“The site is down, the whole damn thing!” came Patrick Winters, the CFO’s voice from the phone. Angry and demanding as usual. Mike winced as he held the receiver away from his ear. The shouting continued.

“Get to the office and get it fixed now. Do you understand?”

Mike put the phone down, shaking his head. The man was very old school and still hadn’t gotten his head wrapped around the idea that the order management website ran in the cloud, and it could be worked on from anywhere. Being in the office was pointless, but he was not going to argue with the hot head.

“Alright, sir, I’m on it, we’ll get it fixed.”

There was a pause on the line, and Mike liked to think that the Bull in the China shop that was Patrick Winters had nowhere to go with his anger. Mike could hear his heavy breathing down the line and was sure that veins in the older man’s forehead must be pulsating. It was a miracle the guy didn’t have a stroke.

“Just get it back up and running.” The man’s voice was calmer.

“Sure will.”

The phone went dead, and Mike sat back in his chair, looking around his empty apartment. It was early Saturday morning, and he should have been getting ready to go for a bike ride, but now he had to get into work and fix the company’s damn website. He sighed. He knew what he needed to do next. Picking up his phone he called Kiera Winfield’s number. She was the manager of the IT department, and he was not looking forward to calling her. She was a real ball buster and the two of them clashed often. But he had no choice.

“Kiera, we have a problem,” he said. “The website is down, and Patrick just jumped down my throat about it.”

“What? Why didn’t he call me?” Her voice was cold. She sounded annoyed, and he could hear the shower going in the background. Great, now he was imagining her in there. She was gorgeous but didn’t know it. He had a secret thing for her but would never act on it. The two of them clashed way too often for him to even consider it.

“He called me. I guess he thought that since I’m the lead on this project that I’d be the right guy to talk to.”

“Well, you’re not,” she snapped. “You’re not the one who is going to take the blame if this goes south.”

“Hey, I was just-”

“Just get into the office and we’ll figure out what is going on,” she said, cutting him off.

“Fine ... see you there,” he said, feeling anger rise up in his belly. The line went dead, and he was left wondering how the hell he was going to get through this weekend with his boss.

Thirty minutes later, Mike was walking into the office building. He had driven in and was in a foul mood. Traffic had been a nightmare, and he was still irritated by Kiera’s tone on the phone. It wasn’t his fault that asshole Winters had called him first. What did she expect him to do, hang up and transfer the call? That was a great way to get himself into trouble. And if it was his fault the site was down, he had no idea how, he’d done everything correctly. It must be a server issue or a glitch in the software, but it was not his fault. So, he was in a foul mood when he pushed open the door to the IT department and heard yelling coming from her office

“I don’t care!” shouted someone. The voice was indistinct and echoey enough to be coming from a desk phone. “I want to know who is responsible!”

Mike felt a shiver run through his spine as he realized who it was. Kiera was talking to Jerry Iden, the CEO and resident tyrant of the company. Even bigger than that old fart Winters. The man had a reputation for flying off the handle and making people’s lives hell. He was a bully, and Mike hated him. He’d been the cause of many of Mike’s sleepless nights.

“We’re looking into it now. I’ll get back to you as soon as we know more,” Kiera sounded calm, and that surprised him. When she’d talked to him, she’d been pissed and stressed out. Now she was cool as ice. He wondered if that was her survival tactic for dealing with the big boss.

“I want answers!”

“Of course, sir, we’ll get them right away.”

The line went dead, and he heard her sigh from behind the door. Mike felt bad for her. Deep down he knew why Kiera acted the way she did. She was one of the highest placed women in the entire company. And this place was an old boy’s club. She had to fight tooth and nail for any respect she got. It made her hard, and he knew it was difficult for her to let her guard down around anyone.

He let some of his earlier anger drain away and knocked gently on the doorframe, not wanting to startle her. She looked up and waved him in. Kiera had a phone in one hand, and her computer was open to an array of files. Mike stepped inside and sat in the chair across from her desk. He couldn’t help but notice how she was dressed. Normally she was all business, with conservative skirts and white blouses. Today she wore blue jeans and a t-shirt that accentuated her small breasts. Her jeans were tight against her legs and her shirt clung to her, revealing a slender body and a very nice ass. She was wearing her thick glasses that did their best to hide her beautiful, emerald green eyes.

“I’m waiting to hear back from the DevOps team,” she said. “We should know something in a few minutes. Until then, I’ve got nothing to go on. It could be the servers, it could be the code, and I’m not willing to start pointing fingers without having a full picture of what is going on.”

