The polished concrete of my new office floor felt cool under my sneakers, even through the thick rug Harry had insisted on. The room still smelled faintly of fresh paint and new wood, a scent that hadn't yet been chased away by the familiar smells of old coffee and stress. The day after the tour. Obsidian Works was no longer just a shell company on paper. Desks were being assembled in the bullpen downstairs. Two early-hire developers, referrals from Harry's network, were already plugged in on the second floor, their monitors casting a pale blue glow in the otherwise dim space. The industrial-sized coffee maker in the break room gurgled perpetually, filling the air with the acrid smell of cheap, strong roast. My own mug sat half-empty on the desk, the contents long gone cold.
I was staring at a resume on my laptop screen, my eyes gritty from a morning spent interviewing. The candidates had ranged from eager but green CS grads to jaded veterans from big studios who'd lost their spark. This next one, though… this one had promise. The file name was simple: Sky_Portfolio.pdf. No last name. Self-taught. Her portfolio was a breath of fresh air—clever Unity puzzle mods, a slick-looking endless runner prototype, code snippets that were clean and commented. It screamed raw, unfiltered talent. Harry's talent scout had flagged it with three stars and a note: "Hungry. Smart. Unconventional background. Worth a look."
The intercom on my desk, a sleek, minimalist thing Gaia had integrated, buzzed softly.
Gaia (via intercom): Next candidate is at the main door, Peter. Sky. Bio-metrics and public records cross-check complete.
I saw her image
I let out a slow breath. Daisy Johnson. So that was it. The pieces clicked into place with a quiet, internal thud. In another life, in another stream of probability, she was Quake. An S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, an Avenger-level powerhouse who could level city blocks with a thought and possibly a mutant A destroyer of worlds. Here, now, sitting in my lobby? Just Sky. A foster kid with a killer portfolio and a serious Candy Smash addiction.
Don't interfere too much, I told myself, the mantra I'd adopted since the System integrated. But knowing how this world is....it's definitely going to back fire
"Thanks, Gaia. Let her in," I said, my voice sounding calm even to me.
The heavy glass door to my office hissed open on silent hinges. She stepped in.
Sky Daisy was in her early twenties. Her dark hair was pulled back into a messy but practical ponytail. She wore a faded band hoodie over jeans that had seen better days. A heavy, well-worn backpack was slung over one shoulder, looking like it contained her entire digital life. She had an easy, open face, and her eyes were sharp, taking in the room, the view, me, in one quick, assessing sweep.
She walked up to my desk and stuck out her hand. Her grip was firm, confident.
Sky: Hi. Sky. We, uh, talked on the phone last week? About the junior dev position?
I shook her hand, my brain momentarily stuttering. I'd done so many phone screens.
Peter: Right, right. Sorry, long morning. Have a seat, Sky.
She dropped into the chair across from me with a slight, self-deprecating chuckle, setting her backpack down carefully.
Sky: No worries. Happens. And it's just Sky, by the way. No last name. Foster system classic. Makes tax forms an adventure.
I nodded, forcing my expression to remain neutral, professional. Daisy Johnson. No quake vibes. No hidden tension in her shoulders. She's just a kid looking for a break. I pulled her file back up on my screen.
Peter: Got it. Sky. Your portfolio really stood out. Thanks for coming all the way out here.
Sky: Are you kidding? I would've walked. Seriously. This is about Candy Smash.
She said it with such earnest, unabashed fervor that I had to smile.
Peter: Oh yeah?
Sky: Yeah! I'm, like, pathologically hooked. My username's CANDYGIRL123. You can probably look me up. I've been playing since the day it dropped. The tile cascades? The way the multipliers chain without feeling totally random? It's… it's perfect. I even tried to decompile some of the APK on my old laptop—not to pirate or anything, I swear! Just to see how you managed the RNG. It's fair, but it's sticky. It makes you want just one more game. Every time.
Curious, I pulled up the live player analytics dashboard Gaia maintained. A quick search for CANDYGIRL123. The stats popped up. My eyebrows climbed.
Peter: Top point-zero-five percent. Average daily playtime… nine hours. You're the one who bought every holiday cosmetic pack during the snowflake event.
