Flashover

Chapter 1: Sparks

When I was little, my mother used to tell me that the universe was made in sparks. Would that mean that at the beginning, someone had clacked two cosmic stones together?

***

I was flitting through the code on my screen. This damn bug was driving me insane.

“Stack corruption.” I whispered the most dreaded words a programmer could ever hear.

A stack corruption was a special kind of bug. Somewhere along the line, the program had overwritten a small piece of memory, a tiny piece, but it was located on the stack, and that changed everything.

I clicked through the corrupt stack trace in my debugger, trying to find the culprit. No use.

The stack was the map with which a program could tell where it had been and what it had been doing. There was no telling how badly a program would misbehave after overwriting part of the stack, and you know what the worst part is? That kind of bug gets the debugger itself confused.

I sighed and shut down my debugger, it would have to wait.

I checked my email. Nothing yet.

I should have received the message by now. I was starting to get worried. Did it lose power? Was the process interrupted somehow? What’s with the delay?

I checked the estimated completion time on my phone again and realised it was two minutes past the original estimate. I had to go check it myself.

I got up, turned off the computer, and left the library.

***

My name is Darren Swenson, and I’m seventeen years old.

The year is 2022, and last week, I finished writing the first Structural Molecular Compiler.

The SMC was a piece of computer software. A suite of compiler programs. Only it didn’t compile code into computer programs. It compiled code into complex molecular machines, simply known as nanobots. It compiled from a new programming language I’d invented specifically for this purpose.

The language was called C@ – pronounced ‘cat’ – and it was weird. It certainly looked like C++, but had its own idioms and special keywords for automata.

It was hard work, and the compiler was very slow. It had to account for millions of atoms interacting simultaneously within a molecule, and produce something meaningful out of the code it was fed. It would take days to compile anything of moderate complexity.

At the moment, I was having it compile my second invention, it was a mere 12,382 lines of C@ code, but when passed through the compiler, it produced a peculiar piece of nano-machinery: the Structural Molecular Assembler. I won’t get into its function right now, but if you’ve studied biology, the best analogue for it is a Ribosome on crack.

But the compiler was taking too long. I checked my message queue again. Nothing.

I entered the basement.

***

Designing those things wasn’t easy. It took me two years and a lot of unrelenting work. I had to study so many things in so many fields, I think it’d be fair if I’d turned into a raving lunatic in the process.

What made it ironic was that I was somewhat of a failure at school. History, geography, languages, crafts, and art weren’t on my list of interesting subjects. Well, maybe geography and crafts were mildly interesting.

As I walked into the basement, I could smell something in the air. Something was wrong.

I turned on the lights and went to my terminal, I woke it up from standby and signed in.