Program Alpha-Omega 1

I am NOT the original author. The original author is “Eric Storm”

Episode 1: Omega Finds Alpha

“Mr. Griffin?”

Zack shook himself into awareness as he realized the entire class was staring at him. He looked humbly up at his teacher, and said, “Yes, Mr. Parks?”

“Mr. Griffin, I realize that you may be fully capable of passing your final as we speak, but it is not seemly for you to ignore me completely.” There were some chuckles around the room.

“I’m sorry, sir, I got distracted. What was the question?”

“Never mind, Mr. Griffin, we’ll move on to someone who is more interested in the material.”

As Mr. Parks moved on to another student, Zack glanced up at the clock. Another fourteen minutes before this rather boring review session would be over. Zack Griffin was ready to pass his final in Computer Programming, as Mr. Parks had suggested. Zack spent a great deal of time dealing with computers. He made his extra cash by fixing computers, and teaching people how to use them. This was his last class, and, while normally this class would have been his most fun of the day, but he didn’t need the review, and found himself staring out the window, and daydreaming of Claudia.

Claudia Merris was a senior. Zack had met her the year before, at the Freshman Social. The juniors and seniors of the Freshman Services Team were responsible for helping the new freshmen adjust to the high school. Claudia was a junior then, and held some responsibility that Zack never had been able to discern. However, she had asked him to dance right off the bat, and they had struck up a friendship. He’d hoped for a date, but the one time he’d asked her out, to the Valentine’s Dance last year, she’d politely begged off, because she had a death in the family. Still, they remained good friends, to the point that they were tutoring each other. She needed his help with computers, and he needed a hand with biology. It was a comfortable arrangement.

His daydream, however, had been about the sorts of things he wished they’d been doing last night instead of studying biology. He knew the reason Claudia wouldn’t date him was because he was an underclassman. He didn’t like that, but he certainly understood. Still, it didn’t stop him from fantasizing.

The bell rang, ending an interminably long class. Not only was this his last class of the day, but it was Friday, so he had a weekend to look forward to. Not that he had anything planned, but he could sleep in, and play on his computer. Zack was a computer whiz; he could write programs as easily as most people wrote letters home. His father, who worked for a local computer research company, was extremely proud of his son. His mother was just baffled by it all. The Griffins were very supportive of Zack, and had told him that his college would be paid for, regardless of what he wanted to do. His father secretly hoped that he would join the company, but would not push him to do so. His mother was just glad that he had turned out as well as he had. She worried about him, because he had no siblings. After his birth, complications had made it necessary for her to have a hysterectomy, and so they had only the one child. She was relieved that he seemed to have turned out so well, even if he was something of a loner.

—–

Zack dumped his book bag in a corner and turned on his computer. He wandered off to the kitchen while it booted, returning with a soda and a piece of last night’s pizza. He started up his internet connection, and changed into jeans and a T-shirt while the connection was established. The computer had its own phone line, and Zack spent a large part of his free time surfing the web and chatting with friends.

Today, he headed over to his favorite chat room, where a lot of the technically proficient, but often slightly crazy, computer experts hung out. He hung out in this room often, because he picked up tips on hacking, cracking, and generally useful pieces of information on running systems. Zack wanted to be system admin for a large corporation when he got out of college, so he wanted to know all he could.

Today, one of his old friends was hanging around, just bullshitting with the other chatters. He immediately acknowledged Zack’s presence.

<Valkyrie359>: Hi, Zmorph!

(Zmorph was Zack’s online name.)

<Zmorph>: Hey, Val. How’s things?

<Valkyrie359>: Oh, just peachy. You?

<Zmorph>: Bored. But at least it’s a weekend.

<Valkyrie359>: Got a hot date tonight? 😉

<Zmorph>: Yeah, right. Not funny.

<Valkyrie359>: Sorry. I’ve been waiting for you, though. I ran across something you might find interesting.

<Zmorph>: What’s that?

<Valkyrie359>: Well, it’s a program. The author claims it doesn’t work, but who knows? Maybe you could get it to go.

<Zmorph>: What’s it supposed to do?

