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Why Ten Kay
The first thing Leo saw when he opened his eyes was a smile. In fact, the whole featureless room was filled with smiling people, all wearing simple white robes and bearing looks of divine ecstasy.
“Leonard Finnick. You are awakened.”
The speaker was a young lady with beautifully sculpted hair and thin grey eyebrows, so Leo did not feel the need to be sarcastic about her obvious statement. The outfits gave him a twinge of relief. Nobody from 1998 would have been caught dead in robes like that, so his suspended animation had lasted long enough to avoid dealing with the year-long cluster that his software company had faced with Y2K upcoming. It did not look like he had been awakened five years later as he had requested, though.
“You undoubtedly want to see the new world that has sprang into being during your slumber,” said the young lady. She extended one hand and waited for Leo to sit up, who was thankfully dressed similar to the rest of his smiling entourage. “We have evolved much since your time, shepherded by the very machines that you created. Come to the balcony. There are many who wish to gaze upon your presence.”
“Thank you,” said Leo out of reflex. The entire room of people let out a gasp, and fell to their knees in one motion as if he had somehow performed a miracle worthy of a Greek god. The young lady held his hand as he stepped down from the cryobed, which looked oddly archaic as a device of stainless steel and aged plastic in the bare white-on-white color scheme of the room. The lady was most certainly modern, from the faint glitter in her eyes that bespoke of some sort of implant, to the smooth metal of a bracelet that flexed with her motions as she helped Leo take the few steps to the nearest featureless wall.
“Portal,” she commanded, and the wall split open to reveal a huge courtyard far below, with thousands of people in white robes packed densely across the ground and hundreds more hanging out of open windows of smooth, elegant buildings extending in all directions. The moment they sighted Leo, they all began to cheer wildly, waving and flinging glitter in all directions until the whole area swam in a sparkling fog under the glow of the thankfully unchanged sun. The resulting cheers deafened them for several minutes until they quieted enough for him to hear the young lady again.
“They want a speech,” said the young lady. “I doubt we have time before you begin to work, but if you wish…”
“Work?” asked Leo in a daze. “How far into the future did I travel?”
“Almost exactly eight thousand years,” said the young woman. “Not counting the Great Confluence, and Eternity Week, of course.”
“Eight thou—” Leo’s voice choked up despite his best efforts, and the young lady continued.
“The software of your cryo capsule was faulty, and placed you into a state which could not be revived easily. Several centuries passed before the physician’s skills had even a chance of bringing about your revival, and by that time… Well, you had become famous, and they did not want even the smallest chance of failing. Finally, when our civilization reached this level of perfection, your fame had reached such stellar heights that it was nearly unspeakable to consider you in the flesh instead of the abstract.”
“But I’m here,” said Leo, giving a sideways glance out into the teeming crowds and deciding against a casual wave.
“We would not have revived you except we face a time of dire need, a disaster of epic proportions that our philosophy and science cannot solve on their own. You see, although we have progressed far in the sciences of the mind and body, the very roots of our technology were repeatedly built on the technology which came before it.”
“no,” said Leo in a very small voice as she continued.
“The perfect machines which control civilization’s many worlds have run without needing the touch of a human for centuries. They repair themselves, replace themselves, and build new units when needed, but their very core programming is repeatedly layered upon older code, which they cannot alter by themselves.”
“You can’t mean—” started Leo without the ability to continue. The lady did in his place.
“Unless they are reprogrammed, we fear the machines will all fail when the year reaches 10,000. Do you know COBOL?”
“Leonard Finnick. You are awakened.”
The speaker was a young lady with beautifully sculpted hair and thin grey eyebrows, so Leo did not feel the need to be sarcastic about her obvious statement. The outfits gave him a twinge of relief. Nobody from 1998 would have been caught dead in robes like that, so his suspended animation had lasted long enough to avoid dealing with the year-long cluster that his software company had faced with Y2K upcoming. It did not look like he had been awakened five years later as he had requested, though.
“You undoubtedly want to see the new world that has sprang into being during your slumber,” said the young lady. She extended one hand and waited for Leo to sit up, who was thankfully dressed similar to the rest of his smiling entourage. “We have evolved much since your time, shepherded by the very machines that you created. Come to the balcony. There are many who wish to gaze upon your presence.”
“Thank you,” said Leo out of reflex. The entire room of people let out a gasp, and fell to their knees in one motion as if he had somehow performed a miracle worthy of a Greek god. The young lady held his hand as he stepped down from the cryobed, which looked oddly archaic as a device of stainless steel and aged plastic in the bare white-on-white color scheme of the room. The lady was most certainly modern, from the faint glitter in her eyes that bespoke of some sort of implant, to the smooth metal of a bracelet that flexed with her motions as she helped Leo take the few steps to the nearest featureless wall.
