While Mike had fine hair, he played neither golf nor tennis, was ugly as a troll and short as an elf. Despite these handicaps he was working himself steadily up the corporate ladder. He had recently gotten an unasked-for raise in lieu of promotion, which surprised the hell out of him, and other rattling noises had been heard that indicated the possibility of further upward mobility.

The office he moved into was not much; there was barely room to turn his swivel chair, it was right next to the break room so several times a day it was overwhelmed by the smell of popcorn, and he had to install a hanging book rack for his references. But it was an office, and in a time of cube farms that meant everything. Someone in the background was grooming him for something and he just hoped it was not a guillotine. Unlikely — he was the kind of aggressive pain in the ass every company secretly needed.

He was currently in a mood to kill. The overblown applets on the newest client’s site were slowing their page to a crawl. Unfortunately, the client insisted on the “little” pieces of code that were taking up so much of their bandwidth, so it was up to him to figure out how to reduce it.

He sat with his feet propped on his overloaded desk, gripping and releasing a torsional hand exerciser as he stared up at the “Tick” poster on his ceiling and thought about his next vacation. Two more weeks and then it would be blue surf, cold beer and coral reefs. I should have gone SEAL, he thought, his face fixed in a perpetual frown from weight lifting, and become a surfing instructor. Sharon looks good in a bikini.

He had just taken a sip of stale, cold coffee, thinking blue thoughts of Java surgery, when his phone rang.

“Michael O’Neal, Pre-Publish Design, how can I help you?” The phone snag and stock answer were performed before his forebrain kicked in. Then he nearly spit out his coffee when he recognized the voice.