<Valkyrie359>: Oh, nothing much. You’ll see. Here’s the URL:…

No sooner had he given Zack the web address, than Val had needed to sign off. Zack wasted no time in heading over to the site, and having a look. The page was titled “Failed Projects”. Not an auspicious beginning. He read through the description. This program was intended to… control people? Well, no wonder he couldn’t get it to work! But as Zack kept reading, he realized that the author wasn’t just dreaming, that he had in fact done all the necessary research. But the article concluded by stating that the program had not actually worked on any of five subjects he’d tried it on, and that the author, who identified himself only as Adam, had not a clue as to why. Adam was certain that the science was sound, and that the problem was somewhere in his execution of the elements of the program, but he had not been able to find it. He stated that anyone who wanted to was welcome to try to fix the program, and use it for their own purposes, so long as they didn’t sell it.

Zack downloaded the file, thinking, Well, hell, I haven’t got anything better to do tonight. I can at least give it a look and find out what it does do. Zack was certain that it did not have any chance of actually controlling people, but he figured it probably had some pretty cool graphics in it.

—–

He spent the next two hours engrossed in source code so complicated that it was taking him two or three minutes just to interpret what each line actually did. The source was very poorly documented, and Zack was taking the time to add comments to the code so that he wouldn’t have to re-interpret later. The thing that struck him was that, while the code was poorly documented, it was extraordinarily well written. It was tight, fast code, that didn’t appear to him to have flaws in its basic logic. Though he didn’t yet have confidence enough in it to compile and run it, he was becoming aware that the author of this code was smart enough to know what was possible, and what was a pipe dream, and he began to wonder if there was a possibility that this program actually might work.

He was interrupted by his mother calling him to dinner. He made sure to save his work, and password-locked his system before heading off to the dinner table. Conversation at dinner was the usual dull exchange: Dad had a difficulty with his boss, Mom had to deal with the cranky dean out at the college. They asked, as a matter of course, how Zack’s day had been, and he told them it had been dull. Zack worked his way quickly through dinner, excusing himself even before dessert. His parents took only minor note of that, realizing that he must have some kind of project, which was usually his only reason for skipping dessert.

Zack returned immediately to the code, and continued translating what it did, and typing in comment lines. He worked well into the night on this, for the program was thousands of lines long. When he finally dumped himself into bed at four a.m., exhausted, he had finished translating the code. He set his alarm for nine o’clock. He thought he had spotted some parts of the code that looked wrong. He figured this would be a good weekend project for him. He had no homework, having finished it all during school, and so his weekend was completely free. He fell asleep dreaming of lines and lines of code whipping by him, and he had to find the one line that would make it all run.

∼∼≈≡≈∼∼∼≈≡≈∼∼∼≈≡≈∼∼

Zack was startled out of bed when his alarm went off that morning. He tried to shake off the fuzziness in his brain with a long, hot shower. His parents slept very late on Saturdays, and so weren’t up yet. He made himself a bowl of cereal, and considered what he needed to do to try to get the program working. He knew that he should run the program, to see what it actually did, as far as putting things on the screen, or playing sounds. After that, he wasn’t sure. He’d decide a little later.

Having finished breakfast, he hurried back to his room, shutting the door and sitting back down in his chair. Soon, he was staring at an intensely colorful display with an eerie background soundtrack. He felt a strange sort of pull, but was able to shake it off, and turned the program off. Now that he had some idea of what the program was actually producing, he needed to look at Adam’s research, which was included with the source code.

For the next five hours, Zack was immersed in his project, uncaring of what went on around him. He delved deeply into the research text that Adam had included with the program. He moved back and forth between the source code and the text, labeling the program as to what each section was trying to achieve. He had sections labeled ‘Initialization of Mind Variables’, ‘Sublimation of Will’, ‘Opening to Suggestion’, and a final section labeled, ‘Suggestions’. This last section was completely empty, except for the only comment line that Adam had included in the source:

// See research text for options

Zack had, in fact, looked through that part of the research text and realized that the code for this section was remarkably like a script language. He would have no trouble writing this section. But where was the problem?

Of course, Zack didn’t actually know there was a problem. Although Adam said the program didn’t work, there weren’t any options listed under ‘Suggestions’, which was where the actual commands to the person were supposed to be entered. Zack decided to try a hopefully harmless experiment on himself. He modified the program to make the watcher “lose” an hour of time, staring at the screen. He would try this on himself. With any luck, it wouldn’t turn him into a zombie.

Taking the precaution of leaving a note for his parents, Zack began the program, noting the time at 2:46 pm. The program ran its course, and closed. Again, Zack had felt the strange tug of the program, but when he looked at his watch, it was 2:52 pm.