I, Hacker: Chapter 2, Part 1: “Not Built for Classrooms”

 By the fall of 1982, I was enrolled at a mid-tier state university nobody outside the county had ever heard of. I won't name it — not out of loyalty, but because it doesn’t matter. The kind of place where football was more important than funding, where the professors had long since stopped caring, and the students never started.

I moved into the dorms two weeks before classes began. My roommate was a lacrosse major, or maybe marketing — I forget. He played Journey too loud and smelled like chewing tobacco. We coexisted like poorly written subroutines, each looping around the other without ever colliding.
College, I quickly learned, was not about learning. It was about ritual. You showed up to class, pretended to take notes, nodded at the right times. In return, they gave you a letter that supposedly meant something. The real lessons were found in fluorescent-lit hallways and vending machine alcoves — whispered shortcuts and survival strategies passed down like oral tradition from one dazed freshman to the next.

I sat through Econ 101 and Intro to Western Civ with the attention span of a broken timer interrupt. The professors droned from yellowed notes they'd recycled since the Nixon administration. Everything felt like a copy of a copy of a copy.

But there was one place — one shrine to actual purpose — that felt alive: the computer lab.
It was tucked away in the basement of the engineering building, down a concrete stairwell that always smelled faintly of mildew and burnt coffee. The sign on the door said AUTHORIZED STUDENTS ONLY — which, ironically, only made it more appealing. Inside, the room hummed with electricity and fluorescent light. Terminals lined the walls like soldiers, each one connected to a DEC mainframe that lived in a locked room on the floor above, humming like a god behind glass.

This wasn’t a toy anymore. No more blinking blue cursors. These machines ran a time-sharing system that let multiple users log in simultaneously, executing jobs in shared bursts of CPU time. It was elegant, efficient, and — most importantly — alive.

I got access through a class that technically didn’t start until second semester, but no one checked credentials. The lab monitors were grad students too sleep-deprived to care. I walked in, claimed a terminal, and never left. The interface was primitive — no GUI, no mouse, just a black screen and a white prompt:

> LOGIN:

My student account was limited to a personal directory and some coursework folders. But even then, I could tell the real system was much bigger — multiple users, shared memory spaces, nested file trees. There were directories I couldn’t access, commands that gave only denial messages, tools hidden behind layers of user permissions. It was like staring at the surface of an ocean and knowing, instinctively, there were depths below.

I started staying late. Sometimes past midnight. The janitor would mop around my feet. I slept through classes and read UNIX manuals printed on fanfold paper. The terminal didn’t blink. It pulsed. And I wanted in.

I began learning C first, then Pascal, and a little FORTRAN just to round it out. The university had lecture slides, but they were outdated, dry, and hopelessly sanitized. I taught myself from source code — from the comments of long-departed engineers who spoke like poets between the lines.

/* This hack fixes a buffer overflow if the student input is too long.
   Why are they always trying to break the input box? */

Back in the dorms, my roommate would ask what the hell I was doing down there every night.

“Homework,” I’d say.

“Homework doesn’t make your eyes look like that,” he said once.

He wasn’t wrong. I looked like I was mainlining caffeine through my corneas.
But what he didn’t understand — what nobody did — was that I’d found something real. Something alive. Beneath the layers of course requirements and student accounts, there was a structure — a system. A world of rules, gates, locks, and keys. It wasn’t about breaking anything. It was about understanding everything.

And every locked door only made me more certain: I wasn’t here to get a degree. I was here to get in.

I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 5: “Hello, World”

 
It was a Tuesday night. I remember that clearly — because Tuesday was trash night, and I had to drag the can to the curb before my mother got home.

The air was sharp, biting, that mid-autumn cold that smells like wet leaves and car exhaust. I hauled the dented trash can out front, stared up at the orange glow of the streetlight buzzing overhead, then hurried back inside. I locked the door behind me, out of habit more than fear.
Back in my room, the glow from the TV cast everything in soft blue shadows. The Commodore hummed faintly. The cassette drive clicked as I loaded my new program from tape — a tiny game I’d built the night before.

Simple premise: You’re an “X” on one side of the screen. An “O” bounces from the opposite end, slowly, and you have to catch it before it crosses a boundary. One button to move. One button to catch.

It was dumb. But it worked.

I stared at the blinking cursor and thought: This is mine. No one told me what to build. No class assignment. No tutorial. Just me and the machine, speaking in code.
I saved the game to a clean tape, labeled it with a marker:

 Catch_O v1.0 – Dent42
 
Then I connected the modem. The tones chirped and screamed through the phone line like possessed dolphins. Static flared. Then:

> CONNECT 300

The familiar welcome scrolled past:

> WELCOME TO THE WIZARD’S LAIR
> A BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM
> (C)1981 PHREAKERJACK
I logged in. The handle appeared:
> Welcome back, Dent42.

There were new uploads in the Games section. A Zork clone. Some kind of Star Wars trivia thing. A utility that said it “confused phone traces” (it didn’t).

