by JT Kalnay
“ATTENTION CRAIG, INPUT LOCATION TO SEARCH FOR ENTITY.”
“Most frequently used page,” Craig entered. Then he returned to the APSoft code window. He finished the first comment and began adding a second. As he typed, another driver program window beeped and flashed.
“ATTENTION CRAIG, INPUT LOCATION TO PLACE ENTITY.”
“Least frequently used page,” Craig entered. After answering, Craig looked back at the two requests from his driver program. He determined that the two drivers had taken two mutually exclusive paths through the sample data space he had provided to exercise the game code. As he pondered what that meant, he thought aloud.
“What would happen if I moved this to there?” he asked himself. So he cut and pasted code from one game segment to another and started a compile to test the changes. While the compile proceeded, Craig typed in more comments to the APSoft code. The compile finished. He started the game driver program and watched. Almost instantly the driver program beeped and flashed.
“ATTENTION CRAIG, ENTITY LOCATED.”
Again his arms flew overhead in the touchdown sign. He jumped up from his chair and danced a few steps around his office. “I am the world’s best freakin’ programmer,” he shouted. “THE BEST!”
Craig shoveled in some more Chinese food and sat back down. Then, the self proclaimed world’s best programmer, still hung over, wickedly sleep deprived, and pathetically lonely, unintentionally cut a segment from his video game test program and pasted it into the autopilot software. An immense yawn consumed his entire body. His arm reached out to his sides as he rolled back his head. His hands tried to return to the keyboard and then went to his eyes. He rubbed his eyes then ground his knuckles into his temples. Another yawn controlled him. Finally his hands came back to the code.
“Time for a break,” he said. So he got up and walked around the office and forgot, or never noticed, that he dropped the game code into the autopilot software. Craig dropped and did five pushups. Then he went to the chrome bar wedged into his doorframe and pulled five chin ups. Finally Craig sat back down.
He rolled his chair forward and crushed the empty two liter Diet Coke bottle under the wheels of his chair. “Uhn,” he groaned as he got out of his chair. He rolled his neck, listened to it grind and pop and left for the bathroom. “Time for a leak,” he said.
While he was at the bathroom, the following message displayed across his screen.
TIMED BACKUP. ALL CODE CHANGES SAVED.
The message remained displayed on his monitor for thirty seconds then disappeared without Craig seeing it.
Walking slowly, Craig returned to his office.
“I am way too tired to do anything else today,” he said aloud. So he shut off all the game drivers and closed his edit windows. Craig typed in a command to start his daily backup and thus unknowingly pushed the auto pilot code that contained the video game fragment even farther down into the bowels of the company software library. Later that night, since it was the end of the “coding week,” the code would be transported to a secure offsite backup location, adding another level of backup to his code.
#
“Just another day in the salt mines,” Craig said to Rufus as he signed out.
“Yessir,” Rufus answered. “Do you want me to get you a taxi? You’re looking a little weary sir.”
“No thanks. I’m fine. Just a little tired,” Craig said.
“Okay sir. Have a nice night, or should I say morning? Drive carefully. And I hope you’re feeling better tomorrow.” Rufus said. There was no mistaking the edge in Rufus’ voice, and Craig understood what he meant. Rufus buzzed the door to let Craig out.
“Home alone. Alone on his birthday, hung way over and he works eighteen hours,” the guard said to the parking lot monitor as he watched Craig get in his car and drive off. Rufus shook his head and went back to reading his newspaper and listening to oldies on his not so secret AM radio.
Chapter
February 21st, 1994
Washington, D.C.
The fifty-something pilot, normally calm, practically unflappable, watched frozen as the dials spun wildly counterclockwise. The ground roared up through the windscreen. Impact was only moments away.
“Engage autopilot,” Stacey spoke calmly.
Quickly the dials came under the control, the ground stopped rushing up, and plane leveled out.
“What just happened?” the pilot asked.
“We simulated your wings icing up, and then having the plane encountering a wind shear condition in a pocket of clear air turbulence.”
“So that’s why nothing showed on the radar? Clear air turbulence?”
“Yes.”
“That’s bullshit,” the pilot declared.
“Maybe so, but it could happen.”
“Doubt it.”
“Willing to bet your life on it?” Stacey asked.
There was no response.
“Willing to bet the lives of four hundred passengers on it?” Stacey asked. Her emerald green eyes held the silver-haired pilot’s in a steely gaze.
“So I just engage the autopilot?” he asked as his answer.
“Only after you do all your pilot things,” Stacey answered. “You have the feel of the plane, and you know what to do. You’re on top of it, the code is just there for backup. We’ve tried to model as many things as possible, no matter how bullshit they are, but we can’t replace twenty years of experience,” Stacey explained.
She saw the downtrodden pilot’s pride returning.
“Come on, let’s run that one again, and this time you get it without the software,” she said.
The pilot re-queued the simulation and flew the scenario again. This time he briefly called on the autopilot software right after the spin started, soon enough that the spin didn’t get out of control. Then he quickly disengaged and took the plane to a lower altitude and diverted to a local field.
