Page 6 of Bro Code

you know that goal from teh olypmic game aginst latvia that everyon takls about was WEBB’S goal, he typed. It was full of typos. He didn’t care. arseanult just fed him teh pass–

A voice in his ear: “Webb?”

Riley jolted and looked up. “What’s up?”

“Waitin on you, dog.”

He still hadn’t joined the game. He put down the phone and tapped through the menu to configure his settings.

“He is distracting on his own reflection maybe,” Petrov mused in his headset, in his thick Russian accent. “Because he is panty model now.”

“Busy trying on budgie smugglers,” said Anderson.

“Buggy what?”

“Never mind. Just means tighty-whi–”

“I’m not fucking wearing tighty-whities!” Riley snapped. “Are we playing the game, or what?”

“It was a fucking joke, Webb.”

“Sure. No, I got it. Ha ha ha.”

Awkwardly quiet on the line as he finished choosing his options and confirmed. Beside him, the phone lay face-up and the video reached the end and autoplayed from the beginning again.

Eventually, Petrov said, “Sorry.”

They began the game in silence.

Louis

The morning after the game against New York was chaos. Traffic was fucked coming over the bridge; he arrived ten minutes late and spilled coffee on his khakis as he buzzed himself into the Montreal practice complex.

When he got upstairs, he logged in and discovered the AI he’d left running overnight to assemble the morning report had hallucinated twenty-thousand lines. He panic-scrambled a summary together for Holly, and sprinted to the coach briefing to watch her deliver it. Then it was back to his desk in the bull pen to make sure everything was ready for practice at ten-thirty, and he spent the rest of the morning tweaking the AI to make sure it didn’t fuck him again.

He very much did not appreciate being “encouraged” to use the technology that replaced him at his old job and got him laid off last year. Especially when it didn’t even work.

He got back to his desk with a takeout lunch at twelve-fifty and sat breathing deeply with his head tipped back and his eyes closed. He stayed like that until his phone buzzed in his pocket and snapped them open.

Tossing the takeout box onto his desk, he dug out the phone.

A text from Chloé, in French. Are you free? Need to chat about Mom.

Pinching his eyes under his glasses, he typed back, I’m at work. Can it wait?

Reply dots bubbled. How about this evening?

Sighing, he reached over to the desk to wake up his laptop. We have a game

So can I call you at halftime?

There's no halftime sésé, it’s hockey.

OMG ok so when can you talk?

He looked up and stared through the bullpen’s big window at the parking lot. I don’t know. The season just started, it’s busy

You can’t just call me while you’re watching the game?