The headset slid on like a fighter pilot slamming down his helmet visor. And, with a deft gesture, his ears filled with Interpol’s “Slow Hands”.

The coding context unfolded into his headspace and caffeine set fingers a jitter. Task lighting cast a calibrated magic circle. All distractions stranded in shadow beyond the illuminated space would spend hours starved for attention.

Complex sigils flew from his hands as his eyes beheld his own alchemy. The workspace was soon crowded with conditional realities and tenuous notions, these converging and collapsing to give birth to remarkably greater syntheses.

Something good was brewing—he knew it. It was on the verge of precipitation, the parts all but self-assembling into something that made his hair ache.

But the cat—starved for food as well as attention—wrecked the spell. Giving a friendly purr, she leapt onto his workbench, casually scattering the fragile glowing runes hanging in space and toppling over the small cauldron in whose steam they’d been suspended.