The Sysadmin Who Learned to Write: A Short Story

Vasya looked at his laptop screen for the umpteenth time. He didn’t want to refresh the page. Though obviously, it needed to be refreshed. One more time. The last time. He wouldn’t refresh it again. F5.

56.6. Dropped by one. Damn. A minus one over four hours wasn’t a big deal, but it still stung.

The gray-blue tangle of threads (or wires, whatever) stared back at his bloodshot programmer eyes. It was simultaneously alluring and repulsive. This tangle promised fame and knowledge, but at the same time, it could bring disgrace.

Not long ago, just a few hours earlier, one overly witty comment had cost Vasya 12 points. Revolting. He needed to get even. It was a matter of honor now. He absolutely had to get even. Alt+Tab.

Word 2010 helpfully presented Vasya with the draft of the article that was supposed to bring him glory. This article was supposed to shake up that very tangle of threads and tell the world about something great. The problem was that at this moment, the article contained exactly two bytes. \r\n. Nothing else had been written.

Vasya had spent the last 20 hours in front of the computer. He’d probably slept, though he couldn’t remember it. A couple of times he’d found himself collapsed on the keyboard. His mood was abysmal. His entire life had narrowed down to this tangle. Not a single good line would come to him. Everything was just catastrophically bad.

He cycled through his tabs with Ctrl+Tab once more. Bash — nothing new or interesting. THG — utter nonsense about gadgets that wouldn’t reach Russia for another couple of years, God willing. Art… — nothing to talk about. Gmail — a couple of fresh spams, a dozen indifferent emails from Microsoft and similar companies. Habr — again. Again this tangle that wouldn’t let him live normally. He was starting to wonder — was he losing his mind? Maybe he shouldn’t…

---

Very abruptly: Beep, and then — smooth and drawn-out — Whirrrrrrrr…

The Android on the desk came to life. Vasya looked at his beloved pet. The stock firmware had been stuffed with mods that Vasya had built himself. Built painstakingly, until the phone had become something like R2-D2. The crowning achievement launched automatically — Artoo Server Guard. A building map smoothly unfolded (that animation alone had cost Vasya two weeks of reading manuals and practicing Java) and a red dot blinked on it.

R28->Dwn->ICMP=false->UPS=true

Vasya was particularly proud of how concise his watchdog’s messages were. One line — the most critical information about something terrible. Plus it looked cool. The whole thing was styled as some kind of cross between an old console and C++.

The dying-on-the-keyboard attempts to level up nonexistent skills ceased that very instant. Vasya sprang to the closet and pulled out his belt with all the necessary tools. The app had already placed a taxi order on one of the websites. While he was putting on his jacket, the Android screen came alive once more.

Accept call.

“Yeah, I ordered one. Uh-huh. Yeah, the usual. No, just economy-plus is fine. Yeah, I’ll wait.”

Right, that’s sorted. Taxi to the server room. Now to figure out what happened to node 28. The app was diligently downloading system logs and displaying the status of other nodes. Node 28 went down from overheating. Node 29 was heating up fast. The temperature on 27 was slightly above normal.

Fortunately, Vasiliy’s engineering mind didn’t take long to deliver the answer — just overheating because some cleaning lady had done a bad job in the server room. Most likely, when he got to the scene, he’d find an HP server happily chewing a mop rag with all its fans.

Damn, he’d have to get authorization to ban cleaning staff from the server room. The server room should be cleaned by an admin. Preferably one who’d served on a flagship warship and knew how to scrub everything spotless to pass a “white glove” inspection.

28->Fail->36B-Online

Good. Node thirty-six had happily taken over all the functions of the casualty. Uptime — still 100%. But that didn’t mean he shouldn’t bring the fallen soldier back online at this ungodly hour (what time was it, anyway? Three in the morning? Holy hell!).

SMS: Your taxi is waiting at the front entrance.

Good.

