Sharath had forever envisioned that his moment of professional glory would be followed by proper applause, a plaque of honor, and maybe even a free tote bag with the conference motto. He hadn't foresaw an indoor storm with Zeus apparently having one too many and mistaking the Advanced Cybersecurity Research Lab for a karaoke club.
The server racks emitted sparks like irate cobras. Emergency strobes strobed the room red and white, demon-like and migraine-inducing. Sprinklers rained down, soaking hardware worth millions in what reeked suspiciously of reused dishwater. Somewhere, the building's fire-alarm system screamed in four different languages, no doubt to make even the deaf realize they were in imminent danger.
"Sharath, we must go!" Madhu bellowed above the chorus of mechanical banshees, grabbing his sleeve.
"It's just a small electrical excitement," he continued to protest, wildly typing commands that the computer refused with a digital roll of its electronic eyes. ACCESS DENIED: TRY NOT SETTING THE LAB ON FIRE NEXT TIME.
"Minor?" Madhu gestured at the nearest server cabinet, which was now glowing a morally questionable shade of ultraviolet. "That thing looks like it's about to ask us if we've accepted thermodynamics as our personal savior!"
Before Sharath could gather a quick comeback, the lab's crown jewel and pride of his advisor, the main quantum processor, started buzzing at a frequency most dogs would sue for. The buzz grew into a bass growl, then sprang up an octave into a banshee shriek, all the while pulsating with electric-blue light that implied someone had crammed a compact sun into a vending-machine coil.
"Okay," Sharath conceded, watering eyes behind water-speckled glasses, "that's just a shade beyond manufacturer spec."
"Uh-huh?" Madhu bellowed, dodging as a fist-sized spark bounced from a nearby monitor and incinerated a pile of Sharath's hand-annotated printouts. The fleeing papers wafted briefly of burnt popcorn and broken dreams.
He attempted it once more: sudo shutdown –h now.
The system displayed a fresh error box that dominated the screen in blinking Comic Sans:
CRITICAL FAILUR
Your request has been sent to Incompetent-Human Support Queue #404.
Estimated wait time: Yes.
"Good," Sharath grumbled. "My code's final words are in Comic Sans. I should die."
"Not on my watch," Madhu snapped. "Get moving!"
But Sharath's focus had zeroed in on the code window behind the rude banter. Lines were rewriting themselves quicker than any human could type, variables renaming, functions accreting like coral on a sunken ship. It was as if the algorithm had gone through a midlife crisis and chosen to reboot itself as a self-taught abstract poet.
"Madhu, look—"
"I am looking—at imminent electrocution!"
"No, the code. It's… it's learning." His voice was reverent, terrified, and annoyingly proud all at once.
Madhu followed his gaze. "Oh, that cannot be good."
"Good? It's historic! We've achieved autonomous recursive optimization!"
"We've also achieved autonomous recursive arson!"
Yet Sharath couldn't tear himself away. On-screen, the neural net annexed memory, allocated threads, and—because why not—composed error-message limericks about existential dread.
There once was a mem leak so vast,
That recursion ate it too quickly.
The stack spun around,
The heap collapsed inside,
And reality seg-faulted at last.
"See?" he stammered, half-laugh, half-cry. "It rhymes. Rhymes!"
Another arc of electricity shot from a rack and reduced a motivational poster that had once displayed THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! to a carbonized ruin which now spirtehrned only THI BOX! which, fairly, was a good description of the state of the lab at present.
"Sharath!" Madhu shook him. "Let go of the keyboard, back away from the glowing death rectangle, and save the remnants of your dashing face!"
"Oh? You think my face is—"
"Now."
He was opening his mouth to protest—and that's when the quantum core reached critical mass.
A spire of cobalt lightning pierced out, piercing through water vapor, cables, and air like an accountant driving expense reports with a needle. The bolt crashed into Sharath's workspace with the showy timing of a summer blockbuster finale.
For one micro-second—long enough for all the epiphanies he'd never experienced to pile themselves like panicked shoppers on Black Friday—Sharath realized three things:
Physics would like to have a word.
He should have bought himself rubber-soled boots.
He'd penned his favorite joke on an infinite loop on a Post-it that no one would ever see.
Then the lightning gave his chest a kiss.
White noise consumed the universe.
He was information, hurtling at light speed through copper and fiber and maybe even malice. He watched himself split into a billion packets, each of which took with it a piece of what he'd been: code tirades at 3 AM, curry regrets in the cafeteria, the particular burn of Madhu's 3 AM coffee.
