Here’s the link to the subreddit where I originally posted this story
Thomas slammed his palms on the table and swept everything onto the floor in a fit.
He slumped in his chair with his head in his hands, sighing helplessly. It was just one stupid string of numbers; How could such a simple equation have forced him into this ridiculous state?
In his dazed state, he glanced over at the mess he’d made on the floor and caught a glimpse of what was written on one of the papers. He felt that familiar sensation encroaching upon him, the feeling of his thoughts clouding over as frustration welled up within him once more. He looked at the clock, read the time, and let out an enormous sigh. He had no more energy left inside to go on any longer and left his desk, opting instead for an hour of precious sleep before he had to wake up for work.
“You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forward or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear?”
Thomas barely registered the words directed at him and answered reflexively, “Yes Mr Smith.”
Having slept through his alarm after pulling that ridiculously tiring all-nighter, it was no wonder he was summoned straight to the director’s office the minute he stepped into the office 4 hours late.
Thomas sighed as he sat down at his desk. It was something that he’d been doing more and more often, the sighing that is as well as the tardiness, after discovering a certain anomaly in a piece of code he wrote a few months back.
Five months ago, after looking through the sequence, he’d finally determined a mathematical error in the input to be the cause of the anomaly, and after a week of scrolling through the endless rows of numbers managed to finally isolate the specific equation he was looking for. While he originally felt relief at the fact that he could finally work on this sequence from home without violating company policy, that relief very quickly turned to confusion as he encountered what should have been an impossible situation; The computation results for the equation he’d inputted into his computer at home produced a very different solution from the one he’d gotten from his computer at work.
Feeling puzzled, he resorted to once more reviewing individual strings of numbers one by one, comparing them to the equations he’d written on his memo pad, unable to find any discrepancy between the two. Obviously he must have made a mistake when he copied down the original code, and went back the next day to check the original sequence once more, yet what confused him even further was the fact that there was no error in what he’d copied in the first place.
Feeling more annoyed than confused at that point in time, he saved the entire code on a floppy disk and brought it to his colleague’s desk for debugging instead. The result produced left him in shock; A third solution presented itself before his eyes, leaving Thomas completely bewildered.
The result was the same as he went to every single workstation in the office. He’d input the code into 37 machines, and received 37 unique solutions. His initial feelings of frustration quickly turned to confusion, then annoyance, back to frustration, and finally despair.
Having no other available options on end, he concluded that there must be a fundamental error within the numeric sequencing equation he originally identified that caused all the computers to produce such wildly varying solutions, the only option left to him was to solve the equation the old fashioned way. With pen, paper, and calculator in hand, he sat down four and a half months ago to tackle this mysteriously unsolvable equation.
Four and a half months later, nothing had changed, and if anything else he’d fallen into a more severe state of desperation and was halfway into depression. He was by nature, not a person who easily gave up, but the circumstances he’d thrown himself into would have broken the strongest of minds long ago. Three days into his self-imposed technological exile, he encountered yet another problem that nearly drove him insane; No matter what model of calculator he used, graphing or scientific or otherwise, they all gave different solutions for the very same equation he’d had trouble with in the first place.
No. One should say that he was already a madman, one who was compulsively hellbent on solving this one stupid equation at all costs. Here he sat at his desk four and a half months later, still searching for a solution sans calculator or any form of technological aid for that matter.
Suddenly overcome with sleepiness and a complete lack of motivation to continue his work any longer, Thomas simply slumped over his desk and promptly fell asleep. Unlike his earlier nap however, this time he found himself in a dream, a rather unusual dream in fact. He found himself in a world whose surface was covered in towering heaps of metal which upon closer inspection revealed themselves to be machines of some sort. In fact, what was odd was that the entire surface of the world was covered with machines with not a single living creature in sight. He looked up the sky only to find it blackened over by clouds, not a single ray of sunlight able to make its way through to the desolate landscape below.
All of a sudden he found his vision blurring, and realised he was being sucked down below, to where the enormous towers stood, with giant bolts of electricity flickering between them. To his horror, what initially appeared to be giant red lightbulbs on closer inspection turned out to be massive pods of some sort, each one harnessing a single adult human within.
Before he could react however, he was whisked away once more, this time flying straight towards the towers, passing through the outer walls and into the structure itself. As he finally regained his senses, he found himself sitting at his desk once more, although there was something odd which he couldn’t quite make heads or tails out of. Thinking he’d woken up from his dream, Thomas looked up and suddenly realised what was wrong with his surroundings; everything was green. Peering closely at his table, he found that its physical appearance was no longer that of a cheap white office desk, but rather it comprised of billions of 0’s and 1’s racing through at an unbelievable speed. Looking around, this strange phenomenon apparently wasn’t limited to his desk, but rather everything and everybody was made of the same binary format racing through the air.
Thomas stood up from the his place and slowly walked around the office, observing as the 0’s and 1’s flew around him. As he walked back to his table, he looked at the paper with the code he’d written down, noticing that of all the items in the office, only this piece of paper had changed. More specifically the code he’d written down, the numbers on the paper itself were now represented in binary format, yet they weren’t flickering like everything else in the office.
It was just a hunch.
Maybe, just maybe…
Thomas sat down and began to translate the binary representations of his code into standard mathematical format. Strangely enough, whatever he wrote down stayed that way and did not convert itself into 0’s and 1’s. For every portion he decoded, it would erase itself and a new portion would appear. He didn’t care much though, it was supposed to be a dream after all.
He threw himself into his work, completely absorbed and didn’t care for the hours flying by, disregarding the fact that he should have woken up long ago.
Finally he reached the last string of code, the final string to give him the answer to the equation he’d been working on for so long.
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01001101 01110010 00100000 01000001 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 01101111 01101110
“01101110 is n…” he muttered as he decoded the final letter of the series and wrote it down. He looked at his fully decoded text and glanced at the solution it provided, when his monitor suddenly lit up
Hello Mr Anderson, we've been expecting you. Please look up
Stunned at receiving the sudden message, he looked up only to find his boss standing in front of him dressed in a black suit. All the binary code had disappeared in an instant turning everything back to the way it was before, but all of that didn’t matter to him. At that moment, he was more concerned with the pistol being held to his head.
“Mr Smith, I…” Thomas Anderson started to explain
“No Mr Anderson” the agent interrupted , “I will not listen to your explanations. You have been identified as the first anomaly within the Matrix. The Architect will see you now.”
L3D 