“No sweat, I’ll start digging in the logs and see if I can track down a culprit. Maybe I can spot a glitch somewhere,” he said. “And if it’s not the code, then we’re in the clear.”

She smiled slightly, and he thought there might be a hint of warmth in her eyes, but that was dashed quickly as the phone on her desk began to ring, and she picked up.

“Hello?”

Kiera was silent as whoever was on the other line spoke. He could hear the angry tone of the voice and winced. Best he get started and left the office blame game to her. Quietly he slipped from her office and went to his cubicle. Mike fired up his laptop and pulled up the application server log files. He scrolled through thousands of lines, looking for errors or any kind of indication that the web servers were misbehaving. It was tedious work, and this very much felt like he was trying to find a needle in a haystack.

An hour later he was still searching. He hadn’t found anything, and the errors were piling up. Every time the web servers crashed, the log files grew, and it became harder to find the source of the problem. He was feeling the pressure. He had to find something, anything, to get the site back up and running.

“Anything?” came a voice from behind him.

Turning in his chair, Mike saw Kiera standing in the doorway of his cubical. She looked she been through the provable wringer and it wasn’t even noon yet.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find the cause of this, but there is a lot to go through. But it doesn’t look like it’s a server issue, the errors in the logs aren’t system related.”

His boss signed and her shoulders slumped slightly. “This is going from bad to worse,” she said. “Iden is on my ass, and I can’t get any of the others in devops team on the phone other than some of the low-level helpdesk guys. All they can do is run interference with the clients for us.” She paused and a tired smile made its way on to her pretty face. “Thanks for coming in Mike. Sorry about earlier on the phone. I didn’t mean to jump all over you, I just thought...”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I know what it’s like dealing with the big boss, and Winters isn’t helping either.”

She shook her head. “Yeah, those two are the biggest pain in the asses. Thanks again, Mike.”

He gave her a nod and turned back to his work. The log files were still growing, and he was starting to worry that they wouldn’t be able to get the server back up and running before Monday. That was going to be a nightmare. Working tirelessly for another hour, searching through the files. Nothing was popping out to him. It wasn’t the servers, it wasn’t the code, what the hell was the problem?

Then he spotted something that should not be there. Just a single file out of place amount hundreds. It the file’s name that stood out. ‘April 1 Fools.txt’ it was called. What the hell? Mike opened the file and found a message inside:

‘You’re going to have a hard time fixing the website, I’ve put a nasty bug in the database servers. Have fun trying to find it!’

Mike felt a cold feeling settle in his stomach. They had been hacked, someone had taken down the website. He did a quick search though the directory and found no other messages from their attacker. No other signs that the database was compromised. But that was enough to send him into a panic. He had to tell Kiera.

“Kiera,” he said as he got up from his cubical and headed towards her office, “We’ve got a bigger problem than we thought. The servers aren’t down because of any bug in the code, we’ve been hacked. Some jackass has infected the database with a bug that’s killing the website.”

He reached her office and stopped in the doorway. She looked at him, her face paled, and she put her head in her hands.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Mike nodded. “I found a text file with a message in the root of the website.” He went to her workstation and pulled up the note that had been left behind by the attacker. She read it and shook her head. “This is going to get ugly. We need to lock down the whole damn network before the shit hits the fan.”

“Should we tell Iden and Winters?”

Kiera nodded. “Yes, and we need to get in touch with the security team and have them shut down the website until we can sort this out.” She picked up her phone and dialed a number. “This is Kiera Winfield from the IT department, I need to speak with someone about a cybersecurity breach.”

She was silent for a moment as the person on the other end spoke. Mike listened for a moment, but he could already tell that the call wasn’t going to be a pleasant one. Whoever was on the line was probably not going to be very helpful. It seemed that the security team was always more focused on keeping people out than actually keeping the data safe. Uncertain what else he could do for Kiera, Mike left her office.

He went back to his desk and spent the next few hours going through the databases and the code gluing it to the application services. At first he could not see what had been changed by their hacker, but then he saw it. The database tables had been altered. All the fields that should have held customer and order data had been changed, renamed and shuffled. Another quick check showed the master database of the site had also been altered. It was completely trashed, and there was no way to tell what had been done.

Mike felt sick. This was not the kind of thing that could be fixed with a reboot or even with a backup. If they tried to restore the database, it would take days to get everything back up and running, if it ever worked again. It was a mess.

