Jerry scanned the cubicles desperately for someone to show off. Cindy Naismith’s feminist manner was likely to offend them, Larry Fox hadn’t had a bath since they arrived and Danny was too big a risk to even consider. Finally he saw Karl was in his cubicle and steered the group, dragon and all, in there.
"This is Karl Dershowitz, one of our programmers. Karl, you know Bal-Simba and these are, ah, Malus and Petronius."
"Petronus," the wizard corrected, stonefaced.
"Ah, yes. Petronus. Anyway, they’re here observing today and I wanted to show them what you were doing."
Bal-Simba pushed into the stall until he stood directly behind Karl. "What have you there?" he asked.
"I’m working on a sequencing module," Karl told them, slightly awed by Bal-Simba’s bulk and pointed teeth. "This is the part that reports conflicts between the different processors."
"And this is the—ah—sequencer?" Bal-Simba gestured at what sat on the desk.
"No, this is a debugging tool. Each of these demons monitors one of the versions of the code and reports any destructive interactions."
Sitting on Karl’s desk were three monkeys. One had his paws clasped tightly over its ears, another had its eyes clinched shut and the third was covering its mouth. "Hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil," Karl said. "That means everything’s running fine."
"There’s something familiar about those three," Jerry said. "Something in their faces."
Karl looked sheepish. "Well, yeah. That kinda just happened."
The monkey demon in the middle suddenly opened his eyes and glared at the one to his left. He reached out and poked his fingers in the other’s eyes. The demon recoiled and then grabbed his tormentor by the nose, twisting it sideways and leading him around the desk. The third monkey broke up laughing at the sight and the first two turned on him.
"Okay," Karl said, "we’ve got a conflict here. One of the processors jumped the queue and grabbed a resource intended for another one. When they got locked in contention the third processor got more than his share of resources."
He looked down at the orgy of eye-poking, nose-twisting and noggin-bopping going on on his desk.
"Now I recognize them," Jerry said.
"Uh huh," Karl said. "I’ve got the sound turned off. Otherwise it gets kinda noisy in here."
They watched the byplay between the monkey demons for a while longer.
"I know I’m going to regret asking this," Jerry said at last, "but what’s the name of that module?"
"That’s the Scheduling Transport Operating-system Object Generator and Editing System."
Jerry’s lips moved as he worked out the acronym. Then closed his eyes. "I knew I was going to be sorry I asked."
The group backed out of the stall and moved down to the end of the aisle. Several benches had been arranged about the section used as a whiteboard. Jerry gestured for them to sit.
The dragon had decided Jerry and Bal-Simba were all right. He crowded close to Jerry’s legs and bumped his head insistently on his calf. Absently, Jerry reached down and scratched him on the scales behind his pointed ears.
"Have some tea?"
Bal-Simba’s nose wrinkled. I thank you, no." The others also shook their heads and the wizards started to sit down.
The dragon sighed luxuriously and pressed harder against Jerry’s legs, forcing him to shift his stance or be knocked off balance. Jerry sat down on the bench harder than he intended, causing the other end to jump up and smack Petronus on the bottom as he sat down. The wizard glared, Jerry reddened and the dragon wuffed insistently, demanding more scratching.
"I want to apologize. Things aren’t usually this lively."
"I should hope not," Petronus said.
"Quite a display," Malus said. "Attacked by a swarm of miniature demons as soon as we entered."
"Oh, they weren’t attacking us," Jerry assured him. "They were playing a game. The idea is to shoot down your opponent’s fighter."
"Your opponent’s fighter?" asked Bal-Simba. "You mean those demons were not self-motivated?"
"Oh no. What would be the fun of that? The idea is to outfly the other guy."
"So each of those—fighters?—was directly controlled by a magician."
"Sure. At least most of them are. A few were probably drones thrown in to improve the dogfight simulation, but…"
"Dogs?" asked Malus. "You call those dogs?"
"Well, no, but it’s called a dogfight you see, and…"
"If the creatures who are fighting are not dogs, why call it a dogfight?" The pudgy wizard waggled his finger at Jerry. "Confusion. That’s what this new magic of yours does, it sows confusion everywhere."
"No, you see…" But he was interrupted before he could get any further.
"Fox," a female voice proclaimed from the other end of the Bull Pen, "that’s disgusting!"
Cindy Naismith came striding down the aisle, eyes blazing, with Larry Fox trailing behind her.
"Jerry, I want you to do something about this right now!"
"Cindy, can’t you see we’re having a meeting?"
"Now!" Cindy demanded.
Jerry turned to the wizards. "Ah, excuse me, Lords." Then he faced Cindy and Larry. "Let’s go talk, shall we?" and he herded them down to the opposite end of the Bull Pen.
"What the hell is this all about?" Jerry hissed as soon as they were safely away from the inspection party.
"It’s about the so-called user interface this cretin wrote for the front end."
"The code’s in spec," Larry said sullenly.
"Spec my ass!" Cindy blazed. "That routine is pornographic and demeaning to women!"
"Pornographic code?" Jerry asked, totally bewildered.
"Here," Cindy said. "See for yourself!" She turned and gestured to call up the demon. There was a small billow of pinkish smoke above the central table. It writhed and coalesced into solid flesh. Very solid and very pink.
Jerry gaped. "Holy shit!"
The demon was gorgeous, voluptuous and totally nude. A mass of blue-black hair spilled down over her shoulders, her blue eyes were alight with amusement and promise. She smiled at her watchers and ran a pink tongue tip over her blood-red lips in a way that was blatant invitation. Then she stretched and reclined on the table in a way that made her enormous breasts ride even higher on her ribcage and her dark nipples stick out like strawberries.
In the small part of his mind that was not totally occupied by the vision stretched out on the table, Jerry realized that all three wizards could see what was going on. In fact Malus was standing on the bench and craning his neck to get a better view.
"It gets worse," Cindy said. "You should see the things she does!"
"Yeah," breathed Jerry. "I mean, no. Of course not!" The demon shifted her shoulders and pointed her delicate toes at him, still smiling.
"Well, it’s supposed to be user-friendly," Larry said in an aggrieved tone. "Hey, I offered to do a male version. Tom Selleck or something. But noooo, she wants to spoil everyone’s fun."
"If that’s your idea of fun…"
The demon smiled again and scissored her legs in a way that showed off her dark pubic patch.
"That’s enough!" Jerry said sharply, tearing his eyes away from the demon.
"Look," Jerry mumbled, examining his shoelaces, "this module is supposed to help the user, not distract him. Do some work on that interface, all right?"
As Jerry walked away he heard Danny whisper urgently. "Hey Larry, give me that code, will you?"