The fluorescent lights of the Advanced Cybersecurity Research Lab hummed like dying flies—or more accurately, like a chorus of tone-deaf monks attempting to sing death metal. At 2:47 AM, Sharath Krishnamurthy slouched over his desk like a question mark that had given up on finding answers, grimacing at lines of code that taunted him with every passing minute.
"Come on, you jerk," he swore at his screen, using the tried-and-true tradition of shouting insults at things that couldn't hear him in the hopes they'd magically acquire feelings and obey out of shame. His neural net simulation had crashed once again—the seventh time tonight. Or the eighth? He'd lost track somewhere after his fourth energy drink, which was about when his brain had begun sounding like a dial-up modem circa 1995.
His work space resembled the scene after a particularly specialized natural disaster—Hurricane Programmer. Coffee-stained papers littered his desk like the remains of caffeine-fueled fantasies. Crushed chip bags flaccid and abandoned, their substance having transferred long ago to either his belly or the keyboard trenches where they'd create archaeological strata for later computer scientists to uncover. A small graveyard of Red Bull cans lined up, their silver bodies reflecting the cold fluorescent light like small metal tombstones. Three hours of induced hyper-awakeness and a crash that had him feeling as though he'd been struck by a truck driven by disillusionment each.
One Post-it note on his monitor stated: "Shower tomorrow. People are noticing." Another, in increasingly frantic handwriting, declared: "If this does not work out, seek career in goat herding." A third, which he'd clearly written at a low point, contained just: "Why did I think computers would be easier than talking to humans?"
The irony was not lost on him. He'd studied computer science in part because machines were allegedly logical, predictable, and wouldn't criticize him for his social awkwardness. And here he was, being personally attacked by an algorithm that appeared to have a sadistic sense of humor.
Sharath massaged his eyes, which had apparently been replaced with sandpaper around midnight. His reflection on the black screen glared back at him—a ghostly glimpse of his future self if he didn't sort out what was going wrong with this code. His hair was poked in ways that undermined several laws of physics, having been strained by furious finger-combing for the last six hours. His t-shirt, once a respectable navy blue at the beginning of the day, now looked like a Jackson Pollock painting whose medium was coffee stains and whose theme was "despair."
The lab itself was just as zombie-apocalypse cool. Piles of empty pizza boxes leaned against each other in a stack of bad food choices beside the printer. A peel of banana artfully thrown across his monitor had reached a degree of brown that indicated it was either incredibly ripe or had long since given up on life. His set of programming textbooks was covered over with piles of printouts, the majority of which had error messages that read like haikus penned by a broken robot:
Null pointer exception
In the void of line forty
Your hopes are now dead
The most annoying part wasn't even the crashes. It was the crash messages. Standard software errors were terrible enough—mysterious strings of letters and digits that needed a PhD in Computer Science to decode. But his neural net had somehow attained a level of intelligence advanced enough to get a personality disorder.
Yesterday's treasure had been: "PENGUIN OVERFLOW ERROR: Too many flightless birds in memory buffer." What the devil was a penguin doing in his cybersecurity algorithm? He wasn't operating a virtual zoo. He'd invested three hours searching for where penguins could even come into play in network traffic analysis before deciding he might be experiencing hallucinations brought on by stress.
Today's magnum opus was worse: "EXISTENTIAL CRISIS IN MODULE 7: Algorithm questions the meaning of its existence and refuses to continue." He'd looked at that text for twenty minutes, wondering if his programming had gained consciousness just to promptly develop depression. It was like bringing up a digital kid who instantaneously found out about nihilistic philosophy.
But the pièce de résistance had come earlier in the day around lunchtime when the system crashed with: "ERROR 404: PROGRAMMER'S SANITY NOT FOUND. Have you tried turning your life off and on again?"
That one had actually made him chuckle, which was not good. When your own code began cracking jokes about your sanity, it was perhaps time to reassess some life decisions.
