Page 11 of Single Player

These thoughts remained on his mind as he drove home through a late-afternoon Florida rainstorm, the drumming of rain on the roof of his car making him feel isolated from the world around him.

Silas blinked hard, trying to train his eyes on the computer screen. It wasn’t like him to be unable to keep focused when he was working. Normally he had great vision. No need for glasses, due to some superior vision genes and regular stretch breaks. Today, though, he was unable to keep his eyes from blurring out. He sat back and rubbed them, exasperated, then looked back at the screen. Blurry again. For crying out loud.

He got up from his chair and paced around the room. Just what he needed. How was he supposed to get any productive work done if he couldn’t even get his eyes to cooperate? This was terrible. He leaned against the wall with a heavy sigh, resisting the impulse to fling the items off the nearest workbench onto the floor. He wasn’t going to throw a tantrum, however much he occasionally wanted to.

Travis, one of Silas’s colleagues, looked up from his station. “Hey, man, you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Silas knew he sounded snappish, but he didn’t care. Travis was an adult and he could handle it.

Taking the hint, Travis turned back to his work and left Silas alone, just as Silas preferred. He returned to his computer and flopped down in his chair, gritting his teeth. There was a problem with this design, and the simulations were coming out all wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was, which was the most frustrating thing in the world. He tapped his fingers against his lips in thought, then tried changing a few of the parameters and running the simulation again. It was taking forever to load, of course, because everything this week had been one long string of annoyances, day after day.

With his peripheral vision, he spotted one of his other coworkers, Pauline, come back in from one of her countless water breaks. Amazing the woman could get anything done at all with all the excuses she made to get up from her chair. “Thank god it’s Friday, right?” she announced to the room. “I’m so done.”

Silas looked up with what he hoped was a clear “stop talking” face, in time to see Travis making throat-slicing gestures to Pauline. Probably regarding him. Well, good. His colleagues had worked with him long enough; they should know that he was best left alone when he was in a mood like this. Pauline got the hint and stopped talking, and for a while, the lab was blissfully silent. When Travis and Pauline took a break for lunch an hour or so later, it was even more tranquil, since they left the lab altogether and gave him the peace of a solitary workspace.

In a job like his, he sometimes had to interact with his colleagues, but it was much more individualistic than collaborative. Their project manager divided up tasks, they each completed the tasks, and then they’d test the unification of all the components they’d separately been crafting. Silas often worked on other projects during the unification stage. He’d done his share, and they didn’t really need him to watch a prototype work or not. The team could figure that out without him. As such, he’d often pressed to get his own lab, but Wayscorp insisted they all work in the same space. Irritating.

He could see someone standing in the doorway, but elected to continue working and hope they went away. Obviously, he was working through lunch. People who worked through lunch shouldn’t be bothered. It was like the unwritten code of any office space. When the figure neither entered nor left, though, Silas eventually looked up. Elliot Turner, his current project manager, was watching him with eyebrows drawn together. “Hey, Silas. Aren’t you going to take lunch?”

Silas blinked at him, annoyed and trying not to show it, a feat at which he didn’t always succeed. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not hungry right now.” He couldn’t be positive, but that seemed to be a pretty nosy question. What did Elliot care about his eating habits?

“Don’t work too hard, okay? I don’t want you to burn out.” Elliot leaned heavily on the doorframe and put his hands into his pockets. He was significantly older than Silas, in his midfifties, broad in the chest and built more like a football player than a biomedical engineer. He had patents on some of the best inventions to have come out of this company, and Silas knew he should show a little more respect to the guy, but right now he wasn’t much in the mood for idle chitchat or misplaced concern.

“Thank you, but I’m fine. I wanted to get this simulation working by the end of the day so I can move on to something else, but it’s not cooperating.” Silas stared at the screen again. Maybe the program was malfunctioning.

“Mind if I take a look?” Elliot walked in.

“Be my guest.” Silas got up and gestured to the screen. It would be gratifying to have Elliot as stumped as he was.

Elliot rubbed his beard and studied the screen, then changed a few numbers. Silas felt his shoulders tense at the sight of someone else touching his workstation, but after all, he’d given Elliot permission to do so.

His project manager got to his feet. “There you go. It should be fine now.”

Silas blinked. That didn’t make any sense. “What do you mean, fine?”

“I mean, run the simulation. Your calculations were off. Looks like you added when you should have multiplied.” Elliot gestured to the computer. “Go on. Take a look.”

In disbelief, Silas sat down at his screen. Son of a gun. Elliot was right. He ran the simulation, which went off with no error messages. Feeling a blush of shame, he looked up at his project manager. “Thanks,” he grumbled, trying not to sound ungrateful but feeling more irritated than relieved. He should have caught that.

“Silas, how much sleep have you gotten this week?”

Another personal question. Elliot was on a roll. Silas thought back through the week, which had been a mixture of restless nights and bad dreams. “A couple of hours every night, more or less.” He hadn’t slept well since that night with Matthew a full week ago.

“A couple of hours, that’s it?” Elliot frowned.

Silas felt his annoyance grow, but Elliot outranked him, and he had to be polite. “I have insomnia. I deal with it as best I can.”

Elliot nodded. “All right. I don’t mean to press. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.” Silas just wanted to be left alone with his irritation. “Have a good lunch.”

The dismissal was clear. He wasn’t sure if Elliot might fight against it, but instead, he walked away. “Take care, Silas.”

Once Elliot was gone, Silas stretched his arms above his head, cracked his neck in both directions, and settled back in, willing himself to feel refreshed and alert. This time, he wasn’t going to make any silly arithmetic errors.

Matthew had been working hard enough this week that he didn’t even mind the cavelike darkness of the programming room. He was coding PI Games’s newest endeavor, an expansion pack to the space exploration game Orion. They hadn’t even released Orion yet, but Will wanted to have this expansion pack ready to go early, since Orion’s preorders had already broken most of their internal records and he wanted to capitalize on that success. He had the programming team creating additional levels and characters for the expansion packs, which would give the game more customizable characters. Isabel’s design team had already finished the expansion overview, and Caleb’s art team was hard at work on design, so Matthew was responsible for overseeing the nitty-gritty programming. In addition to Orion, though, Matthew was on the team for Endgame, a psychological game that had been one of Will’s pet projects. While it seemed like a cool project, it was also going to be a ton of work, so he was procrastinating. They were hoping to preview the game at DiceCon at the end of the month, but he still had some time. Even without Endgame, he’d been fairly busy all week, and he couldn’t be happier.

It was a good job. More than a good job, honestly. He loved what he did. Something about taking an idea and making it real, coding levels and turning plans into fun, satisfied him on a deep level. He had been feeling pretty low on Sunday night after going through those trophies at his parents’ house, but a week of fooling around with Orion had alleviated some of that negativity. At least, he’d been busy enough to keep his mind off it. Now it was Friday, with a relaxing weekend stretching out in front of him, and he couldn’t help but be in a good mood. Plus, he did lunch out with coworkers every Friday, and that was bound to be fun.