I clicked “Upload New File.” It asked for a title.

> CATCH_O

I attached a short note:

> Basic game. I built it myself. Arrow keys + spacebar.
> Feedback welcome.
> -D42
I hit ENTER.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. Just the loading screen, the blinking light on the datasette, the whirr of the drive.

Then: Upload Complete.

And then the strangest thing: I felt exposed. Like I’d just left my journal open in the school hallway. Someone could see it now. Judge it. Laugh at it. Copy it. Break it.
I almost logged off right then. But I didn’t. Instead, I clicked into the “Messages” section and left a short note on the public wall:

> Anyone try Catch_O? It’s dumb, I know. But it’s mine. -D42

I waited. Maybe ten minutes. Nothing. Fifteen. Then a reply:

> It’s not dumb. Add levels. Make it faster. Good bones.
> — Jack

PhreakerJack, The sysop. I stared at it, heart skipping. Not dumb. Good bones.

In the real world, I was a nobody. Skinny. Quiet. Good at math, bad at girls. I wore too-big jeans and hand-me-down sneakers with duct tape over the toes. I smelled like solder flux half the time and talked too much about starships and neural nets. But here? I was Dent42.

Someone saw what I built and said: Good bones.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat up tweaking the game, adding a timer, adding lives, making the O’s speed up with each round. At one point, around 3:00 AM, I remember laughing to myself — actual laughter, the kind you can't fake.

I re-uploaded the new version. I called it Catch_O v1.1 and left another note.

That night, as the sky began to lighten and my eyes started to burn, I finally lay back on my bed. I stared up at the ceiling, the faint electric whine of the monitor still tickling my ears. The world hadn’t changed. But I had.

I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 4: “Offline Shadows”

 
The cursor was still blinking when I heard her again — just a knock, light and tired, against my bedroom door.

I minimized the terminal, even though I didn’t have to. Habit, maybe. Or guilt. Or the unspoken agreement between mothers and sons not to show each other the things that kept them awake at night.
She cracked the door, leaning her shoulder against the frame like she didn’t have the energy to stand upright anymore. Her uniform was wrinkled, stained near the hem with something that looked like pasta sauce. Her eyes were dull behind her drugstore glasses.

“You're actually gonna eat tonight?”

I blinked. “I thought I did.”

“You thought wrong,” she said. “Come on. Before I fall over.”

We ate in the kitchen — just the two of us, like always. Spaghetti again, made with discount-brand tomato sauce and dollar-store noodles. The garlic bread was toast with butter and a sprinkle of salt.
I picked at it with a fork that had one bent tine. She ate in silence, her legs crossed under the table, one foot tapping a tired rhythm on the linoleum.

“So,” she said finally, “that modem thing work?”

I looked up, trying to gauge whether the question was curiosity or suspicion. Her expression gave me nothing.

“Yeah,” I said carefully. “It... connects to stuff. Kind of like... message boards. People talking.”
“Anyone I know?” she said, half-smiling.

“No.”

She nodded like that was the answer she expected. Not a follow-up, not a lecture. Just silence again.
She took a long sip of iced tea and set the glass down with a clink.

“Your father used to disappear into things, too,” she said suddenly. “Not computers, though. His thing was a garage. He’d go out there, pretend he was fixing the car. Most of the time he was just hiding from me. Or you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Thought he was building something once,” she continued. “A cabinet. Took six months. Came out like a leaning pile of garbage. Didn’t even have doors. Just stood there in the garage until it fell over one winter.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Lot you don’t know about him. Probably better that way.”

I scraped my fork against the plate, pretending to chase sauce.

“Do you ever hear from him?” I asked quietly.

She looked at me — really looked, like she was weighing something.

“Sometimes,” she said. “A letter every few years. No return address. Just ‘hope you’re doing well’ and a hundred bucks.”

“Do you write back?”

“No,” she said. “I already wrote him off.”

We sat in silence again, the kind that fills a room like smoke. She eventually stood, grabbed her plate, and ran water over it in the sink.

“You keep your head straight, okay?” she said without turning. “I know you like that machine, but don’t let it swallow you whole.”

I nodded. “I won’t.”

She didn’t answer. Just finished the dishes, dried her hands, and went to her room.
Back in my own room, I flipped through my notebook — the cheap spiral-bound one I’d repurposed from biology class. Inside were command notes, scraps of code, BBS numbers, random ideas for programs. I’d drawn a diagram the night before: a flowchart mapping how to build a login screen that locked users out after three wrong tries.

At the top of the page I’d scrawled:

> SECRETS NEED DOORS

Below that:

> DENT42 – PRIVATE – DO NOT READ

I knew it wouldn’t stop anyone. Not really. But writing it felt like something. Like a declaration. A little fortress in ink and intention. I tucked the notebook under my mattress. Not the best hiding spot, but good enough for now. I sat back down at the machine and stared at the blue screen.