---

When Vasya stepped out of the elevator, you might not have recognized him. His eyes were no longer red for some reason. The dejected look had vanished. The belt with various tools and the jacket covered in tactical pockets gave the young man the appearance of a space engineer from the future — one who could straighten a warp drive mid-flight in open space at faster-than-light speed.

“Good evening!”

“Good night.”

“Could you hurry, please? I’m in a rush.”

“Sure thing. Moscow’s all ours at this hour.”

“Great.”

“Where are you off to in such a hurry? Usually only people heading to the airport rush like this.”

“No, I’ve got an emergency at work.”

“Ha! Your boss must be a real beast, dragging you to work at three in the morning. Although, you know, in our business…”

Vasya let the taxi driver’s story wash over him. He just nodded at the right moments and said he completely understood what his nighttime companion was talking about. The taxi driver, in turn, was delighted to have such a listener. It wasn’t often that someone listened to him this well, so he poured his heart out at full blast. For all 20 minutes, while the gray Nissan sliced through the deserted streets of nighttime Moscow.

Vasya watched the buildings around him and tried to spot something interesting and unnoticeable in each one. This always helped him train his attention and get into a working state.

Moscow, truth be told, isn’t a great city for stargazing. Not that there’s anything wrong with it — the city is beautiful — but it’s just too tall. Nothing like, say, Redmond. Six-to-nine-story monoliths loom at you from all sides, occasionally broken up by taller Stalinist towers. It wasn’t exactly fatal, but on this particular day, had Moscow been a one-story town like Ilf and Petrov’s America, Vasya wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. Well, not trouble exactly. God knows what.

Had Moscow been one-story, Vasya might have noticed that a star had disappeared from the sky. It simply vanished from Moscow’s reddish-black sky. Well, not vanished exactly — it turned into a perfectly black dot. And this dot began to expand rapidly. Soon, directly above the Nissan, two stars had gone missing. Surely someone else would have noticed, but as it happened, at that second, nobody thought to look up at the sky. The radars were silent too. And that wasn’t particularly surprising. Because the anti-radar coating on the object surpassed anything known on this planet.

Three, five, ten, twenty! One by one, stars simply drowned in the expanding blackness of a disk that had suddenly spread over the Nissan. Nearly half the sky had turned black. But unfortunately, Vasya hadn’t noticed. He noticed a pigeon landing on a window of the building across the street. He noticed someone watching television. He noticed many curious things in the buildings he was looking at. Shame he never managed to glance up at the sky.

The car arrived at its destination.

---

Vasya got out, handing the driver 600 rubles. He said goodbye to the stranger, whose face was beaming with delight. No wonder — he’d just poured his heart out for the first time in 20 years. The driver watched the departing figure for a long time. Then he turned around, rolled down his window, and lit a cigarette.

The unknown Nissan owner noticed that something was off. But he couldn’t figure out what exactly. There was just some kind of discrepancy somewhere. It bugged him a little, but overall, his mood was excellent, and he decided to shake off the nagging thoughts about who-knows-what.

Vasya, meanwhile, was thinking only about number twenty-eight. He hadn’t had time to look at the black sky.

In the server room, as usual, the not-so-gentle breeze from the industrial air conditioner cooled all 64 of Vasiliy’s pets to 22 degrees. The pets stubbornly resisted. Despite their cases being cold, their silicon hearts ran at much higher temperatures.

Number twenty-eight silently blinked its yellow light. Vasya was an engineer. He could find the problem in a couple of seconds. But in this case, there was no need to overthink it. A tuft of Barsik’s fur was sticking out of the server’s front panel.

Barsik did a decent job protecting against mice and rats that occasionally chewed through cables, though once every six months he himself became the cause of one of the sixty-four going down.

Vasya carefully removed the tuft from the cooling system and slid the server back into the rack. He pressed the button and the menacing roar of fans spinning up blended with the general hum of the server room.