She didn't look embarrassed. She grinned, a wide, genuine thing that lit up her face.
Sky: Guilty as charged! Those snowflake combos were genius! I grinded for that icy crown for, like, three nights straight. My roommates staged an intervention. They call it my 'candy coma.'
Peter: Sky… nine hours a day. You know I have to say this as both a potential employer and a fellow human: you might need to, uh, touch some grass.
She laughed, waving a hand.
Sky: Mom-voice detected. I get it, I get it. But it's not like I'm skipping life. I was working retail until last month—Target, the night shift. Stocking shelves, dealing with coupon Karens at 2 AM. This… She gestured around the office, at the computers visible through the glass wall. This is the dream. Coding for the game I'm obsessed with? It's not even work. My goal is to get stable, build a real portfolio, not just mods. Long-term, I want to make my own thing. A narrative puzzle game, maybe. Where the choices you make actually reshape the world, not just give you a different ending slide.
She leaned forward, her enthusiasm palpable.
Sky: And working for you? That's the big draw. You're the guy who built Candy Smash solo on a laptop. That's legendary. This place feels like a real startup, not some corporate cubicle farm. I'd crunch here, happily, if it meant learning how you think.
Her directness was refreshing. I decided to match it.
Peter: Alright, fair. Let's talk shop then. This endless runner in your portfolio—the procedural terrain generator. Walk me through the core loop. What was the biggest technical hurdle?
Her posture shifted immediately. She wasn't just an eager fan anymore; she was a developer solving a problem.
Sky: Okay, so the core is the Perlin noise for the hills, right? But making it feel smooth at high speed was the trick. I couldn't have the player hitting an invisible wall because the next chunk didn't generate in time. So I threaded it. A background worker pre-calculates the next three 'chunks' of the course while the main thread handles rendering and input for the current one. Power-ups stack combinatorially—grabbing a speed boost while you have a shield active creates a temporary 'sonic boom' effect that clears debris.
Peter: Mobile optimization? Battery drain is the silent killer of endless runners.
Sky: Threading helped there too. I locked the frame rate to 60, but built in a dynamic scaler. If the device starts to chug or the battery dips below 20%, it automatically cuts the render resolution, simplifies particle effects, and drops the FPS cap to 30. It's not as pretty, but it doesn't crash. Tested it on my ancient Android—ran for an hour, battery only dropped to 82%.
I was impressed. She wasn't just reciting theory; she spoke from the grind of actual testing.
Peter: Good. Edge cases. What if a player finds a way to manipulate the seed to replay a 'perfect' run for a high score?
A glint of pride in her eye.
Sky: Seeded per a hash of the device ID and the system timestamp in milliseconds. So even if you force-close and restart instantly, you're extremely unlikely to get the same sequence twice. I left a debug mode with fixed seeds for testing, but that's not in the public build. And for the leaderboards? All run data is hashed and validated server-side. If the hash doesn't match the gameplay data packet, score gets rejected.
We volleyed like that for twenty minutes. Architecture, bug fixes, player psychology. I asked for a war story.
Sky: Oh man. Freelance job last year. A small indie launch party app. Goes live, user surge hits, and bam—server melts. I'm on call. Logs show an infinite loop in the leaderboard sync. A rookie mistake—a query pulling tens of thousands of rows at once instead of batching. I traced it, wrote a hotfix to batch pulls in groups of a hundred, pushed it at 3 AM. Had to manually roll back some corrupted scores and issue refunds. Client was so grateful they sent me a case of Monster and a bonus.
Peter: I feel that. Candy Smash launch night. Our servers buckled at a million concurrent. Thought it was a DDoS. Turned out the database was getting hammered by achievement unlock pings. Spent three hours in panic mode, sharding tables on AWS while players screamed on the forums.
Her eyes went wide.
Sky: No way! How did you not have a heart attack?
Peter: Adrenaline and a truly terrifying amount of caffeine. It was a brutal lesson. Now, autoscaling is baked into the architecture from day one.
Sky: Savage. That's the kind of fire I want to be in the middle of. So, what's the culture here? Is it… crunch-till-you-drop?
