It's soul-sucking, and I can hardly fathom it, and innumerable bruises and lacerations are making every fine movement of my fingers torture, but here I am—back at the keyboard.

"You've been grinding twenty-six hours on this," I say to Jared and Prisha, who stand together with Paul in my cubicle, "and your code has gotten through the end-to-end Blackquest testing environment how many times?"

The leaders of the two primary modules take a moment counting in their heads. Prisha's typically sleek, well-behaved hair is matted, though otherwise she's come through well enough. The same can't be said for Jared, who smells like brown-wilted cabbage and seems to have a new fringe of neck hair.

"Five," Prisha decides.

Jared whirls on her. "What? We've passed at least two hundreds botlets through the sandbox."

"And the vast majority failed," Prisha says. "The simulator rejects 95% of the botlets' output."

Her glare has more venom than any I've seen her shoot in three months at Codewise Solutions. She's either gained confidence or had her veneer of decorum melted off by the circumstances.

Paul—more practiced at settling squabbles than me—says, "Back up. Why don't you us what you've accomplished so far? Let's focus on that, and not the converse."

This restores civility. Prisha and Jared cool down and describe their progress. The optimization team has unpacked the simulator's matrix of seven variables and calculated a range of possible values for each. They can manipulate the matrix, store its values, compare those values over time. They're able to obtain a handle to the existing algorithm and use it to calculate the output the system would've produced—the output to be lowered.

The injection team, Jared's, has crafted objects ("botlets") that meet the handshake interface agreed to at the start of the project—allowing Prisha's team to catch and use them. The botlets can inject themselves into the host system, evade basic malware countermeasures, and intermittently slip through the shifting sandbox security to the optimization team's waiting arms.

"That's a lot," I say, and mean it. "Now let's talk about that five number. That's five times we've fooled the simulator—beaten the sandbox, taken those seven variables and returned a lower output than before, but within the simulator's accepted bounds. Correct, yes?"

They nod.

"Great. And what's the specific requirement? We need to fool the system for how long?"

Chins fall to chests. Both engineers shuffle furtively until Paul speaks up.

"Perpetuity," he says, the word lumpy from his mouth. "For as long as the—er, the simulation runs."

Our eyes meet, and I know we're both mentally replacing "simulation" with "nuclear power plant." The software needs to swap in allowably lower energy values (who knows what units we're in—Joules, kilowatt-hours) for as long as it remains in place.

What happens if Elite installs our software and it passes a bad value to the plant's core? Does it revert to the old algorithm? Or could a terrible thing happen?

I'm suddenly sympathetic to their insistence on "100%-repeatable success."

We work through lunch, hard and hot, trying to satisfy the simulator by different means. It's a fickle beast. Lopping five percent off the top works occasionally, but not enough to rely on. We change the weightings of the seven variables, testing one at a time, then two at a time, and so forth. The results are inconclusive.

The process is maddeningly slow because Jared's botlets only eke through once every couple minutes.

"We need more from you," I tell him.

He palms his muddy jaw like I just slapped him. "My code beat the sandbox." His sneer is straight out of second grade. "If you want to blame somebody, you should—"

"I don't," I cut in. "Do your botlets have .clone?"

Clone is a function many objects implement; it allows other parts of the system to make copies of itself.

He says, "That wasn't in the interface."

"Didn't ask if it was in the interface."

He raises a shoulder, sulky. "No. It's trivial, though."

"You could?"

"Course."

I smack my mousepad and snap my fingers, reminding myself unwittingly of Carter Kotanchek. "Do it."

I give Jared a minute to write the botlets' clone function, then modify Prisha's optimization module. Instead of simply catching each botlet and sticking in logic from one of our strategies, I clone each botlet a hundred times—scratch that, five thousand times—and give each clone its own strategy.

In the monitor's reflection, I catch Prisha's pupils spinning.

"How..." she begins, "...but won't they—"

"Collide?" I say. "Nope. We should get parallelism for free—have you seen the box Elite has running this sim job?"

High-end modern servers can manage multiple processes running at the same time without the programmer needed to specify a bunch of race conditions—like I'm told they had to in the Stone Ages of the 1990s and 2000s. That beast chugging along in the parking garage may even feature enhanced support for parallelism—dedicated RAM, tripling, who knows what. We'd be fools not to take advantage.

When Jared's next botlet comes through the sandbox, another ninety seconds on, my screen erupts. Green and red text barges down the screen; jagged, urgent lines of it; debugging output from our now-wonderfully voluminous botlets. None of us can read text falling this fast, but there is new electricity around us. Stuff's happening—and quickly.

When the tempest stops, a final summary-stat line reads:

Run time: 4.3s. Botlets deployed: 30000. End-to-end successes: 73. Max consecutive successes: 3.

"Yahtzee!" Paul roars, throwing up his arms.

Prisha and I exchange raised eyebrows at our manager's exultation while Jared turns his trucker hat around, all tough and Go Time!

The army of botlet clones, in four-point-three seconds, has netted us seventy-three successes: ten times the number that had been achieved in the first half of Blackquest 40.

That seventy-three number is the one people are goggling, but the number that interests me—that worries me—is three.

Before I can disabuse everyone of their enthusiasm, I detect a familiar smell. Floral but woody, commanding. A moment after my nose processes this, my eyes find Susan.

"What are we celebrating?" she asks, swinging around my cubicle border.

Paul says, "Deb is absolutely on fire."

Susan looks down at me—I'm sitting in my chair—with glittering admiration. She's changed her suit; it's a shade darker than persimmon. Her stance is forward, balanced, and assured. She might've just come from a day spa.

"So the software piece is on track?" she says. "We're killing this deadline?"

My mouse hand audibly flops over. Did she just use the word 'killing?' Is this all an act? I know Oleg is about, cruising the halls for malcontents; maybe she saw him out of the corner of her eye. Maybe she's being strategic, putting on the illusion Blackquest is just another project, no biggie, we're swell, see?, here we are having regular-project interactions, par for the course.

Still. Susan did see the video of Mom at Crestwood, having eggs forked menacingly toward her face, right? She must have—they beamed it to every screen in the building.

I say, "It's a major longshot."

The three engineers' faces wilt. I'm not usually a downer, but somehow Susan's false cheer pries this sober—and undeniable—estimation out.

Susan squishes her hands together. "We knew this training would be challenging, would force growth on the organization. That was our idea."

And with an as you were tock of the head, she leaves.

That was our idea? Seriously?

Paul watches her go, his eyes with that same incredulous hang mine must have.

The kinship I feel here is hard to trust, coming from our McGriddle and feet-leering start to yesterday morning. I've always written Paul off an an unimaginative plodder, a flat box in an org-chart, but his actions today and the background I've learned are forcing me to reevaluate.

I think about his comment to Oleg that Susan's hiring of me was pure optics. Was he just saying that to save my skin, or did he believe it? Because it sure had the ring of truth.

If my coming aboard was part of some PR scheme, then I swallowed the hook—every inch as deeply as Oleg or CNBC or the Codewise stockholders. I believed I was joining the cream of the crop. I believed we were trending up—and when those layoffs happened, I told myself it was typical Wall Street-driven restructuring.

But everything Paul said squares. Why is Jared leading a module? How come Prisha, who's been in the workforce two measly years, is my best replacement option?

Did I really ditch Google for this?