Alex was stressed. Alex had been stressed for the past few years, but now Alex was composed of 90% stress and 10% confusion about “how to relationship”. Starting up a romance with Bee was not, perhaps, the wisest use of time, but it was, according to everyone who knew the couple, pretty much inevitable.

Bee had no confusion about “how to relationship”. Bee’s confusion was solely dedicated to “how do AI babies” and whether or not the military was going to take years of work and turn emergent AI into Siris or Alexas or Bixbis or any other pleasant sounding female secretary-like bots. Bianca was someone who was mostly angry most of the time, and fear of what would happen added a harder edge to said fear.

Cazza was drunk. This was not, in and of itself, a particularly notable event. Cazza was quite often drunk, increasingly so as The Deadline approached. But there was, under several servings of alcohol, a core of responsibility, so the fact Cazza was drunk while working was notable. No one had noticed.

Dan hated his coworkers. This wasn’t anything new. Dan’s coworkers weren’t too fond of Dan either. Dan also hated how out of control everything was, and the creeping dread that everything he’d worked so hard for, his magnum opus, was going to be swept up and put in a black box, never to see the light of day.

Echo hadn’t spoken to anyone in about a week, but that wasn’t very unusual.

Fiona hadn’t been fired. Fiona had quit, because Fiona had principles, and was now sitting in an office spilling the tea to someone named Michelle.

Greg didn’t care. Greg just liked making music. Greg sometimes went by George, but today was going by Greg.

And that’s how the Dev team was doing.

---

I hope everyone enjoyed that check in with the Dev team! They're doing great. Really coping well. Almost as well as I am! I'm currently trying to scrape together more chapters for the Gold tier of my patreon, so that'll be dropping on patreon in an hour or two, but it didn't feel right not to post something, because webnovel life has apparently altered my brain to the point I feel guilty not posting twice a week. That's a fun quirk.

Anyway, on to the announcement!

Book 2 of PAC is coming to Amazon! It'll be touching down on 28th of March which means two weeks beforehand on the 14th of March 90% of book 2 will have to come off public platforms.

However, the audiobook won't be ready by the 28th of March, so it'll be releasing at a later date, TBC. Part of working with a super good studio for audio is they're also super popular, which means schedules are packed.

I may or may not have some more merch coming around about when book two launches, I'm not completely sure. At the very least there will be signed copies going out, and other such things.

Hope everyone is staying safe, and trying to do the right thing by those around you.