Free Single Player by Elia Winters Page A

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?”
    â€œI’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?
    â€œDon’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