28->Online->36B->SpareAwait->SparePendPool=12

Artoo Server Guard immediately reported that the cluster was operating at full fault tolerance.

Yeah, shame that Vasya was the only one who knew about this fault tolerance. After being laughed at back in college, after being carefully mocked at every job, he’d stopped telling people he could build fail-proof systems. He just kept quiet, or claimed 98%. He’d even managed to hide the fact that his cluster, serving the internet needs of a major company, hadn’t gone down once in four years. He forged logs, filed fake reports about this or that server being down for a couple of hours. But his system never, under any circumstances, went down.

He’d always dreamed of getting through to people that while perfection may be unattainable, with 220 volts you can make a computer run without errors. He’d always known that a computer is nothing without a human, and all software bugs are just developer laziness. He knew that true artificial intelligence would never be fully realized until some great and mad developer traded their body for silicon chips. Unfortunately, people tend to fall into bad states when they start thinking they can’t do something. But humans can do anything. Vasya knew this for certain. And it was precisely this—

A piercing screech tore through the room. His ears rang as if from an explosion. Every bone in Vasya’s body began to shake in rhythm with incomprehensible vibrations. He threw up instantly. He fell onto the concrete floor of the server room. The room got much brighter. It felt like every metal component was emitting light that grew brighter with each passing second.

Trying to spit out his own vomit, Vasya looked up and realized everything around him was glowing. Another wave of incomprehensible vibrations struck his body hard. At that moment, only one thought raced through his mind: “God, help me die faster!” — the suffering was that intense. No, there was no pain, but the incomprehensible vibrations caused a feeling of utter revulsion toward everything. The light grew brighter and brighter. His eyes began to ache, and just as they were about to simply burst, Vasya blacked out. Had he not — he would have died, and in a way more agonizing than any human on this planet had ever experienced.

---

White. Everything white. Everything around him — monotonously white. Like the loading program in the Matrix. Vasya tried to get up from the floor. Or whatever it was, because it was perfectly smooth and white. He couldn’t. Every bone in his body responded with pain. A pleasant, human kind of pain, though — not the vibrational nightmare. He struggled to pull the Android from its case and turned it on.

No signal. 4:12 AM.

Almost immediately, Vasya blacked out again.

When he realized he’d woken up, he was afraid to open his eyes. But he had to. White. Everything just white. He stood up. The pain had passed, leaving only a memory of how recently his entire body had suffered. He grabbed the Android — the battery was completely dead.

Vasya understood he needed to do something but hadn’t yet figured out what. He tried to walk forward, experiencing a strange sensation — as though you’re walking and standing still at the same time. A few more uncertain steps through the whiteness and his nose slammed into a white wall. No spatial or temporal orientation whatsoever.

“Wooip.”

The sound reminded him of something from Half-Life. It came from everywhere.

“Wooip.”

Probably some kind of alert system — the engineering mind sparked with a moment of reason.

After that, sounds began coming from everywhere, something between dolphin clicking and a 2400-baud modem connecting.

Brainwashing? Modem? What the hell?

Through all of this, Vasya hadn’t made a sound. He was silent. He understood perfectly well that the situation didn’t fit the “Police! Help!” template.

The modem went quiet.

“Wooip.”

A doorway appeared absolutely silently, right in the middle of the whiteness. Black. Vasya started to move toward the opening but stopped, completely dumbstruck.

There were two of them. Absolutely incredible creatures. Gray, tall, extremely gaunt, as if their bodies contained nothing but a spine and a couple of bones. These thin and indistinct bodies were, however, augmented with exoskeletons. These were elegant black structures of rounded modules positioned on the gray bodies. The modules were connected to each other by some kind of wires that looked very organized.

One of the openings on a gray face opened, and Vasya once again heard the modem-dolphin melody.

Speech! They communicate by modulation!

This realization, however, didn’t spur Vasya to action. He just stood there, staring at the creatures in stunned silence.