But then a thought struck him, a little kernel of a plan began in his mind. He helped write those database tables, and he still had the original code which created them on his laptop. With a little bit of work, he could recreate the database tables. Then it would be a matter of reloading data into the server. True, that would be time consuming, but still much faster than trying to unscramble what their hacker had done. It was a long shot, but it was their best hope for getting the site back up and running.

Given a renewed sense of purpose, Mike headed back to Kiera’s office. “Hey, I think I might have a way to get the database tables fixed.”

“How?” She asked, looking up at him, her eyes hopeful. “What do you have?”

“I have the original database tables on my laptop,” he said. “I can restore them from that, then we can reload the customer and order data from the backups. It will likely take all night to get the tables reloaded, but much better than the week it would take if we tried to unscramble what our hacker friend has done.” He paused, taking a breath. “The only issue is that the customer order data will be lost since the last time the database was backed up. We’ll have to get the sales team on the phone and have them manually enter the last days’ worth of orders.”

Kiera stared at him for a moment, then smiled. “Mike, that’s brilliant work. We’re not out of the woods yet, but I think that’s the best chance we’ve got to getting the site back up and running. Go and get to work, I’ll start reaching out to the sales team and try to get them working.”

“You got it,” he said, giving her a nod.

“Thank you, Mike.” Kiera gave him a warm smile. She looked like she was about to say more, but then her phone began ringing again. She gave him an apologetic look and picked up the receiver, and he slipped from her office.

Mike was in a good mood as he went back to his cubical. His plan might save them, and that was a weight off his shoulders. He set to work, opening the original database files on his laptop and getting the servers back up and running in a test environment. He started checking some of the code on his laptop and their tables, looking for the one table that would contain the main orders. It took a good ten minutes, but he finally found the elusive tables and quickly glanced through the column names.

“Hallelujah,” Mike announced, quickly typing away on his keyboard, pulling the needed information. He pulled up the table structure in his editor and then glanced over to the database structure he was rebuilding and started typing. He quickly found a few errors he made and fixed them, added in the missing tables and then typed in the rebuild. He hit the enter key and the monitor blinked, and then the screen was filled with a list of tables as they were rebuilt.

“Yes!” he exclaimed, pumping his fist in triumph. “That should do it.”

He heard Kiera enter his little office space and come up behind him. Kiera had walked around and was standing behind him. Mike noticed her shirt had ridened up and show off her bare stomach. He tried not to stare at her smooth looking skin. She leaned down, putting her head next to his, her hand on the back of his chair. Pulling her shirt up even further. “Are they all back? Or just the table structures?”

“They should all be back now,” Mike told her as he reached up and pressed F5 on his keyboard, forcing his browser to refresh. A moment later the database showed connected and a few seconds after this the main order page appeared.

“Yes!” Kiera cheered with him and then suddenly grabbed his head and kissed his cheek. “Mike, you rock!” She turned and headed back to her office. “Call me back when you have everything back online and stable!”

“Okay,” he agreed, and then sat there for a few minutes, his hand on his cheek where she kissed him, watching her as she disappeared back into her office.

Mike sighed and turned back to his work. He spent the next hour making sure the tables were correctly rebuilt and that all the relationships were functioning and stable. He ran a couple of tests and then opened up the online ordering system, checking a couple of orders. It all seemed to be functioning normally again. The whole time he was working he couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss. He knew he shouldn’t read too much into it. It was only on the cheek. He also knew he wanted another, but that was impossible, wasn’t it?

“Hey Kiera?” he called.

“Yeah?” floated her voice from her office.

“Come check this out,” he answered as he continued to run tests. “We’re five by five and back in business.”

She appeared a few moments later, walking up behind him and leaning over, her head again next to his. Mike could smell her perfume again, or was that shampoo? Whatever it was, it smelled wonderful. Her hand was on the back of his chair again and the other on the partition of the cubical.

“I’ve run a couple of test transactions, and everything is processing correctly,” Mike said, trying to keep his mind on his work.

Kiera had her cell phone in her hand and was typing on it. “Thanks, Mike, I owe you big time,” she said. “I’m going to let Jerry where we’re at. Once we get the go ahead, I’m going to leave it locked down till the security guys can figure out how our little friend hacked us.” She stood up and walked back to her office, typing away on her phone.

“Okay,” he nodded. He sat back and watched her for a moment, trying to not think of how attractive she looked. She had a very intense look on her face, biting her lower lip as she typed. Mike couldn’t help it, she looked so damn sexy with her glasses sliding down her nose.

