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My hormone-addled brain recalls a mention of a sibling who inspired Vlad to go into computer science.
Vlad steps away from me, rounding on the newcomer with a string of Russian.
Now that there are no delectable muscles blocking my view, I scan the speaker.
Yep. Has to be a brother. They look so alike they could pass for the same person—except the older sibling is a scruffy, laidback-looking version of the two.
“This is Fanny,” Vlad says, switching back to English. “We work together at Binary Birch.”
Work together—that’s a nice euphemism. He could’ve said “works under me.” No, wait, that would make me sound like a hooker.
The brother extends his hand. “Alex.”
No Mr. Chortsky here, interesting. Oh, and I get the 1000 Devils reference now—Alex owns his last name, it seems.
“Nice to meet you,” I say as I give his hand a professional shake.
“Step into the war room,” Alex says and leads me and Vlad into a large conference room with a view of Central Park.
A bunch of people are already here, and unlike the exuberant gun-toting colleagues we left outside, they look subdued, even haggard.
“We have a problem with Squirrel Simulator,” Alex says, but he makes it sound like there’s a double “w” where the double “r” should be in Squirrel, and a “w” instead of “r” at the end of simulator.
Weird. He said war room without doing that, so it can’t be a speech impediment.
“Again?” Vlad frowns and explains to me, “1000 Devils just released a fix for a major glitch in that game.”
So, Squirrel Simulator is a game. I should’ve guessed that.
“Is it like Goat Simulator, but with a squirrel?” I ask.
“Much more fun.” Alex’s chest expands with pride. “A squirrel is smaller, so it can get into places a goat can’t even dream of.”
Vlad darts me a quick glance, then asks, “Did the glitch not get fixed?”
I redden. Was that glance in reference to the “squirrel can get anywhere” comment? It might be, since in my case, a type of squirrel was up my butt—and that wasn’t really fun. At least not for me.
“The last glitch is gone, but I think the big update with the fix introduced this new problem.” Alex picks up a remote, and YouTube shows up on the screen in front of us.
A video starts playing with a cute squirrel scurrying under a park bench. Suddenly, the furry creature expels smoke out of its mouth, which turns it pixelated—making the squirrel look like a demon from the deepest circles of hell.
Vlad frowns. “This reminds me of that glitch in the Sims, the one that made babies look like monsters.”
“It’s eerie,” I say, looking at the distortions in the image that look like claws and tentacles. “Almost like you did it on purpose to scare people.”
“Exactly.” Alex opens a laptop on the conference table and looks at his brother. “Can you check if we’ve been hacked?”
Vlad takes a seat in front of the laptop and starts typing away.
“Did you know cybersecurity was yet another one of my little brother’s talents?” Alex asks me with a wide grin.
“Nope.” I shoot a hungry glance at Vlad. Realizing the brother might catch on, I clear my throat and ask, “Have you ever been hacked before?”
“Never—and for the same reason. Vlad set up the security.”
“Have you already found the bug in the code?” I ask.
“No. The development team are on it, but it’s hard so far because we’ve been having trouble replicating the problem here in the office. The only reason I know that video isn’t a hoax are the one-star reviews from angry parents whose children couldn’t sleep after seeing this glitch.”
