Recursive

“And there we thought that SanctumV2 was the answer to all our questions!”, mumbled Calvin, rubbing his eyes, as the flashing red message indicated that their simulation had failed to compile again. “Can you please turn off that dumb beeper? What’s the point? I am trying to catch some sleep here!”

“But.. But this doesn’t make sense! There is nothing in this code that could be causing this! People have LITERALLY gone through it word by word! Damn it!”, Jammer exclaimed, poring over the seemingly inexplicable list of errors. No amount of coffee was going to get them through this.

Calvin swung his chair around to face Jammer. “As if it makes a difference. Fiddle all you want and it will still be the same. Look around you, we aren’t exactly setting benchmarks in employee retention”, Calvin stretched his arms out indicating the vast but empty development department.

Jammer didn’t respond. “Fine, suit yourself. I am going to get some more coffee. You want some?”, Calvin took his cup and got up from his chair.

“uh.. Oh.. Yeah I think some coffee would be good”, Jammer said as he locked his terminal and left with Calvin.

“You know what?”, Calvin asked as he took a sip from the over-sweetened machine coffee.

“Ohh.. Yeah, what? Tell me”, Jammer replied, his coffee going cold in his hands.

“Let us go catch a movie. That new movie about dreams within dreams seems to be doing quite well. What say?”, Calvin crumpled his cup into a ball and tossed it into the bin.

“Not really. I think I’ll try to tweak the Sanctum for a while longer. I am getting this feeling that I am onto something. Wonder what it means..”, Jammer drifted off mid sentence.

“What what means?”

“Max SIM Depth Reached. An error that keeps popping up every single time, along with a bunch of random errors.”, said Jammer, back to reality.

“I don’t know man. But one thing that I do know is that you are a lost cause. Have fun. I’ll call Stella from Accounting. She is better company anyways.”, Calvin said with a wink as he picked up his bag and turned to walk away.

“Yeah. “Better company”. You have fun.”, mumbled Jammer as he headed back to the terminal.

…………………………………………………………………

“What the hell! Don’t tell me you didn’t go back home!”, exclaimed Calvin as he hung is overcoat on the door.

Jammer turned with a start, “You almost gave me a heart attack there! What are you doing so early? And why are you drenched?”

“You would know if you looked at a different screen or , you know, maybe if this place had windows of the real kind”, Calvin answered as he sat down, “It has been raining relentlessly since last night. Both the internet and the cable are down at my place as well as most places in my neighborhood. I could check the news only at the reception. Some sort of a global flash monsoon”

Jammer was already back at the screen. “wait.. I am almost there. I am about to crack the code.”

“Code? Crack? What code?”, asked Calvin.

“The Universe!”

Calvin looked at the number of coffee cups all around Jammer, some piled up on top of the terminal, the barely eaten pizza on the floor, the half opened shoe on his left foot and the haggard lines on his face. Perhaps he truly was a lost cause.

…………………………………………………………………

“Its the same stupid issue again. Although, you might want to look at this. This time it looks like they may breach the ceiling”

“Hmm. Does look like that. I thought we had more time to go before they got this far”

“Apparently not. So, what do we do now? System says breach is imminent”

“We just need a little more time to finish our research. It would be a real shame to wipe it all out and start all over again. We have already had enough iterations”

“I guess we could pull up the Flush program, it would give us enough time”

“I suppose it would save us a lot of garbage cleanup effort too. Well, Go for it”

“Cool. Launching Flush . Initiating in 5…4….3…2…1 and it’s done”

“Nice job. Good that we caught it before the Sim bug could breach the code and cause a depth failure. Sometimes I wonder why they ever made the Sentience module if it was suppose to cause this bug every single time”

“Good point. Hey, wanna wager on how many religions the flush will start this time round?”

“I really couldn’t care less. All I need is enough time to figure out a solution to this other one. I can’t seem to figure out why the second simulation wouldn’t launch”

“Yeah, that one just seems to somehow stay out of our reach”

“Not for long, I think I’m on to something here”

“Guess that means you wont come for the movie tonight?”

“Nah, I’ll skip. You have fun”

“Okay, see ya tomorrow. Want me to get a raincoat for you? It’s been pouring down really hard since yesterday”