Book 1 - The Sleeping Darkness
It had been a long day. They were all long days. Bob muttered to himself, as he piled unwashed dishes into his kitchen sink (a problem for tomorrow’s Bob). The sheer inhumanity of the thing. They kept him locked up in that office for nine hours each day, cramped him into an uncomfortable chair and made him stare for endless stretches at a flickering blue screen. You just couldn’t make this stuff up. But when he brought up the injustice of the whole system, people looked at him like he was crazy.
Bob's stomach rumbled discontentedly. The meal had been less than satisfying. You could only do so much with frozen dinners, but a man could hardly be expected to whip up a meal from scratch after he'd crawled back home after a soul-crushing day. Especially today, because today had been a bad day. A bad, long day. In the calendar of bad days, today took special place, like some evil holiday.
Robert Brown, junior quality assurance engineer, had cycled into the office that morning, wandered zombielike to his desk, plopped himself down on his chair, clicked into his computer and there it was: the bug of his nightmares, The Russian Trojan Turtle. It was back.
The Slackback Turtle, a messaging platform for tortoise and turtle enthusiasts, prided itself on its wide and very specific range of reptile emojis. But now one user complained, and provided video evidence, that upon sending a Greek Tortoise emoji to his friends, the emoji was warped somehow and transformed into a Russian Tortoise emoji.
Customer Service had been tactful enough to include the user's comment in the ticket: "And just think," with the outrage of an expert on an obscure and meaningless topic, "my associates might have believed that I couldn't tell the difference between the two of them. I'd be a pariah in the shelly community."
Now Bob would freely admit to anyone and everyone who asked that he could not tell the difference between the two emojis. In fact, when the bug had first been reported a year and a half ago and naturally, as a low-priority, low-effort ticket, been dropped on him as the newbie QA, Bob's first move had been along these lines.
Bob had actually gone to the emoji designer and asked him point-blank if the two emojis weren't just copies of each other. Somehow (astonishingly) that hadn't earned Bob any good will. The designer had pointed out, with not a little irritation, that the Greek tortoise emoji was a shade smaller than its Russian counterpart and that its shell patches were golden-yellow as opposed to the pure-yellow of the Russian.
Only the obvious emotion in the designer's voice convinced Bob he wasn't being taken for a ride. He'd gone back to his desk, pulled out his ruler and tried measuring the emojis on his screen. Both appeared exactly four millimeters across. Maybe his ruler wasn't precise enough?
Still Bob had guts and the desperate determination of a man who didn't want to have to job-hunt again. He thought of himself as rather a good QA. He had a creative mind and took an unhealthy pleasure in breaking features. He was a little offended if a story got past him without a couple bug tickets. He could figure this out.
No, no, he couldn't. Bob had invested many hours in a faithful attempt to reproduce the issue. He had failed. He had failed miserably. The bug had been marked as unreproducible and buried deep in the team's backlog.
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The story should have ended there, but, tragedy of tragedies, today, on this evil holiday, an identical complaint from a different user with new evidence had just appeared. It pretty much signaled the death knell for Bob's career prospects.
An issue that already affected multiple end users, and which Bob had "supposedly" spent multiple days investigating and with nothing to show for it, no steps to reproduce, not even an educated guess... Well he didn't come out of that sounding good, did he? No, there was no escape. Bob reckoned it was odds on they would fire him. The user was already threatening to complain on the forums. The company was in jeopardy. Something had to be done. Someone had to take the fall.
Bob crumbled onto the sofa. The grind followed you everywhere. Here he was, supposedly off-the-clock, and yet still obsessing over the bug ticket, scrambling around for any conceivable flow he hadn't already tested half-a-dozen times. Work was like a parasite, some leech clamped down on the back of his neck, just where he couldn't see it, slowly draining away his life blood.
Thank god for George. Bob sat down on the floor beside his golden retriever and took the dog's head in his lap. Georgie-boy yawned charmingly and Bob smiled through the stinky dog breath. He stroked the soft patch at the back of the dog's neck and rubbed away that little eye gunk the dog always seemed to pick up somewhere.
There's something about your own dog. You can just tell he loves you. That he wants you to be there. That he misses you. There's something so uncomplicated and pure about a dog's love. There's nothing quite like it.
Bob started to feel better. Things were looking up. And he knew what he wanted to do now. He was headed for a warmer and more comfortable place. The one true oasis in the scarred and ugly world of modern labor: the bath.
Yes, Bob would probably have given up all hope long ago and been ground down into one of those robot-people you see everywhere, if not for the rejuvenating and restorative efforts of a hot bath with a good book. Bob grabbed up the paperback he was reading and made for his happy place.
This involved stepping over the curled-up figure of his golden retriever, because George had acquired the annoying and endearing habit of parking himself right in front of the bathroom doorway. The dog was a sleepy sentinel, who would slowly raised his head, blink his eyes questioningly a few times at passing intruders, before letting himself fall back into a half-dead stupor.
Bob bent down and scratched the dog’s neck in passing; George let out a low contented sound. That dog has a good life. Better than Bob's at any rate. Bob made a half-hearted attempt at closing the door, but the dog shot him an annoyed look and he gave the thing up. George had never been good at following instructions.
Enough of that. Enough of troubles and guilt. Enough of the world's ugliness. There it was. The soothing sound of running water and the warm, inviting steam that curls over the tub. He stripped down and with the paperback under one arm, stepped into the water’s embrace. It was piping hot, just the way he liked it. Cloaked in a cloud of white mist, he sighed serenely. The day’s troubles started to melt away; he let himself breathe in long and slow; he sensed his own warm blood circling his body. This was life.
He’d kept both hands out of the water, not wanting to wet his book, Jonny the Man: the Kiwi Warriors. He was at a good place and had spent most of the work day anticipating what would happen next. There's nothing like going to another world, where a seemingly ordinary man discovers his potential and grows into the hero of ages.
Bob could finally forget his stressors: the specter of the trojan turtle, his impending termination, his empty dreams. He leaned back in the tub and moaned happily. Bob's time had come. Finally, peace and quiet and joy. He rested his elbow on the rim of the tub, and thumbed through looking for the earmarked page. "Jonny, my old friend, glorious seeing you again."
> Commencing System Integration Protocol...