An alarm clock, a phone — and the first thing that catches his eye is not code, but a new image from Tom2036.
Tommy is used to the fact that he does not understand half of these morning messages, and long ago stopped tripping over them. He puts the image aside in the back corner of his mind, where he keeps everything unexplained from the guy from the future, and reaches for his work tasks.
At work, Tony catches him first — as always, by the coffee machine, and as always, with that same one:
A month ago Tommy would have tensed up. There usually would have been nothing to show, and he would have had to wriggle out with a “it’s almost ready” and quickly change the subject. But today he is in a great mood. And Tommy catches himself not dodging. For the first time, he is not waiting for the blow — he is striking first.
“Oh, Tony, just the guy I was looking for,” he says and, without letting him open his mouth, fires off a barrage. “Listen, I have a few questions about the landing page: are we going with a dark theme or a light one? Big logo or modestly in the corner? A livelier font or a stricter one? I do not want to guess and then redo everything.”
Tony gives him a taste of his own medicine.
“Well… what do you think?”
“That is exactly what I think,” Tommy picks up without slowing down. “Brighter grabs attention, but it can feel cheap. More serious looks more solid, but boring. We will decide that together. You go ahead and take a stab at it, and I will tune it to that.”
“Y-yeah…” Tony is already drifting. “Let us look at both options and then decide.”
There it is. Exactly what he needs: a clear task that could be strictly questioned in a day still has not been born. But Tony will come away with something else in his head — the guy knows his stuff, digs deep, does not slack off. Tommy nods busily, while inside he quietly rejoices: the landing page has not moved a pixel, but right now he looks not like someone dragging his feet, but like someone keeping everything under control. The questions are real — and someday they will really have to be answered. Only he pulled this off not with code, but with his face, and that makes it doubly sweet.
Freed from reporting to his boss, Tommy immediately reaches for his own project. His personal sandbox pulls harder than the work landing page — there he is his own boss and levels up a new skill every day. He sits down at the laptop and, in his usual lazy way, throws this at Sam:
Create a new game, you know which one, something more interesting.And, as has already become the norm, instead of an immediate miracle — the familiar wall. Sam does not jump into coding from “you know which one,” but calmly passes the ball back: what game, how do you play it, what is most important in it, what should make it hook people? A month ago that would have driven Tommy up the wall — he wanted a miracle at the click of a finger. Now he just snorts: he learned the rule the hard way — without a clear order, development does not start, no matter how hard you push.
He is already about to type out the details — and then stops. What, exactly, is there to spell out? There is no order at all. There is only a vague desire: not just “another game,” but one that would be nice to open and show off. “Something more interesting” did not convince Sam — and rightly so, it does not convince Tommy himself either. What he needs here is not someone who will build from a blueprint, but someone who will help him feel out that blueprint.
Tommy closes the terminal with Sam and heads over to Alex.
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