“Sure. I’d be happy to.” She sounded light and sincere.
And I was relieved. “When you get here, text me and I’ll come downstairs, so you don’t have to…”run into anyone from the office.
Fuck. It had been easy enough to tell her last night that I was okay being seen with her, but having Fallyn walk into the AcesPlayed offices…
“Yeah, I’d like to avoid that.” She sounded as hesitant as I felt.
“I owe you. Big time.” I hung up and took King back up to the offices with me. The instant I was back at my keyboard, I was immersed in bug fixing again until Fallyn texted me that she was here.
Once again, I headed outside, and found her across the street at Loading Java, the coffee shop there. She was holding two cups as I approached and she handed me one. “You might need this.”
“Thanks.” I wasn’t used to that. “You might need this?” I handed her King’s leash.
Not that I needed to. He was already jumping up on her legs, and she was laughing and crouching down to pet him.
When she straightened up again, I finished giving her instructions, and handed her my car keys as well. “Seriously, I’m eternally grateful for this,” I said.
“It’s not a big deal. I was going to cut out anyway, and Puppy will be good company.” Fallyn shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “So, um, is the issue what you thought?”
I shouldn’t have this conversation with anyone not in the team, but especially not her. “Largely. It caused a few other issues as well. Database corruption, things like that, but mostly it’s the same issue.”
“Can’t you just go back to an old save of the code or something?”
What? No. That was dumb.
I swallowed the response. I forgot that just because Fallyn knew how to break our code didn’t mean she understood how we created it. Most people didn’t. “It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
How to best explain this? “Imagine you’re writing a script for your show. You find a section you don’t like, you edit maybe half a page, and then you go on to make dozens of other little edits—spelling fixes, etcetera—both in the new and old,” I said.
Fallyn nodded. “With you so far.”
“Now multiply that by ten thousand, and that’s what we’re dealing with. Yes, we could roll some sections back, but after we accounted for all the other changes made since then, it’s faster to just manually fix things. Hours instead of days, to make sure we don’t make the issue worse.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “That makes sense. But it sucks you have to do all of this twice.”
I would’ve laughed at the simplicity of the statement if the accuracy didn’t hurt. “It really does.”
“So I’ll let you get back to it.” She tugged lightly on King’s leash.
“Thanks. For everything.” A strange impulse snaked through me, to lean in and kiss her. Not a long, drawn-out, tonsil-tag kind of kiss, but a simplethank youon the forehead. I ignored it, gave her one final wave, and returned to work.
As I sat down at my computer again, I found myself staring at another piece of code I swore we’d fixed, and the exchange with Fallyn, in the car, rushed back to me.This is something you patched months ago in beta.That was what she’d said as she listened to the symptoms.
It made sense she would remember—it was one of the bigger issues she’d pointed out to us. I didn’t like the doubt that accompanied my thoughts.
I’d heard most of the conversation she had with Link this morning, and I believed her when she said she loved the game and wanted to see it thrive.
Which made me hate even more that my mind was ticking through how she could’ve pulled this off. This was a bug she’d originally found. Looking at the code now, what was in here wasn’t written by the original developer who’d worked on this module. Code was like handwriting—everyone’s was just a little different—and after working with some of these people for as long as two decades, I know how each of them did things.
This code snippet was out of place, but more like it was mimicking what surrounded it.
Fuck if the pieces here didn’t fit together the way they should, and the picture they were creating was ofsomeonesabotaging the game.
But it wasn’t Fallyn. The conversation I’d just had with her told me that regardless of her skillset, she didn’t have the knowledge to pull this off.
Someone was working pretty hard to make it look like this was her fault, though. Who?