Philip Hemplow: Sarcophagus

“Look, I show you,” announced Yosyp bitterly, cycling the power to the mainframe. The blue screens turned black, and the computer emitted a short frenzy of beeps, signalling POST errors. Green text began to scroll quickly down the screens as the machine identified a boot device and tried to load the operating system—but the technical details and hexadecimal addresses were soon lost in a cascade of gibberish, as random words, characters, and values flooded the display.

“You see?” spat Yosyp. “It will just keep saying this nonsense now. On and on, until it crashes again.”

Victoria leaned forward and tried to catch some of the words that were scrolling endlessly down the monitors. Some were English; most were in languages she couldn’t recognise. She saw 1000 MASKS repeated over ten consecutive lines before it was bumped off-screen by endless dyslexic variations on the words DARK and PHAROAH. These, in turn, were quickly supplanted by unrecognisable syllables—either foreign or just nonsensical—and long strings of random numbers.

“Oh my,” murmured Victoria. “That is not a happy computer.”

“You see?” repeated Yosyp. “How am I supposed to debug this? It will not even let me log in. Yesterday, I tell you, it was fine.”

“Could it be a computer virus?” suggested Osterberg, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I know, I know, you used all-new components. Even so, could it?”

“This is not a virus,” declared Yosyp. “Nothing has even been run on this hardware. It must be this place. Environmental. Radiation.”

“There is no radiation in here, Yosyp,” Osterberg chided him. “Even if there were, it would not do this to your computer.”

“It has to be environmental,” insisted the pasty Russian. “First the other array, now this one. Not a coincidence, you must agree!”

“If that is the case, why are we seeing exactly the same dreck on this machine that we saw on the old one? Look. Look at that! ‘LENG’! L. E. N. G. What is the chance that those four letters keep coming up on both computers if the problem is environmental? And you talk to me about coincidence! The problem is with the computers.”

Yosyp grimaced and tapped the spacebar of his keyboard repeatedly in frustration. For a few moments the three of them just watched the endless succession of ASCII characters continue to fill screen after screen.

“It is corrupted,” declared Yosyp. “It is as if all the order to the data is gone. Now, instead of carrying information, it is just junk. It can only be a problem with the embedded encryption engine. I will need to speak to someone at IBM.”

“How long would that take to fix?” Osterberg wanted to know.

“It was all working fine before,” reiterated Yosyp defensively. “We tested it many times. It worked. We loaded it onto the mainframe and it worked. Then it stopped, so we reloaded it and it worked again, and now it stops working! I bet you if I go and load it onto another machine somewhere else, all the software will work fine. It is this place. The radiation causes bitflips, and the scrubber is not catching them.”

Osterberg snorted but said nothing. A small red light on the mainframe cabinet began blinking to indicate that the case was overheating. The cooling fans were already in overdrive, and roaring. The scrolling grid of random characters ground to a halt as the screens locked up, occasional coherent words visible in the code like shapes in a Magic Eye picture. Victoria leaned forward, trying to make some sense of them.

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Before she could reach the end, the rising temperature activated the automatic cutout, killing the power supply to the mainframe. The screens went blank and the roar of the fans died rapidly to nothing. Yosyp threw his hands up in the air.

“See? She overheats again. We can forget it!”

“Yosyp!” Osterberg’s voice was stern. “Concentrate on how we mend it. It is just a problem. It has a solution. You want to speak to somebody at IBM, you said.”

“Wolfgang, this is a big problem. Something is wrong with the chips, or something in this place is screwing with it. I cannot just make a magic solution for you.”

“You try your best,” replied the German, laying a reassuring hand on the frustrated technician’s shoulder. “That is all we ask. Okay? Yes?” Yosyp gave a demonstrative sigh, then nodded resignedly. “Okay then, we leave you now. Anything you need we can get, remember. I will talk to you later.”

“Good luck, Yosyp,” added Victoria, trying to buoy the defeated programmer’s spirits as Osterberg led the way to the exit. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Come, Victoria,” called Osterberg. “Let me show you around our Carapace. Is it big enough for you, do you think?”

He ushered her out with one last concerned look at Yosyp, sending her down in the lift first. It was designed for two people, but not when they were the size of Osterberg.

Victoria waited at ground level while the bucket wobbled back to the computer centre. She should have brought her camera, she thought. It would be a shame not to have photographs of the final stages of the project to which she had, after all, devoted a significant amount of time and effort in the early days. It occurred to her that there was a camera on her phone. It wasn’t great, especially at landscapes, but it was better than nothing.

It was gloomy in the Carapace. She pulled the phone from her pocket anyway, snapping a couple of shots of the computer centre first, then panning around to take shots of the entrance, the far wall and the overhead gantries.

She waited for the lens to autofocus on a row of flatbed trucks that were completely dwarfed by the soaring vault around them. As she did so, one of the shadows on the screen of her phone detached itself from the rest, standing separate and shockingly clear at the edge of the frame as she reflexively pushed the shutter button.

She snatched the phone away from her face and stared anxiously across the giant hangar, looking for what she thought she had seen—but finding nothing. The contents of her stomach suddenly lurched. A second gastric spasm made her jacknife—swaying, hands on knees—as a stream of watery vomit pulsed from her mouth and splattered onto the concrete between her feet.