Peter: Anti-crunch. Firm. Forty to fifty hours max, flex time. We've got a gym going in downstairs, nap pods on order. Burnout writes bad code. I'd rather have a rested team that's sharp than a exhausted team that makes mistakes we have to fix at 3 AM.
The relief on her face was immediate and profound.
Sky: Thank god. My last freelance gig was the opposite. Eighty-hour weeks, the project lead screaming about deadlines. I walked after a month. My mental health wasn't worth it. This… this sounds sustainable.
Peter: It has to be. My aunt's rule: no point building a life you're too tired to live. Same goes for games.
She nodded vigorously.
Sky: I love that. So… practical stuff. Salary range for a junior position? Benefits?
Peter: Starting at sixty thousand. Full health, dental, vision. 401k with a four percent match. And equity. A small grant that vests over two years. Bonuses are tied to project milestones—launch bonuses, that kind of thing.
Sky: Equity? Seriously? That's… that's amazing. That makes it feel real. Like I'm building something, not just filling a seat.
Peter: That's the idea. So, one more fan question: what's the one Candy Smash feature you can't quit?
She didn't even hesitate.
Sky: The combo bombs. The way they start a chain reaction that can fill the whole screen with rainbows and multipliers. The sound design, the screen shake… it's pure dopamine. I've spent… probably too much on booster packs for those.
Peter: Designed to be satisfying. But, again, maybe budget those booster packs. I don't want my employees going broke playing our game.
She laughed.
Sky: Deal. So, work style? Are people siloed, or is it collaborative?
Peter: Heavily collaborative. Whiteboard sessions, daily stand-ups. But we respect deep work time too. No micromanaging. If you get your work done, I don't care if you do it at 3 PM or 3 AM.
Sky: Perfect. Solo coding gets lonely. You need people to bounce ideas off of. What's the growth plan? Hiring fast?
Peter: Steady ramp. Maybe twenty people by summer. And I want junior dev input. You'll be in pitch meetings, design discussions. Your voice matters.
She looked genuinely surprised, then thrilled.
Sky: You mean that?
Peter: I do. The best ideas can come from anywhere. The company's called Obsidian for a reason. It's sharp, it's tough, and it cuts through the noise.
We talked vision for another ten minutes. She pitched an idea for a co-op puzzle mode in a potential Candy Smash sequel, solving latency issues with a clever peer-to-peer fallback system. It was smart.
Finally, I leaned back. I'd made my decision five minutes into the technical deep-dive.
Peter: Sky. The job's yours if you want it. Can you start Monday? Nine AM orientation.
For a second, she just stared. Then a huge, disbelieving smile broke across her face. She shot up from her chair, doing a little, silent fist-pump.
Sky: Hell yes. Yes! Thank you. I won't let you down. So… how big is the team right now?
Peter: You'll be number eleven in the core dev group. We'll grow from there, but slowly. I want to keep the indie feel. Tight, creative, no bloat.
Sky: Eleven. That's perfect. Not a faceless corporation. Okay. Monday. 9 AM. I'll be here.
She grabbed her backpack, still smiling like she'd won the lottery. At the door, she paused and looked back.
Sky: Hey… how big do you see this getting? Eventually?
Peter: Maybe thirty, forty in the first year. If we do it right, we won't need five hundred people to make great games.
Sky: That's the dream. See you Monday, boss.
The door clicked shut behind her. The quiet of the office rushed back in, deeper now. I stared at the closed door.
Daisy Johnson. Quake. In another life, you shattered planets. Here, you just want to make puzzle games and finally have health insurance. Harry, what web did you stumble into? Or did you know?
The System was silent. No warnings. No alerts. Just the hum of the servers in the wall and the gurgle of the coffee maker down the hall.
My phone vibrated on the desk. A text from Gwen.
Gwen: Hungry? I'm outside your fancy new building. Brought sandwiches. Rescue me from the December wind?
A smile tugged at my lips, pushing the cosmic thoughts aside. The future was a tangled web, but some threads were simple, and good.
Peter: Be right down. Saved me from cold coffee.
I stood, my new office feeling less like a blank slate and more like the beginning of something. It felt fuller already.
Sky's pic in comments