Chapter 2: The Hero's Burden

James's hands were starting to itch.

He'd been watching for six minutes now. Across the room, one of the new hires was struggling with a routing conflict, staring at a screen full of error logs like they might rearrange themselves if he waited long enough. The young man had joined Nexus Financial Services three months ago, bright and eager and completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the bank's network architecture. Right now, his leg was bouncing under the desk, his fingers hovering over the keyboard without typing anything.

James knew exactly what was wrong. He could see it from across the room. A misconfigured subnet mask was causing packets to route into a dead end. It was a fifteen-second fix. Maybe twenty if you wanted to document it properly.