“Portal,” she commanded, and the wall split open to reveal a huge courtyard far below, with thousands of people in white robes packed densely across the ground and hundreds more hanging out of open windows of smooth, elegant buildings extending in all directions. The moment they sighted Leo, they all began to cheer wildly, waving and flinging glitter in all directions until the whole area swam in a sparkling fog under the glow of the thankfully unchanged sun. The resulting cheers deafened them for several minutes until they quieted enough for him to hear the young lady again.
“They want a speech,” said the young lady. “I doubt we have time before you begin to work, but if you wish…”
“Work?” asked Leo in a daze. “How far into the future did I travel?”
“Almost exactly eight thousand years,” said the young woman. “Not counting the Great Confluence, and Eternity Week, of course.”
“Eight thou—” Leo’s voice choked up despite his best efforts, and the young lady continued.
“The software of your cryo capsule was faulty, and placed you into a state which could not be revived easily. Several centuries passed before the physician’s skills had even a chance of bringing about your revival, and by that time… Well, you had become famous, and they did not want even the smallest chance of failing. Finally, when our civilization reached this level of perfection, your fame had reached such stellar heights that it was nearly unspeakable to consider you in the flesh instead of the abstract.”
“But I’m here,” said Leo, giving a sideways glance out into the teeming crowds and deciding against a casual wave.
“We would not have revived you except we face a time of dire need, a disaster of epic proportions that our philosophy and science cannot solve on their own. You see, although we have progressed far in the sciences of the mind and body, the very roots of our technology were repeatedly built on the technology which came before it.”
“no,” said Leo in a very small voice as she continued.
“The perfect machines which control civilization’s many worlds have run without needing the touch of a human for centuries. They repair themselves, replace themselves, and build new units when needed, but their very core programming is repeatedly layered upon older code, which they cannot alter by themselves.”
“You can’t mean—” started Leo without the ability to continue. The lady did in his place.
“Unless they are reprogrammed, we fear the machines will all fail when the year reaches 10,000. Do you know COBOL?”
Pics
Kind of an absurdist joke. I mean, what are the odds that with all the digital record-keeping, nobody has any documentation of COBOL and is capable of learning it? And what are the odds this one guy does? He'd have to know it from memory, apparently, since nobody has any files of it or can even use the existing machines for trial and error experimentation. But if you can accept that, it leads to a humorous situation. It's telegraphed, in that the pomp of it all certainly felt like it was going to lead to a stupid joke, but it didn't telegraph what the joke would be about, so it does keep up interest.
Hehe.
This is fun. Matter of fact, a few weeks ago one of my colleagues showed me an article telling how desperate some banks are to find people competent in Cobol, because the old ones are all retired and the code needs modernising.
What is the message here? Learn assembly and then go to sleep, and in a few thousand years, you’ll be worshipped like a god? :) Not so absurd. My own society is desperately looking for people able to write real-time code in C, a challenge no newbie – even from the beat software schools – seems apt to rise up to.
That being said, there is not much to the story except that joke, which makes it looks like a sort of feghoot. Maybe you could have expanded a bit more or given us more meat to chew on before the final twist, because as it is, it’s a bit scrawny.
On a final note, would you trust someone who wrote faulty software for his own hibernating machine?
This is fun. Matter of fact, a few weeks ago one of my colleagues showed me an article telling how desperate some banks are to find people competent in Cobol, because the old ones are all retired and the code needs modernising.
What is the message here? Learn assembly and then go to sleep, and in a few thousand years, you’ll be worshipped like a god? :) Not so absurd. My own society is desperately looking for people able to write real-time code in C, a challenge no newbie – even from the beat software schools – seems apt to rise up to.
That being said, there is not much to the story except that joke, which makes it looks like a sort of feghoot. Maybe you could have expanded a bit more or given us more meat to chew on before the final twist, because as it is, it’s a bit scrawny.
On a final note, would you trust someone who wrote faulty software for his own hibernating machine?
>>Monokeras Having lived through Y2K in the tech world, I'm constantly baffled how our world both has leading bleeding edge programming mixed in with legacy systems running code that pre-dates many of the people in the department. But it *works* and runs the paychecks every month, so nobody dares touch it.
>>Pascoite Friends of ours moved to South Dakota about ten years ago. He promptly got a tech job and had to go learn COBOL because their whole codebase ran on it, much like one might get a job at a technical writing company and have to go learn Ancient Greek.
>>Anonymous Potato I can't write compact code or compact stories, so I had to improvise.
>>Pascoite Friends of ours moved to South Dakota about ten years ago. He promptly got a tech job and had to go learn COBOL because their whole codebase ran on it, much like one might get a job at a technical writing company and have to go learn Ancient Greek.
>>Anonymous Potato I can't write compact code or compact stories, so I had to improvise.