“Nice,” Stacey said. “But once you had it under control why did you go to a lower altitude?”
“Experience,” he answered. “If there was clear air turbulence once, there might be again. Also, it won’t be as cold lower down. After a spin like that I’m getting the airframe on the ground as soon as possible. Maybe your code should try something similar,” he added.
“Sounds good,” Stacey said.
“Experience,” the pilot repeated.
“Pardon me?” Stacey asked.
“Experience. There’s no substitute for experience,” the pilot said. He held Stacey’s gaze just a moment longer than appropriate.
“Now what are you talking about?” Stacey teased.
“Just that a man my age, with my experience, sometimes we have a touch that is missing in a younger man.”
“Do a lot of the stewardesses go for that one?” Stacey asked.
“Enough,” he answered.
“I’ll bet they do. And I am here alone, with my boyfriend back in California...”
“Dinner?” the pilot asked.
“Tell you what. You land this next one, and I’ll let you go running with me, if you think you can keep up. But dinner’s out. Too much risk with an experienced handsome man like yourself.”
“Very wise,” he winked.
Chapter
February 22nd, 1994
San Francisco, California
“The alarm clock never went off,” Craig mumbled sleepily into the phone.
“Oh really?” Stacey asked skeptically.
Craig pressed the phone closer to his ear. He pulled the covers up under his chin.
“Yeah. I worked past midnight. I guess the clock never went off.”
“Did you set it?”
Craig checked the clock.
“No.”
“Sure you weren’t out drinking again?” Stacey teased. “Rufus said you looked pretty green yesterday.”
“You talked to Rufus?”
“When I couldn’t get you at your desk, I checked with Rufus to see if you were in. I thoug
ht maybe you’d done something stupid and romantic like fly out here to spend a day with me.”
“Sorry. I thought about it.”
“Don’t even,” Stacey chided. “Your next flight is to Colorado. So how are you doing? Do you miss me?” Stacey asked.
“Yes. Come home today okay?”
“Okay. I left my car at the airport so you don’t have to get me.”
“Okay.”
“What are you going to do today?” Stacey asked. “I just want to be able to picture you.”
“I’m going to sleep until noon and then call in and telecommute. Stan will figure it out anyway when he sees yesterday’s in/out log. I must have worked twenty hours.”
“Rufus said eighteen. Anyway. Miss me. And I’ll see you tonight.”
“How was your day in the simulator?”
“You know, same old same old. You show up some pilot with thirty years experience and they give you the ‘that’ll never happen’ line and then you have to build them back up so they’ll take the lesson anyway.”
“How’d the code do?”
“Great.”
“And you’re sure all the pilots were old guys?”
“Old and horny, just like always.”
“Did you run one into the ground?”
“Literally and figuratively,” she answered.
“I love you. And I miss you,” Craig repeated.
“Love you too. See you tonight.”
#
At 11:45 Craig woke up again. He called APSoft to let them know he was telecommuting. Stan’s assistant took the call and put a sniffer on a line to a secure server for him. Craig shaved, showered, ate, powered up, dialed in and logged on.
“Let’s check that test run,” Craig said. He opened a window and examined the test data. He made some tables and then made some graphs. “Looks very good,” he said to himself. Craig proofed the data one more time then emailed the data and graphical analysis to Stan.
“Alrighty then. Let’s download the latest code and clean it up,” Craig said. He worked the keyboard and mouse to access the software library at APSoft. The computer displayed:
FILE TRANSFER IN PROGRESS
Craig got up, walked around, turned on the stereo, got a Diet Coke from the fridge and returned to the computer. Meatloaf started blasting at full volume from the CD player. Craig started dancing in his chair until he saw that his file transfer was done. In minutes he was busy adding comments and making little tuning changes to his software. Since he was working in a different part of the program, a program that contained seven point three million lines of code, it was no surprise that Craig didn’t notice the five lines from the Marauder game that he accidentally inserted the previous night.
Pid = fork();
If ( pid == 0 )
{
execl(“./maraud config=ALL find=YES hide=YES level=MASTER);
}
As the day wore on, Craig’s face moved closer and closer to the monitor, and his eyes narrowed in classic signs of computer-based eyestrain. He didn’t even notice when the “Loaf” stopped screaming, singing, pleading, being.
#
At five o’clock Craig looked at his watch.
“Holy shit. Another four hours lost to the world. Time for a run,” he said to himself. Craig got up from his desk. First his knees, and then even his hip cracked. He wiggled his spine around trying to re-arrange it and somehow make it fit after four motionless hours in his chair.
“Ooh that feels good,” Craig said. He pulled off his Batman pajamas, pulled on his red and white jogging clothes and headed out the door. An hour later he was back at his desk, breathing hard, dripping sweat.
