Today’s morning sync was titled differently. It read, “Prepare for battle”. Sometimes they did this. I logged into the meeting.

  “Is everyone here? We have a lot of things to discuss today, so I’ll start right now.”

  Priya sucked in a deep breath. The lighting was dim in her room, and I couldn’t see her face. Then she leaned in, shoving her face into the camera. The light from the screen lit up her face. Her face covered the entirety of the screen and it looked like her face was stuffed into a small box. I could see a bead of sweat dripping down her face. Every word she said was from the throat, guttural, exploding from her larynx with force. She always took her morning meetings virtually so I could never know, but I always imagined that she would have to wipe her screen down with a wet wipe after she was done.

  “Last night, production went down at 3:23 A.M. for the AST group, and it went down at 4:17 for the LMT group. Thank you to John and Rakesh, who were up until the crack of dawn to fix these issues.”

  John reacted with a thumbs up. It floated up from his profile, and faded away. Last week John had told me he was looking for a new job. John shot me a message on Slack.

  “It’s not super likely, but I think the prod breakage on AST might have something to do with your asynchronous execution feature. I accidentally mentioned this to Priya. Sorry bout that.”

  “Ah, GG”

  Maybe I should start looking for a new job as well, if I didn’t get fired this week.

  “We were able to remediate these issues for now, but we discovered, MISSION CRITICAL bugs that we need to fix IMMEDIATELY. I want the respective code owners to get into a war room and stay there until we have a resolution.”

  Priya took stock of her troops from her bunker, leering at the faces she saw through the video call. I imagined bombs dropping from the sky, a couple miles away from her bunker, filling it with tremors. We were the chosen men, specially selected meat shields she was going to order a valiant charge against the forces of evil. As far as I was concerned, Priya had been born and raised in Silicon Valley, and had never even seen a gun in her life before. But this was her battle. Her life’s mission. It was paramount that our internal tool was adopted by a massive user base. When it reached maximum adoption, she would be able to achieve nirvana, and float into the sky, eventually reaching heaven.

  “I’m assigning Joy, Jun, and Rakesh to the AST issue. I want resolution by end of today. Send me an update on progress by lunch. Blood must be shed.”

  I imagined arriving at the office, letting my body go limp, pissing my pants, and doing a crazy little dance in front of my team. I would be admitted to a mental asylum, and from outside the mental asylum, Priya and her boss, Dineth, would do one final salute to their soldier gone mad. I would never see them in my life. The internal tool would see adoption for a long while, then something new would replace it, and it would forgotten entirely in the sands of time, and I would wile away the rest of my days in the mental asylum, desperately trying to convince the wardens that I wasn’t crazy, and that it just had been a typical routine mental breakdown.

  “Joy, could you stay on the call for a quick talk?”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I made sure my mic was muted, and let out a high pitched scream for five seconds straight, until all the blood in my body rushed into my head, and I felt like collapsing.”

  “Joy?”

  “Yup, I’m here.”

  “John told me. This bug is your fault. You broke prod, you lost us trust. Do you understand that? Do you understand how important customer trust is? They are reconsidering working with us because of this. I’m incredibly, incredibly disappointed in you. You should know better. I have so many things to say, but I have another meeting right now. We will continue this conversation later. The fix needs to happen today.”

  Priya left the meeting. My shin ached. I looked down. The bandages were damp with pus, and they needed to be replaced. There were seven beer cans on my desk. I shook them one by one, and finally found one that had some left. I took a whiff. Not bad. I finished it. I hobbled to Ikumi’s door and knocked. I couldn’t hear anything. I pressed my ear against the door. I could make out running water, and steps, getting closer. I backed off.

  Ikumi opened the door, with a toothbrush in hand. Her hair was wet, and she hadn’t put on her makeup yet. She looked surprised to see me. I pointed at my shin.

  “Uhm. Could I have some new bandages? ”

  “Yeah, sure. Come in.”

  I entered her home, but didn’t venture far into the apartment. I stood awkwardly a couple feet from the door. Her living room was like a real girl’s living room. Sunlight shone on the succulents placed on the windowsills. They each had a piece of masking tape stuck to the pottery, where their names were written. A beige couch populated with plushies of different characters beckoned invitingly. Postcards of different landmarks were strung along the wall with brown twine wrapped around mini incandescent light bulbs. I saw Shibuya, the Grand Canyon, Nashville, New York, San Francisco, and many more. I bet she’d been to them all. Ikumi came back with her first aid kit. She beckoned for me to walk deeper into her small living room. She sat down on the floor, and I did too. I took hold of the edge of the bandage prepared to rip it off. Ikumi placed a hand on mine and stopped me, smirking.

  “You were going to rip it off, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to take your skin with it if you do that.”

  “Oh.”

  Ikumi took an edge of the bandage with her blue fingernails, and lifted the bandage off of my shin with steady hands. I winced and held my breath. Ikumi finished taking it off my shin. I sighed. Ikumi curled her nose and sniffed the air. I wiped the little bit of beer residue off of my lips with my sleeve.

  “Did you drink yesterday?”

  “Uhhhmm… Like a little bit.”

  “Why? Don’t you have better things to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She peered into my eyes, and I looked away. She began to sanitize my shin. The alcohol made contact with my shin, and I almost screamed.

  “You know, I don’t understand you, and I think I never will. Sometimes, I meet people like that at work or on the street. They all make life decisions that don’t make sense, and ones that I will never make. It’s fine, though.”

  Her words sunk into my brain like nails being hammered into wood. I imagined the feeling of a cold beer sliding down my throat, and it made the present bearable.

  “Wait a second, I forgot my ointment.”

  Ikumi headed to her room, and closed the door. I heard a loud crash resonate from her room, as if something had fallen on the floor and shattered into a million pieces. I rose from the floor.

  “Ikumi?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine, a succulent fell off my windowsill and broke. I can clean it up.”

  “I can help.”

  “No. I don’t need it.”

  Ikumi came back from her room, looking annoyed with a tube of ointment in her hand.

  “Sit back down.”

  Ikumi finished fixing me up, and gave me a couple light taps on my bandage to signal she was done.

  “Sorry, sorry for inconveniencing you.”

  “No problem.”

  I walked to the door and looked back. Ikumi had gone into her room, presumably to clean up the broken pot.

  “Thanks Ikumi. Should I get you a new pot? I feel bad.”

  There was no answer. I don’t think she heard me. I left and went back to my apartment next door. I headed to the fridge and cracked open another beer. I took a swig, feeling a good buzz coming on my body. I walked back to my computer, ready to start debugging.