cleaning up after them. Evan rolled the spoiled rug up and stacked it by the fridge. He needed to pee. He posted the remains of the headset down the trash chute because the compactor was back in the building site and he’d have to key in to get back there.

They were both urinating against the front of the building as Sadie finished her day job on the robotics floor. She logged the footage of her latest trial results for her professor to check. Part of her scholarship requirement was to recycle old inventory. Someone had donated her robots to the program years ago, then they’d never checked back in to see if they wanted a funding option on the new developments.

At first Sadie had been stressed about her absent client. She was the scholarship kid working on proprietary equipment that investors would be shy of sinking money into. But the lack of a business breathing down her neck had let her experiment a lot. And she’d found a way to make the Things pay.

She switched off the lights in her lab and went down to the janitor’s office to log in. 'Office' was a grand word for a large walk-in cupboard of cleaning stuff and some lockers. She’d come down here first to help the janitor reprogram the aircon. Because this was an electronics and engineering college, the whole system was custom and bespoke. If something went wrong there was usually a poor student to fix it. Enter Sadie. She’d got the system back up and running and made some improvements and, made actual documentation for the next sucker. Then the janitor had asked her if she wanted more work.