Three yearslater
“Would someone like to explain to me how this keeps happening?” I asked grumpily. When I was met with silence, I let out a heavy sigh and softened my voice. “No, I mean, really. Because I haven’t the faintest clue, and if we don’t figure it out soon, I’m going to lose my mind.”
From the screen in front of me, Angie’s voice piped up. “I think it’s a little late for that.”
“Wow, you’re hilarious,” I said brightly, my expression falling into a scowl. “Now, does anyone have anything productive to add? Or should I move forward with firing Angie?”
“You’re not firing me,” her voice said, and I heard her laugh.
“Maybe, but it’s tempting,” I said, looking around the room at the rest of my team and looking hopeful. “Come on. Someone. I don’t even care if it’s a bad idea or a crazy one, just…something.”
For whatever reason, Arete’s system had stopped kicking out error reports like it was supposed to. When we’d upgraded the year before, I had expected we were going to run into problems, as always happened when you made sweeping changes to an established system. Even when you worked hard, as all of us haddone, to make sure everything went smoothly, you had to expect that something was going to go wrong. It had gone off with surprisingly few hitches, and in the couple of weeks between seasons, we had patched the worst of the bugs and could start carefully combing through the code to prevent anything from returning.
So why did it take a year for the system to stop generating error reports while errors were cropping up at what we now could see was a slow but exponentially growing rate?
A good question, and here we were.
“I have an idea,” the newest addition, by about six months, piped up. Nick looked at all of us, even at the video feed of Angie from where she was working at home, the sounds of a fussy baby in the background, and winced. “It’s the old code.”
“The old code?” I began, then felt my heart sink. “You mean…the code we used as the foundation for everything?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said quietly, clearly not happy to present the idea, but hell, I had said to say something, even if it was bad or crazy. This wasn’t crazy, but it was bad. Very bad.
There was a pause, and after a moment, the crying from the screen stopped, replaced by happy gurgles, followed by Angie’s voice. “Sorry about that. Anyway, he’s got a point. We’ve done the analysis; we’ve combed through everything by hand too. The only thing we didn’t do was check the old stuff.”
“Because it was iron-tight, it was solid,” I said softly.
“Once, but it wasn’t just last year that we made changes,” she reminded me. “We’ve been doing extensive bug fixes and other patches since then; pretty much every week we’ve run something new through the system. And if I’m honest?—”
“We were too focused on the new to remember to check the old,” I finished for her and closed my eyes. “Jesus, I knew thiswas going to be a problem. Shit, I really, really hope this isn’t a keystone issue.”
“Wouldn’t that be a blast?” Angie asked sarcastically, and then I heard her murmur to her son, who made soft noises at her. Hearing it was a good thing, because having her work remotely had proved to be the best thing for her. She was no longer trapped in a place where her talents and drive were put to good use, but meant she was a prisoner. At least she could be home with her husband and their newborn, and she still got to give me shit occasionally.
“Alright,” I said, slamming my hands on the table, the thunk of my ring loud. “We’re going to break this down. Angie?”
“Yes, oh glorious master?”
“Start from the bottom and work your way up. When your shift is over, pick who you’re going to pass it off to, and then they’ll do the same. Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Monitor what everyone is doing. You’ve got the freshest eyes, and that can make or break it. I’m going to keep an eye on all of you as you go, and I’ll do some of my own digging. I want notations and detailed note-taking, got it?”
They did, and I left them there, sending a message to the kitchen to make something nice for the team. They could be as bad as me with eating when they were lost in their work, and I wanted them at their best. For my part, I was running onmaybetwo hours sleep, and I needed to take a minute to unwind or I was going to unravel.
I was contemplating going down to the resort proper and being among the guys, but as much as I loved them, the noise and chaos that always surrounded them was too much for my head at the moment. Instead, I wandered into what was technically the Greeting Room and stood staring at the wall of pictures. It was something I had done a couple of years ago, justa quick snapshot of the guys who had left Arete and had a story to tell, something that could show new Guests this place wasn’t just smoke and mirrors, it showed that we could walk the walk when necessary.
Someone had changed Cade’s picture, and I smiled at the picture of him and another former Guest, Walker, standing together at the Grand Canyon, their smiles wide. Cade’s arm was tight around Walker’s waist, his metal leg gleaming in the desert sun. It was funny to me that people insisted there was no magic in Arete, when these two, who had been separated for years, ended up here at the same time to reconnect…and fall in love.
Then there was Isaac, who was an even more special case than most of the people on the board, and not just because he had helped one of our long-term guests finally make a breakthrough, though that was a standout. Half the year; he came to Arete to work as a Guide. He was phenomenal, and his first success story had been one of our problem guests, Logan, who was also on the board, smirking at the camera, his boyfriend giving the peace sign as he dangled upside down next to Logan, both happy.
There were stories upon stories on the board, so many it was impossible to count, and yet I remembered them all. There weren’t any guarantees of success at Arete, but there were still plenty of successes, enough to keep me going whenever I wondered if we were doing enough.
“Hey,” I heard behind me and turned to see Luka, and beside him Rowan, who I swore looked less serious as the years went on. “Jesus, you look like shit.”
“That’s what happens when you spend the weekend working rather than shacked up in a swanky hotel with a boy toy,” I told him, raising a brow.
Luka rolled his eyes. “Go get some sleep or something, Reg, you look like microwaved dog shit. And if you don’t, I’m going to tellyourboy toy.”