The Grays walked up to Vasya in sync, grabbed him under the arms, and headed toward the “door.” Here, Vasya fully experienced the exoskeletons’ capabilities. The thin gray hands, enhanced by unknown devices, held him in a death grip. Even if he’d wanted to, breaking free would have been impossible.

The black corridor ended quickly, and the Grays led Vasya to the center of a small hall. Around him, Vasya saw numerous devices arranged in the “corners” of the room. Corners, of course, didn’t exist, because the room was the same white as before — only the fact that it contained a large number of non-white objects allowed one to guess where the walls might be. One of the Grays walked up to a panel and pressed some button. The other, arms folded, watched Vasya.

That’s when Vasya decided that even a wrong action would be better than no action. So he bolted toward a corner where something that looked like a rifle lay. The probability that it was a weapon — zero. The probability that Vasya could use it — even less. And the first thing the sprinter did was slam at full force into glass that separated him from the various objects in storage. The glass was perfectly transparent. This became obvious from the drops of sweat and blood on the unknown material.

The Grays rushed after the fugitive, and Vasya realized that while the exoskeletons gave their wearers strength, they did nothing for speed. He looked at the floor and saw that where he’d slammed into the “glass,” a thin gray line was drawn on the floor. Vasya noticed that this line ended just a couple of steps from him.

He dashed toward the invisible door, hands outstretched, and “entered” the storage area of strange objects. Even though he had the advantage in speed, he clearly couldn’t escape. The room was enclosed. You can’t run for long in a place like that. He spun around sharply, catching an aquarium of strange yellow leech-fish with his hand, and it shattered on the floor. The yellow creatures writhed in convulsions. Trying to catch the falling object, Vasya caught something else and it started to feel like the whole storage was falling on him. He slipped and crashed onto the white floor, right into a pile of balls, ash, silvery boxes, slime, and yellow leech-fish.

The Grays approached him. Before they could pick him up, Vasya felt a sharp pain in his ear. He couldn’t grab his ear to remove whatever was causing the pain because his hands were locked in the Grays’ exoskeletons.

“Ncessry to cll clnrs.”

Vasya thought he’d imagined one of the Grays rapidly muttering this phrase. He raised his head, which was splitting with horrible pain.

“Yu drppd thm. Yu cln up.”

Babel fish? — thought Vasya, and lost consciousness again.

---

When he came to, he felt the iron grip of exoskeletons on his arms. He raised his head and looked around. The same whiteness everywhere. A room with several chairs in the middle. Another Gray who wasn’t wearing an exoskeleton. And another one — with some kind of tube in his hands.

“Sbjct svn, thre, sxteen.”

Vasya was about to respond, but then he realized the Grays weren’t looking at him. A doorway formed in the wall, and at that very moment, a desperate child’s scream pierced the white room.

“Nooooo! Let go of me! Let go, you monsters! Bastards! Let gooooo…”

The scream dissolved into sobbing — nothing but despair. Another Gray in an exoskeleton entered the room, leading a boy of about 13. His face was tear-stained, his hair disheveled, his denim shirt torn where the Gray held him. Vasya could see the kid had a couple of dislocated fingers — one hand was swollen, the fingers bent at a strange angle. With his other hand the boy was hitting the Gray, though it had no effect whatsoever.

Vasya just stood there watching the kid. He simply didn’t know what to do. He simply couldn’t imagine what to do. No school had taught him how to behave when captured by gray creatures.

The kid, after unsuccessful attempts to beat his captor, turned around and looked at Vasya. A strange expression appeared on his tear-stained face — the kind that means nothing but hope.

“Mister, save me! They’re killing me! Save me!”

The boy’s breathless, frantic scream began turning into sobbing again.

“Svn, thre, sxteen. Hgh intllgnce lvl, engnring mndst. Cpble of dvlpng intrplntry trvl systms. Instll cntrl systm.”

“Saaave meee!” the kid screamed with all his might as the Gray with the tube began approaching him.