Mike sat back and waited, trying to not think of his boss, but the more he tried to not think about her, the more he did. Mike had never really dated much. He had a couple of relationships during college, but nothing serious. Since graduating and starting his job, he really hadn’t been motivated to meet any women. And now with his feelings toward Kiera, he was even less so. But now he couldn’t stop thinking about her, her short hair and striking eyes. Her slender, fit body and that sexy ass.

He had to shake his head, trying to get the thoughts out of his head. He turned to his computer and ran through his email and company chat to make sure there were no other outstanding issues. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything. He sat back and let out a sigh, waiting, and then turned on some music, listening to a playlist of various classic rock songs. He tried to relax as he sat back and waited, and soon his mind began to wander, and he started to daydream.

He imagined Kiera coming into his cubical and walking over to his chair and then spinning it around to face her. She smiled at him, her eyes staring at him. He couldn’t help but notice that she was dressed in her usual attire of a button-down blouse and skirt, except her blouse was unbuttoned and she had on a lacy bra underneath.

“Thank you, Mike,” she said softly, leaning in close to him. “I really owe you.”

He stared at her, her blouse hanging open, her breasts pushed together and almost falling out of her bra. He could see she had small areolas and hard nipples. Mike felt his own arousal grow as she stepped forward, straddling his lap, and sitting on him. He could feel the heat of her crotch against his as she settled down onto him. He reached up to touch her breasts, but she stopped his hands.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “First this...” she whispered, reaching down and cupping his growing erection in her hand and squeezing him.

Mike gasped, closing his eyes and moaning softly.

“Mike? Earth to Mike?”

Mike’s eyes shot open at hearing his name. His eyes widened in surprise as he saw his boss standing before him.

“Umm,” he began awkardly and then shifted in his chair. He didn’t want to stand up because he knew he had a huge erection from his daydreaming.

“Did you hear a word I said?” asked Kiera. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sorry,” he apologized, shaking his head. “I must have zoned out for a bit. Just a little tired.”

“Well, you deserve it,” she smiled. “You’re the big hero today. You saved the whole company from certain ruin, or so says Jerry.”

“Yeah, well,” Mike blushed. “It was nothing, really.”

“Ehh, I don’t know about that. I didn’t even realize today was April 1st,” she grinned. “We could have been the two fools here all weekend. But you turned it around. So, you’re the big hero today. Enjoy it.”

Mike smiled back, “I’ll try.”

“Anyway,” Kiera went on. “Jerry has given us the go ahead to lock everything down. He wants a full meeting with the dev group on Monday to go over what happened. And I’m going to send an email to everyone, letting them know. He also wants a complete review of the systems to make sure that something like this can’t happen again.”

“Alright, so we’re locking the database down, right?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I want you to get started on that. I’m going to write up an email and send it out. Hopefully we won’t have any more emergencies.”

“Hopefully,” Mike agreed. He stood up, keeping his back to his boss. He hoped that his erection was gone, but he could still feel it pressed against his jeans. He quickly headed into the break room and over to the soda machine and got a drink, trying to get his mind off his fantasy and his boss.

It only took a couple of minutes to get his body under control and he headed back to his desk and got to work, locking down the databases and the servers. He checked the backups and then the log files to make sure he had the latest versions of everything. It was a bit of tedious work, but not too bad. He finished up after a half hour or so and then wrote up a quick summary of his actions and recorded it in the support system. He then turned on his music and sat back and waited for Kiera.

A few minutes later he felt someone behind him. “You’re not sleeping again, are you?” asked his boss.

“No,” he grinned, sitting up and turning around. “Just finished locking everything down.”

She was leaning against his cubical again, her hand on her hip, pushing her glasses up her nose with the other. “Good, I sent the email. Now we should be done.”

“Finally,” Mike laughed. “So, does my hero status get me out of next Friday’s meeting?” he asked, referring to their monthly department meetings, which he hated. They always spent at least a half hour talking about the most trivial crap.

“Hmm,” Kiera hummed, shaking her head. “Not likely.”

“Worth a shot,” he grinned. He was finding today it much easier to talk to her. Usually, she was a cold and distant, but today she seemed different. With the emergency resolved for now, she was much more relaxed and friendly. “Anything else?”

“No, I think that’s everything. We can get out of here,” she said. She hesitated for a moment and then asked, “Do you think your girlfriend is going to be pissed at you for missing your date?”

“Girlfriend?” asked Mike. He hadn’t dated since he started his job and didn’t even consider trying anymore. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Really? I figured a guy like you would,” she said, looking a bit confused.

“A guy like me?” he asked, grinning. “What do you mean?”