54
Dale told himself that no malign deity was rolling on the floor in laughter.
Any time he had a short night, his body didn’t want to obey any instructions beyond sprawl and vegetate. If a Detroit Network Services outage had kept him up late, he always spent the next day with his feet up on his couch, completing the outage documentation and coming up with ideas to prevent a recurrence. When his brain and body were that tired, he didn’t dare change anything.
Today, his meat suit objected to brushing his teeth and finding real pants and a shirt. Lacing his arches into those too-small shoes felt like strapping himself into a medieval torture boot. An endless five minutes waiting for the elevator convinced him that his oversize laptop bag weighed too much to haul around today. He left the
