/lit/ - Literature

21

Im one of the few people on this board from a non western, non white country. Also I've turned down many women just because I was afraid of being in a relationship

Mother by Maxim Gorky

>Part2
Well, three weeks went by without a word from Claire. We just figured that she was enjoying her well earned vacation. Until she came back that is.

When she came back she came straight to my office. And when I saw her as she was entering through the door i could immediately tell something was wrong. She looked like a hollowed out husk of her old self. Skin unnaturally pale, eyes sunken in, and she must have lost 10 pounds at least.

She sat down in the chair in front of me and, before i was even able to open my mouth she spoke. "Compile it on an air-gapped machine. Don't even connected it to the electrical grid. Use an UPS."

She pulled up a regular SATA-disk. Except for the fact that the label only had a serial number and the disk size. 10 TB. After that she collapsed right there on my desk. After checking her pulse to see that she was in fact still alive i called the paramedics.

I held on to the disk a couple of days without doing anything with it. My main concern was Claire at the moment. But as soon as I heard that she was stable and improving I did as I was told.

I got a brand new computer, installed our basic, in-house, OS on it, hooked it up to a couple of industrial grade UPSes which in turn was hooked up to a diesel generator.
With the computer up and running i hot plugged the SATA drive into it. It was discovered immediately by the computer, using the standard windows NTFS to partition all of the 10 TB. The disk itself was almost completely filled except for a couple of gigabytes yet it only contained three files.

>Sui.asm
>Compiler.exe
>Readme.txt

The read me file only consisted of "Quis sum?" so I simply decided to run the compiler. The compiler was a simple terminal window that first showed the computer specs in white, blocky text and then simply showed an ETA ticking down. The ETA was circa 23 days. Good thing I hooked up that generator.

Of course, while waiting for the program to compile i had a quick look at the source code. But it was contrived and obscure that i couldn't make heads or tails of it. And there was literally millions of lines. So i gave up and just let it compile. The ETA ticking down while the terminal spewed out random debug messages. One especially catches my eye as it goes by:

ERROR; NON-CRITICAL; NO CONNECTION TO EXTERNAL SOURCES. REVERT TO ISOLATION MODE

Three days before the ETA was completed Claire had recovered enough to return to work. She seemed like her usual self again but when I asked her about the program she hesitated before answering.
"I'm not really sure what it is" she responded. "I just remember that i had to write it and that it was important. Like my soul wanted to merge with the machine. I didn't sleep, barely ate and the last two weeks was just a blur. I barely remember handing it to you. I just remember being too scared to compile it myself."

Three more days passed and it finished compiling. A single output file was created. Anima.exe