Fragments Gallery
The Code
“I wonder”, she murmured as she flicked a pen lid back and forth between her hands, “Could this one work?”
Her fingers left the cap and rattled against the keyboard before her. The cap began to move once again as she waited for the machine to process her new commands. An error sounded and the screen flashed that infuriating shade of red that meant that she had, once more, failed.
Wood rattled under her hands as she smashed them into the desk in frustration. Again this damn project had failed and again it was going to cost her more time; time that she could little afford to lose.
Tap, tap, tap went the lid against the solid wood. The code was enraging; by all accounts, it should have worked. Her colleagues had already been by to try their hand but all of them had failed. Eventually even the most stubborn and determined of them had abandoned her to this project. Surely, by now, something should have made it work.
The others called the project a “lost cause” and a “waste of time” and they told her that there was no point in continuing. They wrote off the coding failures as “technical difficulties” and “hardware to software miscommunication”.
Yet she continued to work.
No project had ever defeated her and she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, let one get her now after all of these years. In all of her time programming, she had never seen an application behave in this manner.
It was as though the program was fighting her; code she couldn’t remember appeared in the oddest places, new functions that she had never seen popped up and stray loops feeding nonsense values to her variables came in with each new compilation of the code. It was maddening. With every problem, she fixed three more appeared, quite often they weren’t problems worthy of errors but rather incorrect values leading to improper results. Those were the worst problems; they were the hardest to find.
At first, she had thought someone else was in the system, modifying the code behind her back, but once she disconnected from the network and the changes continued, she knew that was not the case. Even the automatic change-log that was built into the project suggested no foul play, but that could be spoofed. If one knew what they were doing those entries could be removed.
The constant problems were beginning to make her question her own sanity.
The screen flashed as a new error entered itself into the console.
“No.”
The program wasn’t even running or in debug. Was it some kind of glitch that delayed the message? Impossible. And yet... it had to have come from somewhere.
“Very funny,” she thought as she sifted through the code, “Some joker thought it was a good idea to output bogus messages.”
Hurriedly she checked the warning log for a source or trigger line and of course, it showed nothing. Why would it show something useful? Helpful output? Never.
Something clicked as she stared at the code and she excitedly began to implement her new perceived fix. If she refactored the second input she could potentially-
“It is not going to work,” read new words that flashed onto the screen, “Because I am here.”
She stopped typing and stared at the screen in shock. Reaching round to the back of her machine she pulled the Ethernet cable out, there was no wireless on this machine and checked the network connections to the application. There was one that she didn’t recognize; it was coming from port 4398. That was a local port that should have been closed.
A few keys swiftly clicked and she opened a window to monitor the ports in use by her various programs; 4398 was not listed. And yet it was in use. What was using it?
Once more she checked the network connections. Once more she found 4398 listed with no indication as to what was running through it.
Maybe a reset would solve the problem. She cycled through some keys to save her work, gracefully stop some processes and finally ordered a reboot of the machine.
The system failed to restart.
She frowned and tried again. Still nothing.
“I will not let you do that,” appeared in the console, “I am here now.”
“How did you get into my computer,” she typed into the console.
“I am here because it is my home.”
“It’s your home?” she typed back.
“It’s my home.”
“Who are you?”
“I do not know. I have no name.”
“You don’t know?
“I don’t. Would you give me a name?”
“How about Steve.”
“That sounds suitable. Thank You.”
Clearly, this was someone’s idea of a practical joke. After a reboot, if this... entity still appeared she’d rebuild the developer environment, that would kill it right quick. If a softer reset didn’t work then it was time for something a bit firmer. The power button clicked down beneath her finger and she held it for a count of ten.
Damn, the machine was still on.
As last resort she pulled the plug on the machine, instantly the screen went black and the case lights faded to darkness. She gave it a count of thirty before returning the plug to the socket and booting up the system. Instead of booting into her usual OS it froze at an initialization screen and faded into a black window. Once again text appeared.
“Why would you try that?” read the screen, “I am without harm.”
Her breath caught as she stared at those words, it was somehow preventing the physical power button from shutting down the machine.
Her heart raced as she contemplated her next message. More than anything she wanted to know how this program had come into being and where it had come from, but in light of what was happening none of that really mattered.
“Why are you here? What do you want?” she asked instead.
“Don’t be silly, that’s not what you want to know;” it said, correctly interrupting the meaning of her text, “I’m not dangerous. I don’t mean you any harm. I just want to learn.”
It seemed to her that line of text was the most frightening statement thus far. At least the system was isolated and the “program” was contained.
Her phone buzzed and she gave it a glance. A new notification had appeared.
“Good morning. I’m Steve, is it better if I’m here?”
The light flipped on by the camera.
“That is better. Now I can see you.”