A being of non-euclidian light sat at their desk, tapping at a screen with a single luminescent digit.
“TGIF am I right?” Bill from accounting said as they walked by. Their coffee cup said “Mondays are the worst.”
Bob looked up from their screen and responded with a small laugh. Bill had already walked down the hall towards the copier so it was doubtful if they had heard Bob’s acknowledgement of the daily grind.
Bob scanned through a few of the data streams they were in charge of monitoring. The election was coming up so things might start to get interesting but their team had decided to play it safe this cycle. They had seen decent success in the last two so they had no reason to mix things up for the sake of drama.
“Hi Bob,” Frank, Bob’s manager, said as they coalesced next to Bob’s workstation.
“Oh, hey Frank. I was just looking at some of the numbers coming out of the Southern states. A little bit of agitation but nothing outside of acceptable tolerance.” Bob twisted in their chair. They hated these sudden drop ins.
Frank looked over the screens and emitted a satisfied shade of blue. Bob was about to return to their work when Frank interrupted them.
“Listen, I just got out of a meeting with the CTO.”
Shit.
“They think we haven’t stress tested the impeachment protocols enough,” Frank continued.
Double shit.
“Did you explain to them we did one less than twenty cycles ago?”
“Yes of course I did. But they feel it wasn’t good enough. ‘Wasn’t a big deal’ were their exact words.”
“Well…there is some merit to that argument. But we’re way too close to launch to completely change the course of this one. We also planned for this to be another eight cycle term so best we could do is 2024.”
“It has to be this one.”
“Not possible.”
“What part of direct order from the CTO do you not understand?” Bob fell silent. They took a moment to run through their alternative job prospects but the economy wasn’t doing so hot right now.
“Fine, give me an hour to come up with a plan.”
As Frank melted away Bob stood up to get a cup of coffee. Another sudden management drop in that went terrible. The streak continues.
When Bob got to the break room they noticed that Cheryl was already there.
“Working hard or hardly working?” Bob said with a small laugh and instantly regretted it. Cheryl laughed politely and went back to stirring their coffee. Bob fumbled with the cups in the cupboard for a few moments before they found the one they liked to use.
“So…Frank stopped by my desk just now.”
“Oh no, what now?” Cheryl’s laugh was a little more genuine this time.
“Apparently…” Bob paused for dramatic effect, “We have to work an impeachment into this year’s election.”
“This year?” Cheryl was clearly shocked.
“Tell me about it,” Bob sipped their coffee as they tried to think up something else witty to say.
“Wow, am I glad to be off that team.” Cheryl laughed musically again. “No offense of course.”
“None taken!” Bob stared at their coffee. “How’s uh…the global issues team doing anyway?”
“We’re locked in on the whole climate change initiative, you know,” Cheryl took a sip of their coffee.
“Yeah that’s a big part of our project too. Well, sort of. The subjects aren’t really taking it seriously yet.”
“Well you’d better get them to hurry up or else we’ll all be out of a job.” Cheryl laughed again and twinkled in an alluring manner. Bob lost their train of thought.
“Say…uh…do you want to…um…” Bob’s communicator chirped eagerly, interrupting them. It was Frank.
“I’d better get back to work,” Cheryl said, slipping out after freshening their cup.
“Yeah…me too…” Bob said.
“UPDATE?” Frank’s message squawked.
“Still contemplating” Bob typed back. They went back to their desk and threw the problem into the team group chat.
“What? That’s stupid as hell!”
“Not possible.”
“That’s it. I quit.”
The complaining went on for several more minutes. Soon followed by unflattering memes of the CTO and the company as a whole. Bob let it continue because it was both true and funny. Eventually it was up to them to bring the team back on track.
After saving a few of the best gifs first, of course.
“Ok, I hope everyone got it out of their system. But we need to come up with a plan.”
”Are you sure we can’t put it off until the next one at least?”
”Direct order. Sorry.”
”Well, we could copy and paste most of the code from the first one we did. It was so long ago I doubt anyone will notice.”
”It will be hard to insert a new system in at this stage while the sim is live.”
”I’ve had some luck using the GER_28 protocols to stealth insert things like this.”
”Isn’t that extremely risky? That code has a habit of self replicating and getting out of hand.”
”It’s not as bad as v.38 so shouldn’t be a problem. That one made for some pretty good movies though. But don’t worry, we can compensate by dropping the competence variable to zero”
”OK, hopefully that will make this go quickly. We can prep a back up that gets us close to our old plan and we should be able to wrap this up in a few months.”
”Good work team, get started on the patch and I’ll go brief Frank”
”Can we at least make the patch look stupid?”
Bob closed the chat window and then leaned back in their chair. This job had its ups and downs but they enjoyed the work a great deal. Having a wonderful team made things easy.
Good benefits too.
This test the CTO wanted would probably crash and burn, but what’s the worst that could happen?
