Chapter 1
Year 2107, Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland
Today was a special day for the Museum of Ages that Passed. They were going to launch old nuclear reactor, that dozens of years ago was used in Power Plants. It was quite interesting concept, almost forgotten and somewhat forbidden for normal people. But this particular Museum managed to gain city authorities’ approval for conducting this show. It’s purpose was to safely show modern people how energy was produced back in these crude days. And so it happened.
Everything was prepared and people took great interest in it. Especially schools, because this was a fun way to do science! And how to better learn than by fun?
Anyway. Due to limited resources and space, not every school managed to organize a trip to the first launch, but some did. Students from Piłsudski’s Private Academy were lucky enough to have that privilege.
……
Cod was kind of excited, in a moment he and his class were going to see a working nuclear reactor. Imagine that! Almost none of modern people know what it is, but he was going to see how it works! He felt lucky and intrigued, as he was always a curious kid. Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him a kid, as he was 15 and was very grown up for his age. I mean not every 15 year old could grow a beard or have such a mindset, but he did. Fortunately.
Anyway.
Cod arrived here together with his class from Piłsudski’s Private Academy and 4 other schools. There were quite a lot of people, but the hall with the reactor was pretty big, so it wasn’t very crowded.
Everyone was wearing a special suit, that could deflect radiation - thanks to that they could watch the reactor safely from a pretty close distance and see what’s happening every second.
At least the guide said so, and who knows if he is right. I mean, we certainly don’t. Most of the information related to nukes were made top secret, as to prevent any chances of That happening again. - Thought Cod.
Hey kiddos, be quiet there! - Cod’s teacher, professor Lynn, said to his students, that were talking non stop. They lacked discipline. Oh yes, they did. Almost every kid these days did lack it. Wonders of stress less parenting. Even shouting at a kid was considered kind of bad.
Cod however didn’t lack discipline. His grandpa taught it to him and showed the proper way to manhood. Grandpa Jan was a tough man, he was one of survivors of The Calamity. Some also call it World War III.
He was 108 years old right now, but still had lots of strength and vigor.
That’s why Cod stood quietly, waiting for the show to begin. His back straight, chest puffed out, hands behind his back. He was pretty average when it comes to height. Around 6 foot tall. He had dark hair and eyes, badass, as for his age, beard. He wasn’t particularly handsome or something, rather just average, maybe a bit better than that. He was also a little buff, as he worked out for couple of years now, under the guidance of his grandpa. He was pretty darn strong, his record in dead lift being almost 450 lbs, which is 250% of his body mass. That’s pretty good. Anyway.
Cod didn’t talk much with his classmates, he was polite, talked to them from time to time and stuff, but often they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, as their levels of maturity were completely different, so it just didn’t work. Of course Cod didn’t think that he was better than them or something, he just considered himself a bit unique, not a weirdo though.
Suddenly some middle-aged man appeared on the stage, where the reactor was. He walked up and said through his suit’s speaker, “Hello everyone. Time’s up! Time to begin. The reactor will be activated in a moment.”
*** Meanwhile ***
“Guys, we can’t afford to fuck up and not launch it! We’ll just have to activate it!” Said some nervous man in a white suit.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Someone setting by the Terminal, answered him “But Boss Janusz, the unit tests or functional tests for software managing this whole thing haven’t been run! We don’t know for sure if the code is working properly! We simply didn’t have enough time! Give us just one hour, please! Think about the fact, that most of the code that we managed to write is in C and partially in Asm for these prehistoric x86 machines! We have no clue how it’ll behave in production environment because it’s too old! There might be some bugs that’ll cause a clusterfuck to happen! It would be like another Heartbleed! And if that happens… People will say that we’re even worse than Java’s creators!”
“Don’t dramatize. Besides, if we don’t run it in time, the schedule will be fucked up, and They will get angry, which will result in firing the shit out of our asses. Also, I think it’ll work probably. I mean it did on dev env.” Replied boss Janusz.
“But Boss, don’t you know that everything that can go bad, will go bad on production server? It’s one of the basics of Corpo IT.” Said another bearded dude sitting by Terminal.
“Just shut the hell up and start this shit!”
*click*
*bzzzz*
*buu*
…
“See? It works!”
*** Back to Cod ***
“As you can see, the reactor is beginning to work. It produces energy by… blah blah... physics... blah blah …” Said the middle-aged man, whose name was Wypokowy Eskpert.
Cod was excited. It was so interesting, he thought.
“Now the reactor is working with around 70% of its power, in a moment, we’ll take it to the max, reaching 100%, which will let us observe… blah physics again blah... “ Explained Wypokowy.
*** In the IT department again ***
“Shit! Janusz! QUICKLY! Come here!” Shouted Mirek - one of these that objected to going through with running the thing.
“What is it?!” Replied Janusz Informatyki.
“I fucking told you! We! We’ll be all dead in two minutes, so will be everyone in around two kilometers! Look on the screen!” Said Mirek.
And on the screen there it was:
“Memory management is a b*tch! Stack Overflow fellas! Process manageTheCoreTemp has just crashed! Considering what this software is for, you are in deep shit. Good luck, though. Btw. All of this is Bob's fault, I told him to fix this bug but he was too busy with watching the Silicon Valley. *wink*”
“This… We can fix it, right! Just turn it on and off again! The process will restart then!” Shouted quickly Janusz.
“No! We can’t! This ain’t fucking The IT Crowd! We told you! If we deactivate it, the core will go on a rampage, which will get us the same result, which is a meltdown! We fucking managed to create another Chernobyl. Great. Death, await us!”
“Holy Mother of Bytes…”
“Let’s pray, that’s the only thing left for us to do… Might Dennis Ritchie, dear Stroustrup, holy Guido von Rossum… Or let’s just try turning it off and on again. Maybe it’ll work. Better than not doing anything.”
*** Back to Cod ***
Suddenly something happened. The reactor began being weird. Something bad was happening. Before anyone could do anything… Bang! Some white light flashed in Cod’s eyes. Unrivaled whiteness. Blinding one. And then it calmed. As if nothing happened, no one was affected, no one noticed anything too strange, as if they didn’t see what he saw. However, it wasn’t one of his concerns right now, as he just fell unconscious.
*** IT department ***
“What? The temperature went back to normal? Everything is fine? What’s this?” Said Mirek.
“Yes! I knew it! People from The IT Crowd were always right! HAHA! We managed to prevent some major clusterfuck from happening! But after the show we gotta patch this shit, 'kay boys? And tell Wypokowy to end the show earlier, so we can turn this thing off safely while it still works!”