Free Single Player by Elia Winters Page B

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.
    â€œThank 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.
    â€œMind if I take a look?” Elliot walked in.
    â€œBe 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?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œSilas, 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.
    â€œA 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.”
    â€œI’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