Marco finished his coffee, which had somehow become cold again. “You want the secret to Popular Entertainment Studios?”

“Push the ‘Oops, All Lag’ patch,” Marco said. “Give everyone a free ‘I Survived the Queue’ hat. That’ll calm the forums.”

A junior executive named Priya found him up there.

And then his pager went off because the Puppet Makeup trailer had caught fire. He sighed, straightened his tie, and walked back into the beautiful, ridiculous storm.

He turned the corner and nearly collided with a runner from , a subsidiary now housed in the old warehouse. The runner was holding a hard drive like a holy relic.

His phone buzzed. It was the head of , the studio’s interactive division. “Marco, the ‘Zombie High’ live-service update crashed. Two million players are stuck in a loading screen that just says ‘Patience, Young Padawan.’”