“You are such a slob,” he said to himself as he wiped a wet hand across his wet forehead and flung the sweat onto the floor. Realizing what he’d done he snapped his head around to see if Stacey had somehow snuck in and caught him in the act. Discovering he was safe, Craig went to the bathroom and pulled a thick yellow towel from the gleaming chrome rack. He wiped his slimy face and dripping hands. He stripped out of his wet clothes, spread the huge terry towel over his chair and sat naked in front of his computer.
“Time to check on this morning’s test run,” he said to himself. His fingers left little bits of moisture on the keys and mouse as he opened up his work windows. “Beautiful. Still running extremely well if I do say so myself.”
Craig made another table and then another graph, updating the ones made earlier, and emailed them to both Stan and his contact in the Quality Assurance group.
“Okay. That’s done. Time to play,” he said.
Craig powered up his Marauder finder program and in minutes had located and connected to a three player network session. Hours later Craig peeled himself from the computer and fell into bed. In seconds he was asleep with repeating images of murky hallways and unkillable villains tracing across the back of his eyeballs.
#
Craig bolted upright in bed.
“What was that?” he silently asked himself. His head turned left and then right. He tried to look and listen in the pitch black of the bedroom. Hearing nothing he tried to relax, but then another unidentified sound arrived. He reached under the bed and came up with his black Mossberg. He thumbed off the safety on the semi-automatic twelve gauge shotgun. He slipped out of bed and crept to his “entrenched defender” space, mostly hidden behind the corner of his grandmother’s solid oak chest of drawers. The drawers were his only connection to his family, who’d perished in a house fire years ago. Somehow the drawers had survived, and they were his touchstone. In the back of his mind Craig wasn’t sure if he was asleep, if he was dreaming, or if he was still playing the game. He leveled the shotgun at the bedroom door.
“Honey? I’m home,” Stacey called from the living room.
Craig breathed an audible sigh of relief then looked at the instrument of death he was wielding. He thumbed the safety back on, opened a drawer and dropped in the gun. He stepped out from his hiding place shaking.
“In here,” he called.
Craig walked towards the door and met Stacey as she hung her light jacket in the hallway.
“Expecting me?” Stacey asked. She looked up and down his naked body.
“Uh. Yeah,” Craig stammered.
“I need a shower,” Stacey said.
“I’ll help,” Craig said.
“Will you rub my back?” Stacey asked.
“You know I will.”
“And my feet too?”
“Because I love you.” Craig said.
Chapter
February 23rd, 1994
“Craig? Will you come in here?” Stacey called from the bedroom.
Craig walked into the room and stopped suddenly. Stacey stood in front of an open drawer, her hands cradled Craig’s shotgun.
“What is this?” she asked.
“A shotgun,” Craig answered.
“I can see that,” Stacey said. Her eyes practically shot electric plasma through him.
“It was my dad’s. Be careful. It’s loaded.”
“It’s loaded?” Stacey asked.
“Yes it is. So please be careful.”
“You have a loaded gun in our house? Were you planning on mentioning this to me at some time?” Stacey asked.
“Yes I was.”
“Really.”
“Really,” Craig repeated. “Like I said it was my dad’s. It was in his car and wasn’t destroyed in the fire. It’s one of the only things of his I have,” Craig started. Stacey gently laid the weapon down on the bed. She took a step towards Craig but then simply waited. She felt he was going to say more.
“After the fire, there wasn’t much left. I was too young to understand much of what was going on. Anyway, you know I went to live with my grandmother. Years later my uncle Paul gave this to me for my 16th birthday. He said he’d been keeping it for me until I was old enough. We went out to his farm and he taught me how to clean it, and how to shoot skeet. At first I didn’t really
know what to do with it. I didn’t really want it. But then he told me how his father had given him and my dad guns on their 16th birthday, and that this had gone on for several generations. So I kept it. I thought I would pass it on. Hoped I might pass it on.” Craig stopped.
Stacey slowly crossed the room and took him in her arms.
“Maybe we’ll pass it along together,” she said.
Chapter
February 25th, 1994
San Francisco, California
It was a dark and stormy night. Stacey, exhausted from her work in Washington, the coast to coast flights, and two very hard days at the office had come home and gone to bed with a sniffle. She had awakened with a cold that had blossomed into flu and kept her in bed.
The fog was thick all round the city by the Bay. Craig quietly eased into his chair in his office. He cracked his knuckles, rolled his head around his neck and bent to his work.
“So let’s see who is on the Marauder network tonight,” Craig said to himself. He logged onto his favorite network server and was soon connected with three playing partners.
“I wonder if Jack’s on tonight in Turkey,” Craig asked. In a separate window, Craig typed a few commands and started a search program to find out if his friend, a civilian contractor for the Air Force, was logged on. It would be early morning in Turkey. After a minute, a response arrived from Turkey.
“Hey stud. What’s up? Ready to play?” Jack wrote.
“Yeah I’m ready. Let me drop these three losers I just hooked up with. Okay. Are you ready?” Craig asked.
“Ready, willing and able. And you are going to love this. Tonight I come to you live from the telemetry compartment of our special eye in the sky plane here in beautiful downtown Ancirik.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Craig asked.
