Tommy opens his laptop and realizes he is not tense. His finger hangs over the touchpad — by old habit, it expects the portal to open right now and something burned out overnight to spill out of it.
— Well? What is on fire? — he mutters at the screen, almost defiantly.
Nothing is on fire. Coffee, an open portal, a blinking cursor. Nothing to put out. He rereads what he closed yesterday: clean, proven, traces in place.
— A week ago I was coming in here like into a burning room, — he says out loud, and even he does not quite believe himself. — I generated it “quickly,” it broke overnight, go dig for it. And now — silence. Strange, even.
The phone rings. Tom2036, a picture — the very same one he already saw on the darkest night of his life.
Before, he used to swipe away pictures like that without even looking — who knows what this nickname from the future is sending. Now his finger stops on its own and traces along the screen — along the road, along the fork.
— “A turn, not a sentence,” — he reads aloud. — Right. That night. I did not leave the route then. I stayed and handled it.
And then he notices something that makes his insides quietly jolt. The caption arrived intact. During the darkest weeks, Tom2036 tried to help him, and ChronoGuard aggressively censored everything: it hid most of the words under black bars. But today two words are visible; nothing has been blacked out.
— So you finally exhaled over there, huh, — Tommy says into the phone and puts it face down.
Oliver walks by — he glances at what Tommy has on his screen. He watches Tommy, first thing in the morning, before writing a single line of code, create a separate branch for the task, sketch a short brief, and mark what he will use to check it.
— Listen, — Oliver says, and for the second day in a row there is no usual teasing in his voice. — You already do all this on autopilot, right? Branch, plan, checks. You do not think about it — you just do it.
Tommy shrugs.
— I do it and I do it. Why, is that not what I should do? — He does not even immediately get what Oliver means. Creating a branch before work is now like washing your hands before eating — you do not think about it.
— Remember what you said a month ago? — Oliver smirks, but not unkindly. — “Yeah, whatever, the AI will do everything itself, I’ll just press the button.” I thought they’d carry you out of here feet first within a week.
— And they almost did, — Tommy does not argue. That night, when everything fell apart, is now not a disgrace for him, but the starting point. — I just thought then that the main thing was for the AI to keep working nonstop. But the main thing turned out to be for me to keep it in check.
Oliver chuckles. He stands there for another second, looks at the screen where Tommy is creating a branch, and shakes his head — not mockingly, but as if he is taking stock of something. Then he walks on. At the door he slows down a little and looks back. He says nothing. But he had not looked back at Tommy like that before.
On Tommy's desk is the final work task for the launch portal. One final core fix: somewhere in the reward calculation the logic is lying, and it needs to be fixed so it can be carried through the entire usual workflow and handed to the team lead with not a single question. Not “seems to work,” but proven to work.
— Man, I really want to work with real data — he daydreams out loud, glancing at the portal. When the tasks are done, he can bring the static page to life with real data: pull fresh earthquakes into the block radar, like he did with the map radar and the crypto ticker. He remembers that feeling: writing your own project is much more interesting than fixing someone else’s. — But everything in order.
His fingers reach for an empty file in the corner on their own — just to slap together a tiny toy, for no reason at all. Tommy catches his hand halfway there and smiles.
— Not now, — he tells the toy and closes the file. — Stay over there. Work first.
And then an unread message pops up on his phone. One of those buddies Tommy used to do quick under-the-table side gigs with before all this — from his previous life, where everything was done fast and off the books: “Hey, you’re a pro now. Knock together a little site quickly, no accounting department, cash in hand. No spec, no reports, one evening of work. The extra grand is yours.”
Tommy reads it. Rereads it. “The extra grand is yours” — his finger drifts to the reply on its own. The money is real, and the job is nothing — a couple of hours, tops. A month ago he would have already typed, “When do you need it?”
And he froze. Quickly, no spec, no checks, cash in hand. He knows that road. It already led him into that night once before.
His finger is still hanging over the keyboard. He wants to. He really wants to. He closes the chat — does not answer “no” or “yes.” Let it wait: first I’ll finish the work cleanly, then I’ll deal with it. And as he is closing it, he catches himself: a month ago he would not have minimized messages like that. Back then he would have grabbed them first.
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