As Raymond arrived at the office, he could see that there was complete panic written all over the face of his employees.

Raymond, Mike, and Simon were to leave tonight for the contest and all the services in their office were down. No one had any idea as to how to make things work. Even the simulation servers were down, so there was no way that they could emulate the last round one final time to see if there were any issues or technical glitches.

So as Raymond entered the main hall, Simon came running to him,

"Did you hear? What do we do now?"

Raymond looked Simon and then placed his hand over his shoulder and said,

"Ask the core team to come with their laptops, hard disks, and pen drives ASAP".

Then turning towards David he said,

"Ask IT to switch on ICE-BOX".

Then looking at Akira, he said,

"There is an extra jacket in my cabin, get that with you".

"But why?", asked Akira all surprised.

"We are going to the War Room", Raymond said with a smile on his face and walked ahead.

"I really wonder how can he smile when hell has broken loose on us", Simon said looking at Akira.

"And that's why he is the boss and not us", David said with a smile on his face and went ahead.

Akira laughed at his statement and looking at Simon she said,

"Don't worry, I think he will pull out something from his sleeves. We can do it !!!"

---

It was cold as usual in the War room but everyone was warmed and pumped up,

"First of all, I would like to thank you all for your tremendous support that has helped us reach this point. We are here because of you."

Everyone started looking at each other. They were surprised to hear him sounding so happy and boisterous while they felt like the sky was breaking over them.

"Ok chin up everyone".

"There is nothing to worry about. I have pulled all the data that you would be needing from the servers and we have one main server on the go which you can use".

"Are we not going to try to bring the servers up?"

"No", said Raymond and smiled".

"But why?", asked Brian.

"Because I have myself asked the IT to shut them down".

Everyone in the room stared at him all surprised. They were unable to understand why Raymond would ask for such a thing to be done and that too today.

"But why are our phones jammed?", Kirk asked.

"I will get onto that Kirk", Raymond said and continued.

"Final stage simulation code and emulator code is all on these hard disks. There are three of them and you can distribute amongst yourself. No one is going online today using any network or data card or anything in that regard. Is that point clear?"

"Are we suspecting a Cyberattack?",

"I don't know Brian, but since everything is at stake I don't want to rule it out".

"But the last stage of the game is newly written and never emulated. How can we compete if there are any bugs?"

"I have done 3 emulation rounds successfully and 7 more trials are still remaining. So I am counting on my stars that we will be able to complete that by today EOD before we are to leave for the Amazons".

"So can we do it?"

Raymond asked, leaning a bit with his palms on the table.

Akira looked at the faces of her team members.

They looked worried, they looked all tense. The deadline was tight and integration was manual, just like old days. They weren't sure if they could do it. But the most important fact was that Raymond had faith in them and that was enough for them.

After much deliberation Simon said,

"I think we can, but will one main server able to handle it?"

Raymond looked at him and smiled and then spoke after taking a brief pause.

"It's not a generic Tower Server, my ICE-BOX is a TeraStation".

And there was pin-drop silence in the room.