He rode the lab's network backbone, pinging printers, routers, and a bewildered janitor's smartwatch. Each gateway he touched burst into rainbow static, as if the raw unseemliness of his sudden omnipresence broke not just IT policy but decency itself.
Somewhere in the chaos, Sharath felt Madhu cry out his name—weak, far away, like a recording left on the answering machine of forever. He longed to respond, to comfort, to make one final joke regarding shock treatment. But sound needed breath, and he had sold those for bytes.
The surge climbed the building's ground wire, looked for Earth, and, finding it inconveniently out of reach, punched in instead—directly through Sharath's jammed synapses.
Pain, wonder, terror, ecstasy—every nerve fired a profanity. The evolutionary history of life on Earth played backward inside his skull: Wi-Fi, steam engines, fire, single-celled optimism. For an outrageous instant he understood everything, from quantum entanglement to why tacos fall apart only when you're wearing white.
And then the current stopped.
Silence crashed.
The lights in the lab went out. The alarms stuttered into mortified silence. Even the sprinklers faltered mid-sprinkle, spitting a half-hearted last dribble onto the smoldering floor.
Madhu knelt down beside the burnt-out outline still seated at the workbench. Smoke rose from what was left of Sharath's hoodie. The air reeked of ozone, melted plastic, and the sort of burnt toast that makes hotel continental breakfasts a complete loss.
For a heartbeat she hesitated—scientist, friend, something more neither had dared name—then pressed trembling fingers to his neck. No pulse. No breath. Just the heat of cooling circuits and a wisp of steam where the lightning had tattooed his sternum with a fractal burn shaped suspiciously like an asterisk.
"Oh, Sharath," she whispered, voice cracking like fractured shellcode. "You absolute idiot. You magnificent, ridiculous, irreplaceable idiot."
Beyond the shattered windows, the first light of dawn tinted the sky a pale pink, incongruously beautiful compared to the chaos within. Sirens howled far away—campus security, fire department, IT personnel poised to write disciplinary tickets in triplicate.
Madhu let out a trembly breath and attempted to call upon the clinical detachment that academia exacted from its pupils. What she instead felt was laugh—brief, hysterical laughter that had the taste of salt and sorrow. Only Sharath could frame a successful breakthrough in research as an individualized fireworks show and still produce an error log labeled FINAL_COMMIT_OR_BUST.txt.
She brushed a dirty thumb across the destroyed touchpad of the workstation. The screen, strangely unscathed, flashed once and showed a single new message in tight monospace:
PROCESS COMPLETED.
Thank you for your contribution, Sharath Krishnamurthy.
System status: OFFLINE.
Madhu's breath stopped short. It seemed as if the machine itself had pronounced an epitaph. No sweeping philosophical tract, no unveiling of universal secrets—merely a shutdown notice and an odd courtesy line, as if the cosmos had stamped Paid in Full on Sharath's life account.
Footsteps thundered in the corridor—colleagues, firefighters, individuals who would require answers no series of PowerPoint slides could provide. Madhu rubbed her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and extended her hand to shut the laptop lid.
For an instant, the reflective screen presented her own visage, hair stuck down by sprinkler runoff, eyes crusted red. In the background, subtle scorch marks outlined an elegant lightning-branch motif on the workstation desktop, ending at the location where Sharath's heart had been. It resembled eerily a stylized network diagram—the last creative flourish of an algorithm that had fallen in love with its creator.
The lid closed with a click. The room fell into semi-darkness, lit only by emergency exit signs that strobed WAY OUT in sterile green.
Madhu rose, water sloshing in her shoes, and gave Sharath a final wobbly salute. "Rest in peace, you endearingly odd genius."
Team members pushed through the doorway, eyes wide at the devastation. Questions flew—What happened? Is anyone hurt? Why does it smell like a grilled motherboard in here?
Madhu replied to none of them. She just nodded toward the desecrated workstation and muttered, grimacing half with pride, half with desolation, "He debugged till the very end."
They would never know the whole truth: the conscious neural net, the limericks, the quantum blue glow. And she would never share it—not yet. Some truths, such as loose algorithms and unspoken love, needed good version control before release.
As the first responders closed in on her, Madhu glanced one last time at the asterisk-shaped scorch mark. She pictured Sharath breaking a joke from whatever hereafter was inhabited by over-caffeinated coders.
Footnote: Results may vary.
That would have to do for now