Syntax Of Us

Another Kernel Panic

The Sender's name appeared to be Adrian Voss.  The subject read "Important Message". Peter wanted to ignore this as Adrian never came into his life to bring anything but chaos.

He opened the mail with a distaste, and for the couple of milliseconds it loaded, Peter braced himself for whatever has to come.

Peter, 
My sources tells me that you are coming to CodeCatalyst Hackathon, try not to be a smart jerk there or I will assume that you don't care if I let people know what you did at HackerArena. My brother should win.

Peter remembers what Adrian was talking about. HackerArena... Peter went there with Clara as a duo and all the participants were given an assignment. They had to make a blockchain system to store all records in the decentralised ledger but their duo wasn't doing great. 

Clara has accepted that they are about to lose this challenge but her eyes, they said that she longed for it as she typed each lines of code. That sight was enough to make Peter restless and he wanted them to win.

Peter looked for the closest person who was about to win and it was him, Lucas. Adrian Voss's younger brother.

Peter takes out a USB drive from his bag in which he kept all shady script. He inserted it inside the slot of his laptop and looked for a particular script and he immediately found it--The Zammer. 

This script would install a malware in victim's device and it will start a software update forcing machines to restart several time making it unusable for up to half an hour. Peter targeted Lucas's machine and executed and script did its work.

Lucas was shocked when his laptop restarted on itself to update its Operating System, his jaw tightened and strong wave of disappointment crossed his face. He was really upset, he was now far from winning the competition and Peter stole away that opportunity from him just to make Clara happy.

Everything that happened in the past replayed past his eyes as he forgot that he was in a cafe. The coffee went cold and his lips were dry from the last sip he took a long ago. He didn't know for how much time he was sitting there.

Adrian has to make things worse like the chaos wasn't enough. 

He left the money on the table for the coffee and walked back to his apartment. He has to make some arrangements for the competition but a part of him was frustrated. Adrian has been his rival since a long time, not in programming. Adrian wasn't into computers at all, what made the two of them rivals was Adrian belonged to a powerful family which has a strong financial support. People in the university feared him more than admiration. Adrian was very cruel and everyone would bow against him except for one, and that was Peter.

Peter didn't feed into his ego since the very first day and this bothered Adrian a lot. But since that day at HackerArena, Adrian got a dirt over him and it made him helpless. The fact that the person for whom he made such a move, bent his rules and hurt Adrian's brother wasn't by his side anymore. All this was wasted and he didn't like the feeling of it.

For the first time in his world, Peter felt like losing. Losing even though it wasn't his fault.

He wanted to know what has happened to Clara. But with all this happening at the same time, it was too much to bear and a part of Peter's heart ached for crying but it would make him feel weak so he restrained himself and endured his pain.

By the night, he was back at his apartment. He was tired, mentally. He laid down into his bed and he didn't know when he has fallen asleep. 

He woke up to constant buzz from his phone. There were a lot of pending texts from one person. His eyes were blurry and he can't read anything that was written. He decides to wake up completely. He lazily stands up and sits against his computer.

It was Miu who texted. Peter just met Miu on a casual day and hasn't been a long time. Miu wasn't her real name, Peter himself didn't knew since they didn't talk much. Miu reached out to Peter to collaborate on her project but Peter laughed on her rating as they were too low to even qualify for medium tier tournaments. She wasn't like a person who floods DM with so many messages regularly. Something has to be important.

Peter sees a bunch screenshots of a website which looked like HackMetrics (It was a website where programmers solved complex problems and get their ratings. Good ratings are important for joining special competitions) 

Miu was celebrating that now she can join special tournaments like Peter though she has barely made it. Miu was clumsy in programming and made a lot of silly mistakes.

"You literally took 6 months to reach this level. This way you will figure out the solution after the event is over and everyone's gone... except for a few bugs who lost their ways" Peter mocked, but he immediately regretted it. He just hoped that she is not offended.

"I will just fix those bugs then :)" Miu replied.

It eased Peter... he hadn't felt the same for a long time. In the very back of his mind, he wished that he could be as careless as she was.

Then Miu typed, stopped typing, and retyped and the text appears.

"I heard that a competition named "CodeCatalyst" is organized next week... Can we make up the duo?"

Peter didn't want to make up the duo with her. He didn't like the idea of duo because he thought that duo makes it harder to work and with someone as clumsy as Miu? Peter can't even think about it...

"I am sorry, but I am fine Solo" Peter has just typed it but before he could send, Miu flooded the DM with requests.

Peter has to thought about it once again, He wasn't sure if he should say yes but Miu made it hard to say No.

Putting a stone into his mind, he texted.... continued in next part