Love Bytes Read Online Free PDF

chair, closed his eyes to imagine Violet bent over the sink or against the wall or wherever, being plowed by some lucky guy.
    Some murmurings, soft laughter.
    More silence, then two quick breathy sighs and another “Oh.” Then the blower kicked on and the smell of coffee filled his cramped space, drowning out the action. He rocked backwards in his chair, a grin plastered across his face. This gig was going to be interesting as well as lucrative.
     
    ****
     
    That afternoon, Violet clicked through the emails from the beta testers that flooded her inbox, a growing sense of panic gnawing at her empty stomach. One after the other, the testers reported glitches in the once smoothly running program, anything from an issue with signing into the program to saving scores for multiple users. She sat back in her office chair, rocking back and forth. How did this come up all of a sudden?
    Francis opened the office door, managed to make his way to his desk without bumping into anything, despite the fact he never took his eyes from his cell phone screen. “Vee, did you see this?”
    “I saw it.”
    He looked at her, his expression anxious. “We have a problem.” He dropped into his desk chair, tossed his phone on the blotter. Not a moment later, he picked it up again and dragged his fingers over the screen. “They moved the deadline up two weeks.”
    Violet heard video bird squawks and pigs grunting as he played one of his games. “What the hell, Francis? I didn’t get that…” She turned back to her screen. Right under the frantic emails from the beta-testers, she saw the Edu-Gaming email. She didn’t bother to click on it. “Shit.”
    “I have to think.”
    Violet closed her email program. She’d seen enough. “Stay calm, Francis.”
    “I am calm.” He glanced up at her for a second, and then turned his attention back to his iPhone. “Ice cube calm. No problem that there’s less than two weeks to turn this thing in. No problem at all. We’ll work overtime to correct the mistakes.” He tossed the phone on the desk blotter, birds and pigs still making noises. “We can work miracles, right?” Kicking his chair back, he stared at the ceiling, where he had tacked a poster of Yoda with the words: Do or do not. There is no try. “Miracle workers.”
    Violet watched him, white sleeves rolled to the elbow, neat gray sweater vest, and dark blue pants. When she’d told him one time that he dressed like a mortician, he came in the next day with a green sweater vest so brightly hideous that she begged him to take it off before lunchtime. After that, she never complained again. His style of dress was comforting, dependable. If anyone could handle a crisis, Francis could.
    “And the beta testers reporting problems, when there were no problems before?” An edge of panic tinged his voice. “A one-two punch. Sabotage,” he said, his hands behind his head, still staring at the ceiling. “For this to happen all of a sudden, after all these things were checked, it’s got to be sabotage.”
    Violet shook her head. He could come up with the most outlandish ideas. “You’re paranoid, which I heard goes with depression. Maybe while they were fixing stuff, someone made a mistake?”
    “No way. Not with Rogers’ coding. There are no mistakes, no stray lines of code. The man is a machine.” He removed his glasses and polished them with the little microfiber cloth he kept handy. “Everything has been going well up till now. Sure, we’ve had some glitches, but what software doesn’t? They even allow for it in the competition. But now failure to log in? Can’t save scores? Multiple users can’t access the game. Something else is going on.”
    The panic in his voice was increasing. “Francis. We can run diagnostics on the server. Maybe—”
    He ignored her. “Anti-virus and malware programs are only as good as the information they have.” He picked up his phone, tossed it back on the desk. “If this rogue program was