He worked for three hours straight. He rebuilt the RAID array by hot-swapping a failed SAS drive—the virtual drive was heavy in his hands. He used a command-line tool (which he’d only ever seen in YouTube tutorials) to unlock BitLocker with a recovery key taped to the underside of a keyboard. He reseated a stick of ECC RAM that had come loose during a janitor’s accidental bump.

He slid the card into his Switch. The screen flickered.

A new message appeared. Not a job. A chat window.

The hospital clinic opened on time.

“Tell me where to start,” he said.

Leo grinned. Easy.

He picked up the Joy-Cons.

He installed them. The garage expanded. Suddenly, a back door opened onto a dusty server room. Another door led to a gleaming e-sports lounge with RGB strips that pulsed in time to a low, sub-bass hum.