carl@fire

Carl's phone buzzed, and a call notification was displayed on the AR display of his glasses. He'd just gotten up to start helping with the dishes after winding down from the amazing Vol-provided dinner by hearing about Sammy's and Bobby's days—and while nothing super important seemed to have happened, obviously he was gonna ask just in case—but it seemed like he was going to have to put cleanup on hold now since he recognized the number as coming from the office, which put him in mind of a call he'd sort of been dreading.

"Gotta take this, I think," he said, giving an apologetic look as he headed quickly out of the kitchen and towards the stairs. He cleared his throat as he walked, hoping that he could muster up his Professional Voice despite having shifted fully out of work mode for the day some time ago.

"Hello," he decided to use as his opener while he ascended the stairs.

"Carl, hi, it's Charles," said Charles Massey, CEO of Fire Entertainment, in his quiet, baritone voice. "Do you have a few minutes to chat?"

Carl entered his office like he usually did when he got work calls at home, but he froze immediately when he spotted the small stack of neatly folded clothes next to the bed, recalling that this wasn't going to be his office again for at least a few more days. "Uh, yeah," he remembered to say, recovering from the disorientation that the disruption in his work rhythm brought with it. "I've got a while."

"Good, good," Charles said in a way that was partly considerate of the time and partly expecting that it didn't matter what time it was because he was The Boss. "I wanted to make sure we had a chance to talk about what's going on."

"Right," Carl said, now having made it to his own bedroom, since that was less weird than taking a call in his oldest daughter's bedroom. "It's pretty serious."

"That's understating it from what I was told," Charles said without humor. "I appreciate that you brought it to my attention."

Carl grimaced. "Yeah, I wish I'd looked at it sooner, but—"

"No, Carl," Charles interrupted, "I'm glad that you brought it to my attention instead of sweeping it back under the rug or trying to be a hero and potentially making things worse. It's not often I've had the pleasure of working with someone who's still capable of showing this level of humility after rising so high up in the hierarchy. Knowing and being able to admit one's own limits and shortcomings is one of the greatest forms of strength in my estimation."

Carl decided to sit on the bed instead of leaning from one foot to the other in the middle of the room. "I felt it was best to make sure the company arrived at the solution with the lowest risk, and I know that, at a minimum, my daughter Bobby would probably never forgive me if I broke the game she loves."

While he'd had that call with Gab earlier and been told that he wasn't getting fired, he still wasn't sure that he believed it given his monumental screw-up that was at the center of all this. He was going into this call as though it was his chance to make a pitch for his continued employment, and, despite how annoying things had been at the office and how weird they'd also gotten with the whole Gary thing lately, he wasn't interested in working anywhere else now.

Fire Entertainment was likely to be the one place he could work that his daughters would think was cool, so there was nowhere he'd rather be.

Charles was silent for a few seconds. "Carl, I'm going to tell you a story I haven't told many people," he began at last. "I think you're one of the few who can really appreciate it, and I think you'll understand why the company is the way it is afterwards.

"When I set Fire on the path to making New Era, I said that I was tired of a small world with small ideas. In truth, I was tired of a world that lacked the ideas I wanted. The ideas I needed.

"I had a daughter. Mimi was diagnosed with Myotonic dystrophy when she turned eight. Her muscles were degenerating over time, and, despite receiving the best care I could buy, she needed a wheelchair to get around by the time she turned eleven."

Carl beat a fist softly on his leg, recalling the news article he'd read several years ago about the topic.

"When she turned twelve," Charles continued, "I set Fire Entertainment towards its most ambitious project, one that was called impossible by those with small minds. But I had no choice, Carl. The only way my daughter would ever walk again would be in virtual reality. The only way she could be free again was in a world that wasn't shackled by the small ideas of the doctors who said that there was nothing more that could be done for her, that she was doing remarkably well considering her condition.

"Maybe it was foolish, but it was Mimi who drove me forward on such a reckless path. It was for my daughter's sake that I took out loans that were deemed insane in order to hire people far brighter than me to realize my dream. I worked myself to the bone, and then I kept going. When Roger went home to see his family, I napped for an hour at my desk and kept picking away at the most difficult game engine issues we came across. Mimi was doing well, but her doctors weren't confident that she'd even live to see twenty.

"I had to finish the game, but I couldn't. The brain link technology, even with the greatest minds on the planet working fully on it without distractions, was just too far beyond anything else that had ever been done before to be finished by the time I needed it. The year before New Era launched, Mimi passed away."

Carl sucked in a breath.

Losing one of his daughters was the most terrible thing he could imagine.

"New Era is my daughter's memorial," Charles said in the same, stony tone that he always spoke in. "Some may think me crazy, but I see it as the continuation of her life in this world. It will never have downtime because a life cannot have downtime. If New Era is to go offline for any reason, then I would rather see it stay offline than face the cruelty of seeing it resurrected when she couldn't be."

Carl breathed again, deeper this time, feeling his eyes stinging a little. "I get it," he said roughly after a moment.

The call was quiet for a while. "Fire Entertainment is my family now," Charles said. "We're privately-owned for that reason. So long as nobody disrupts my family—as Gary did—then I'll continue to treat them as family.

"You've given up too much time from your own family to help mine, Carl, and that's my fault. I listened when people advised me to cut your department's resources to nearly nothing once Gary was gone, and I shouldn't have. We're going to make that right. I've already signed off on some changes to that end. I've asked Gab to go through it all with you next time you're in the office."

"Uh," Carl said. Things were really moving quickly, and it was tough for him to keep up with the shift, but it was sort of sounding like this was confirming the things that he'd thought he misheard earlier? "That's really…thoughtful?" he said, though he wasn't sure that was exactly the word he was looking for to describe the feeling of having his significant screw-up turn into a situation that seemed like it was going to be benefiting him in a significant way. "Thanks, Charles."

"I won't keep you," Charles said in a Wrapping Things Up sort of tone. "I won't ask you to agree with my reasoning, but I think you understand why things are the way they are. Enjoy your evening, Carl."

"Thanks for sharing that with me," Carl said as he ruminated. "Have a good night yourself."

"Thanks, Carl," Charles said.

The call ended, and Carl sat in place for a while as he thought over everything he'd just heard. It wasn't what he'd expected, that was for sure. He'd never imagined that New Era's creation and Massey's own eccentric tendencies could've been motivated by that sort of thing, but, as he continued to consider the odd call, which was maybe only the fourth or fifth time he'd even talked to the man, it sort of made sense. The game had been such a monumental leap forward from everything else that was on the market, both in scope and technology, that there had to have been a strong force driving it from the top beyond just some idea of profits at the end.

He sighed. The other man's story had brought with it a sense of melancholy, and he now fully understood why it was that Fire Entertainment's CEO had always seemed so dispassionate.

Regardless of how amazing and awesome New Era was, it wasn't going to bring Massey's daughter back.