Vasya did nothing. He just stood there. He cursed every educational system for the fact that he had absolutely no idea how to handle a situation like this. Political science wouldn’t help. Psychology — oh, to hell with psychology, it wouldn’t help either. He wasn’t going to tell the kid “Calm down and tell me which sexual concerns bring you the most joy”! As Vasya saw it, only physics and chemistry could help here. Something from the napalm department. But there was no napalm handy.

So he just stood there and watched as the Gray brought the tube to the boy’s head and pulled the “trigger.” The room suddenly reeked of swamp. The tube spat a chunk of translucent, gelatinous green mass — more like a slug — onto the boy’s head. The last heart-wrenching cry of “Nooooo!” vanished. The boy went silent. The slug-like mass was being absorbed into the boy’s head. He looked at Vasya — his pupils were dilated. He just looked at Vasya. In the eyes that a second ago had been full of terror, nothing could be seen anymore. Just a body. The person in that body was already gone.

“Cntrl systm instlld. Rst.”

The boy simply vanished. He disappeared from the room. Ceased to be in it. He was gone, in the literal sense of the word.

“Cnfrm rst. Sbjct on plnt, undr cntrl.”

“Rger.”

“Sbjct svn, thre, svnteen.” — now all five gray faces stared at Vasya with unseeing eyes.

“Svn, thre, svnteen. Hgh intllgnce lvl, engnring mndst. Cpble of crtng ultr-rlble systms. Hgh dngr to othr wrlds. Enbles ths plnt to cntrl othr wrlds. Instll cntrl systm.”

Well, at least they think highly of me, — thought Vasya. — Shame my bosses never appreciated it. Oh well, no one ever will now. Whatever that slimy thing is, with that kind of drug I won’t be doing much of anything.

“Cncl.”

“Rsn?”

“Cntrl not rqrd. Fxted on cmptrs. Blvs slgns pshd by our cmpns on plnt. Unble to dfnd own opnion. Not gng to crte flt-tlrnt systms. Sf.”

“Rst.”

Everything went simply white.

---

Vasya woke up in his bed. Android. 6:12 AM.

“What the f—! What kind of crazy dream was that!”

Vasya sat up in bed and caught his breath.

“No way, I wasn’t there! I’m not the silent type! I’m totally talkative! Look, I’m talking to myself right now. So it was a dream.”

Of course. UFOs, a beaten-up kid, brain slugs. A crappy dream from relentless screen time on the internet, on one single website. Vasya flopped back onto his pillow and fell asleep.

Vasya woke up in his bed. Android. 1:42 PM.

He stretched and realized that, all things considered, everything was fine. He’d slept great. Despite the nightmare. Despite the…

Wait!

Idea!

He walked to the window and looked at the bright sky. A real Earth sky.

“So I’m unable to defend my own opinion? So I can’t give you a beating? Well, brace yourselves, you gray bastards!”

He ran to his laptop and opened Word.

“How to Build a Fault-Tolerant System for Windows and Linux?”

“Some say perfection is unattainable. My solution isn’t perfect either. If you hit it with a nuclear warhead, it won’t work. But I can guarantee that as long as there’s electricity in the outlet and it isn’t interrupted for more than eight hours — the system I’m proposing will work flawlessly. As proof, I can present you with four years of logs showing that total uptime has always been 100%.”

He leaned back in his chair. When his karma crossed a hundred, he stopped counting. He knew he shouldn’t be afraid to share his knowledge with others — after all, he had plenty. He knew that others now had this knowledge too.

Vasya looked around his room and scratched behind the ear of his cat Ryumzik, who — while afraid of mice — at least never killed servers with his fur.

“There you go, Ryumzik! It’s all about you! If you want to write a good article — you’ll write it.”

Vasya stretched in his chair and scratched his pet behind the ear once more.

“Less philosophizing, more feeding,” said the cat, and watched his owner crash off his chair.

Babel fish live a very long time.