The most infuriating aspect was that the algorithm demonstrated evidence of actual intelligence between crashes. It had categorized his music library into groups such as "Songs that make humans cry unnecessarily" and "Songs that make humans dance badly in private." It had also reorganized his desktop icons into smiley face configurations and had somehow managed to order him coffee through the campus delivery app—which would have been useful if it hadn't ordered seventeen espressos simultaneously, leaving a very confused delivery driver and a caffeine stock that could likely fuel a small village.
Sharath had another drink of what could generously be described as coffee but more truthfully was liquid disappointment with fake flavor. The vending machine coffee was the consistency of defeat and tasted as if someone had steeped old computer keyboards in boiling water. He'd long believed that the university food services department was secretly running psychology experiments on students to determine just how much abuse the human psyche could withstand before shattering.
His phone vibrated with a message from his mother: "Beta, have you eaten? You never call anymore. Mrs. Sharma's son got a job at Google. Just saying."
Oh yes, the classic Indian parent guilt trick: emotional blackmail laced with comparative analysis. He texted back: "I'm working on something that could change cybersecurity forever, Ma."
Her answer was instantaneous: "That's nice dear. Mrs. Sharma's son has a girlfriend now. Also just saying."
He placed his phone face-down on the desk. Indian mothers were impossible to win over. If you succeeded, you weren't successful enough. If you were trying hard, you weren't trying cleverly. If you were alone, well, Mrs. Sharma's son certainly wasn't alone anymore, was he?
The lab's old air conditioning system groaned into operation with the wheeze of a dying walrus who had asthma. The temperature ranged from "arctic tundra" to "surface of Mercury" with nothing in between. Currently, it was solidly in tundra country, hence the three hoodies he was wearing on a day that it was August.
Sharath cracked his knuckles, the sound like bubble wrap being assassinated, and returned to his code. Perhaps if he approached it from another direction. He opened up the neural network architecture diagram, which resembled a subway map drawn by someone going through a psychotic breakdown. Nodes linking to other nodes in patterns that would make a conspiracy theorist sob with glee.
The issue must have been in the data preprocessing. Or in the training algorithm. Or perhaps in the hardware configuration. Or perhaps cosmic radiation interfering with the quantum processors. By this point, he would not exclude interference by supernatural forces.
He activated the debugger, that most detested of programming implements—the computer equivalent of operating on oneself using a corroded spoon while blind. The debugger said everything was okay, which was like a smoke alarm happily saying "No fire here!" as the building collapsed around it.
"Alright," he told the screen, using the tried and tested method of addressing computers as if they were very stupid kids. "Let's just try this one more time. And for goodness' sake, for all that is sacred in the virtual world, don't crash with another message about existential horror."
He pressed the run button with the fervent hope of a man risking his last buck on a lottery ticket.
The progress bar had shown up: 0%.
1%.
2%.
"Come on," he whispered, as if his coaxing could somehow affect the laws of computational physics.
5%.
8%.
This actually seemed promising. It was supposed to crash before getting anywhere near 3%.
12%.
15%.
Sharath was holding his breath, which was likely unnecessary given the fact that the computer was unable to hear him breathing, but at this point he would try anything, including sympathetic magic and old-school coding incantations.
20%.
25%.
His pulse had accelerated. This was further than it had reached the entire week.
30%.
And then.
CRASH.
The error message popped up in a chirpy pop-up window, like the computer was happy to present its new-found creative writing: "CRITICAL ERROR: Found excessive programmer optimism. System cannot cope with such unrealistic expectations. Please reduce standards and try again."
Sharath glared at the message. Even his own code was grilling him these days.
He lowered his head to the keyboard, creating a line of random letters across the screen that somehow read more sense than anything he'd ever written on purpose. The keys of the keyboard dug into his forehead, making impressions that spelled out "QWERTY" on his skin—a decent tattoo for his present state of being.
Somewhere in the distance was the whooshing of the laboratory door opening, but he didn't look up. He was too busy experiencing what philosophers would refer to as "a moment of profound existential reckoning" and regular people would term "a complete breakdown."
The footsteps reached his desk, and with them, a familiar smell reminded his treacherous mind to ignore crashes in code and that there was more to life that it could be worried about.
"You're still here."