Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank AP Almighty....

Frea here. So I'm out of the closet, and I was not beaten to death with my keyboard. I probably wouldn't have survived the ordeal except that I keep the back-up Dr. Pepper in the same closet. Not gonna lie: it was touch and go for awhile until I remembered that. And then I had to wait for the marathon plowin' session to end before AP would negotiate terms for my release.

BUT, dear readers, I am proud to say that I am now out of the closet because I promised to pay a lot closer attention to the Adorable Psycho's sex life.

And trust me, I know exactly how that sounds.

But hey, to celebrate my release, how's about a taste of what's to come next week, hmm?

An Excerpt from Chapter 43 of What Fates Impose

Andy Kohlmeier turned, drawing Chuck’s attention away from the other two. “So, how’s the software game? I have to say, I miss it. I moved into consulting about ten years back, and every once in awhile, I still miss those all-night coding sessions.”

“Consider me jealous. I would like to miss more of those,” Chuck said. “I got less sleep during my final semester at Stanford in my senior C++ seminar than I ever have in my life. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw code.”

Kohlmeier laughed, and the sound was rich and inviting, almost infectious. “Everything’s built on framework now. Makes me nostalgic for the old-school days.”

“Old-school? I’ll give you old-school. My roommate at Stanford and I coded an entire Zork game from the bottom-up on an old TRS-Eighty.”

“What, there wasn’t a DEC PDP-Ten available?”

“Well,” Chuck said, shuffling his feet in an “aw shucks” sort of way, “we didn’t want to seem pretentious.”

This time, Kohlmeier’s laugh made Faulkner look away from Sarah and over at them. “What?” the Swiss national asked, and Chuck learned something new about their target: he didn’t like to be left out of a joke.

“Geek shop-talk, boss,” Kohlmeier said, clapping Faulkner on the shoulder, and Chuck blinked at Sarah to see a brief look of annoyance flit over her face. What had he done now? He gave her a puzzled look, but she gave a minute shake of her head: not now. “Just reliving our glory days, which are farther behind for some of us than others here.”

“I thought you were only twenty-nine?” Chuck asked innocently.

When Andy Kohlmeier gave a genuine belly-laugh, Chuck grinned and sipped his wine. It was hard to imagine that this man would be involved in a secret government conspiracy, though he could suspect Piers Faulkner in a second. Something about the older man just struck him as off.



The nerdery!  It's just leaping off the page!

:)

Frea