Chapter 47: Cryptic messages.

I went back to my desk with a gloomy semblance.

Hank smiled at me as I passed in front of his desk.

I sat. It's as if I was awakening from some strange dream. What went on upstairs? What was all that incoherence? I had lost my mind a little bit.

I logged in my computer. I couldn't understand anything. Nothing on the screen made sense. Every piece of code seemed to be in a foreign language, with its own alphabet. Every character, extraneous.

They weren't minor changes, like if they had refactored the variables or method names in the IDE I had been using. No... everything seemed cluttered garbage, although the layouts were somewhat recognizable. I was confused, my brain couldn't process anything concrete. The chatter in the background was also noise. All my years of learning meant nothing against that alien computer in that fake office. As if I had teleported into a world that felt the same ⁠—⁠except for the information. I had suddenly become a computer illiterate ⁠—⁠at least with that computer. Everything, cryptic.

What the fuck. Was it an extremely elaborated prank? Had they replaced the whole building with a counterfeit? Had I been hacked? What the hell was going on? Who the hell was Sibyl?

Without giving any explanations, I ran home, to the servers I had there running. I needed to know if anything had changed there. Yes, those servers, their data, was my home then.

“Maybe they trapped me in this building.” ⁠—⁠as I entered the elevator, claustrophobia started creeping on me. Yet nothing blocked my exit from the building. Nothing in Sunset Boulevard was more incoherent than what was to be expected.

Got in the red line.

All was slow and smelly. I found a seat.

Waiting, I found myself muttering nonsensical words.

Finally, arrived to the server room at Eve’s apartment.

It was 2:02pm.

I couldn't log in as ‘root’. Couldn't su, couldn't sudo. At least my terminal session as ‘alice’, that had been running for days, was understandable. It was still zsh. Certain details seemed to have inexplicably changed: prompt decorations, resolution, space left, devices. As if it was yet another bad replica of what it had been a day before.

In the paranoid confusion, I considered that having been hacked was a likely scenario. It could explain most ⁠—⁠not all⁠—⁠ weird things around. Honestly, having had a stroke or any mental disorder surfacing were more logical explanations.

I felt tempted to isolate my LAN. But that wasn't necessarily the smartest choice. Probably not the worst choice ⁠—⁠I also felt tempted to become destructive and drill through the hard drives and smash everything. But only an irredeemable idiot would destroy the only registry of whatever had happened. The only path to truth.

I needed to know ⁠—⁠factual, objective data about reality, regardless of how painful it could be. If penetration had occurred.

I should have had a system set up to capture all the LAN traffic. I was probably too late, but I tried to configure it ⁠—⁠apparently, I managed to get wireshark running in an alien laptop, and configured port mirroring in the switch.

Everything itched.

How to approach studying the network traffic? Whatever malware they may have put, it would certainly encrypt traffic. No weird ports were being listened to. Maybe it was disguising under a running service, pretending to be legitimate, but listening and tampering.

I saw a bedbug crawling.

Running? What was supposed to be running? Everything was off ⁠—⁠I couldn't start telling what had been left untouched and what was soiled.

I scratched my skin a bit more.

Should I dump the server memory and study what the hell was happening? htop. Most processes made no sense to me.

Not too far from /sbin/init. I had been scratching the surface for hours. I was upset.

Time passed, and it didn't become time to kill everything, but time to isolate everything. I started removing cables, throwing them into a mountain in the middle of the room.

More and more bloodsucking lentils started climbing that mountain of hardware. Where were they going? I just knew that I couldn't let myself be distracted by them.

Scratch, scratch as I tried to decipher what the server was executing. Killing process after process. All those debugged. Trying to make sense of everything ⁠—⁠from the kernel out. Drivers. I/O. Five hours in. Upset slowly turning to rage. Maybe it was some kind of a hardware implant. Maybe they had exploited some kind of zero day of the Intel Management Engine.

I was tired. I hated computers. I couldn't understand.

Reality, anger.

I picked up the server, pulled it violently out from the rack. Under violence, its power cables had snapped out of their sockets. Dozens of parasites fell to the floor. It was heavy, I dropped it on top of the mountain of cables and hardware. Then I crawled atop.

In the crumbles of technology I sat ⁠—⁠each having piled up hours of earlier desolation. Hardware parts everywhere around and the deepest feeling of impotence and frustration. What was I doing? Girls⁠—⁠ women my age had a much more normal life. They had plans, they went out and had fun. I was there, lying on a pile of technology.

Resigned, I slowly approached the server. Screwdriver in my left hand, I removed the cover. Expressionless, I saw thousands of bedbugs creep out of the server. No other feature was distinguishable inside that box, except for the fastly evergrowing swarm of parasites overflowing from the box.

My legs clad in running parasites, I had a last shed of hope. I just couldn't let my love and hate relationship with technology to be the reason of my demise. I abandoned that room without the intention to go back. I glimpsed back. Cried while showering. Then went on to wonder if I'd get fired from my job. If not, I would quit. I knew myself and hated my suboptimal decisions. I couldn't avoid them ⁠—⁠yet, at least, I could easily predict them. It was nightmarish to realize how little control my responsible ego was able to exert over my chaotic one.

The next day, I went back to the office.

After a discussion with Mallory, she concluded that we had to “grow separate ways” ⁠—⁠her words.

I had been fired with witless wordplay.