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thoughts of her. He could almost admit he was stretching to relate the messages to their work on the patent. If what he was doing was being picked up by anyone other than the Editors, he hoped they’d attribute his attention to Blythe to desire and not to the patent. He could fool even himself that his attention was merely a red herring.
    I should be working. There are deadlines.
    The problem was that it wasn’t a red-herring. He longed for her. And it could ruin what he was doing. Ramone flexed his fingers, making fists and tapping the tops of his knees. The work. Not the work he should be doing for the company. His work. He needed to focus, impossible as it seemed. It was more important than the compulsion he felt to get lost in the fiction of Blythe.
    He sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair. His fingers itched to search the feeds for himself and find out if something had been picked up for sure. Instead he went to the break-room the engineers shared with the marketing department at the center of the floor.
    “Ramone! Yo, yo, yo! Ramone,” a male coworker said, raising his hand for a high five. Ramone gave him a half-hearted smile, feeling himself blush at the attention. Dave. That was his name. Ramone could never remember for sure. Tall, blond, and bulky, Ramone recalled hearing somewhere that the man played football in college, hoping for the pros, but, well, he was here. It didn’t happen. Dave worked on the marketing side. The guy certainly didn’t fit in with the engineers on Ramone’s side of the floor. “So, my man, did you catch the hu-u-u-ge game on Saturday?” 
    Ramone dodged the high-five, artlessly ducking toward the soda machine. Dave held a diet drink in one hand and pulled a chair out from a nearby table, plopping down among a group of his colleagues as he watched Ramone.
    “Sorry, no,” Ramone said, glancing over his shoulder quickly then back at the drink selection.
    “It was huge. Pre-season, last season’s bowl winners, man. What were you doing instead? Playing chess?” he chuckled to himself. Ramone cringed, staring at the selections. Dave’s friends joined in the laughter.
    “Not really into football, Dave. Nor am I into chess, if you must know,” Ramone muttered, hoping Dave found nothing to tease him about in that statement.
    “Not into football? Seriously?” Dave whistled. Glancing over his shoulder, Ramone caught Dave smiling broadly at his friends, some of them hiding grins and snickers behind their hands. Other marketing gurus. Ramone hated marketing and usually those who worked in it. They were all the same. Suave. Handsome, usually. Clever. Witty. Or at least they thought they were witty, thought they possessed deep insight into the human psyche. “Not even into chess, eh? Well, what do you do in your spare time, then?” he asked, giving his friends a look that said this should be good.
    Ramone selected a diet drink, retrieved it, and turned to leave, facing Dave head on. Ramone couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. “Actually, Dave, I don’t think simple enough terms exist that would allow me to explain it to you in a way you could understand. But, well, let’s just say that in my spare time, I make small, almost invisible robots come to life.”
    Dave and his cohorts laughed. What are they laughing at? Ramone wondered as he pushed the glass door open, their laughter dying as the door fell closed behind him. Ramone sighed, glancing at the drink in his hand before hurrying back to his cubicle.
    At his desk, Ramone pushed the exchange with Dave out of his mind, sipped the drink thoughtfully, watched a flock of pigeons wheeling on the breeze outside, their white and light gray bodies perforating the still storm-cloud dark sky, and sent another message to Blythe. This one was a link to an article about the quarterly earnings of the social media conglomerates. Even after the video feed explosion—all those violent shows like Gladiators vs. Bears and