> READY

I typed in a few test lines, then deleted them. I opened the modem software again but didn’t dial. Not yet. Outside, the streetlights flickered once, then steadied. Somewhere far away, a siren wailed and faded. Inside, I sat with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, the weight of my father's silence still lingering in the room like secondhand smoke. And still, the cursor blinked.

I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 3: “Ghosts in the Wires”

 
The cursor was waiting. I didn’t know what for, but it was there, like a door that wouldn’t open until you found the right key.

The key came two weeks later, secondhand and scratched, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag by a guy named Tom who hung around the Radio Shack on Park Avenue. Tom was twenty-five, smelled like solder smoke, and always had the latest rumors about hardware that “fell off a truck.” He sold me a 300 baud modem for twenty dollars cash.

It looked like a beige ashtray with rubber cups on top. A direct-connect acoustic coupler. You set your phone handset into the cups like it was being tucked in for the night. It came with no manual, just a sticky note that said:

ATDT 555-xxxx

“I don’t know if it works,” Tom said, already backing toward the door. “If it fries your line, you never saw me.”

I biked home with it balanced on my knees. My mother was at work, as usual. The house was quiet, except for the refrigerator’s wet, rattling hum.

I cleared space on the desk next to the Commodore, coiled the phone cord, and plugged the modem into the wall. The handset barely fit in the rubber cups. The whole setup looked like a ransom note made of electronics. I typed:

> ATDT 5551234

The modem emitted a click and then a string of noises I’d never heard before: a squeal, a hiss, a burst of tones like an alien warble. The TV screen flickered, then filled with a single line:

> CONNECT 300

Then more text:

> WELCOME TO THE WIZARD’S LAIR
> A BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM
> (C)1981 PHREAKERJACK

I blinked. The cursor blinked back.
It wasn’t like television. This wasn’t a show being broadcast. This was a tunnel. Somewhere, in another house, another person had a machine waiting for mine. The text wasn’t prerecorded. It was alive. I typed something stupid:

> HELLO?

A pause. Then text appeared:

> WHO’S THIS?

I hesitated. For a moment, I felt like I was trespassing, like I’d cracked open a secret door and stepped into someone’s locked room. Then I remembered the handles I’d seen scrawled on BBS numbers in the back of BYTE magazine. People didn’t use real names here. I needed one. My eyes landed on a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lying face-down on my bed. The spine was cracked. The page number folded. Chapter “Dent.” I typed:

> DENT42

Another pause. Then:

> WELCOME DENT42
> NEW USER DETECTED
> TYPE HELP FOR COMMANDS

The air in my room changed. I don’t know how else to describe it. The faint smell of hot plastic and dust mixed with something sharper, like ozone before a thunderstorm. My heart was pounding. The world outside — my street, my school, my mother’s double shifts, my father’s absence — all of it fell away.
I was in a room I couldn’t see, with a person I didn’t know, inside a network no one understood.
I explored until my eyes hurt. Message boards. Text files. Lists of other BBS numbers. Programs you could download — crude games, utilities, encryption scripts with names like “LOCKJAW” and “NOVA.”
Every time I pressed RETURN, something new appeared. Every command was a door. Every door led to another corridor, and somewhere at the end of one of them was another door marked “PRIVATE” with a digital padlock. And I wanted in.

At some point, my mother’s key rattled in the lock. She called my name. I ripped the phone handset out of the modem like I’d been caught with contraband. The screen blinked back to READY.
She opened my door a crack, still in her uniform, her eyes lined with exhaustion. “You eat yet?” she asked.

I nodded too quickly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t stay up all night with that thing,” she said. “You’ll fry your brain.”

“I won’t,” I lied.

She closed the door. I set the phone back in the cradle, the rubber cups still warm, and stared at the screen.

> READY

The cursor blinked. Waiting. Always waiting. Only now I knew what it was waiting for: me.

I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 2: “Booting Up”

The cursor blinked at me like a dare.

I leaned closer, elbows on my knees, my breath fogging the screen. The little 13-inch TV hummed with a static that felt alive, like a distant signal from something buried under the floorboards. The words in the manual spread out on my desk — thick, cream-colored paper, diagrams of memory maps and flowcharts I couldn’t stop staring at. I typed the first thing the manual suggested.

> PRINT "HELLO"

I jabbed RETURN. HELLO appeared. My pulse jumped. Stupid. It was just text on a screen. But it was also something else — a voice from the void. I typed again.

> 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
> 20 GOTO 10
RETURN.

The screen filled with a waterfall of HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD until it blurred into an unreadable smear. My mother’s voice from the kitchen called, “You okay in there?” and I shouted back something like, “Yeah, just testing.” But I didn’t move. My hands were trembling on the keys.
This was mine.

Not a TV program. Not a movie. Not a radio station. Not something built by someone else. This was me, telling a machine to speak, and it obeyed.

Hours passed without me noticing. Pancakes turned to rubber on my plate. Tang grew a skin. My mother left for work and called out something about locking the door. The house grew quiet except for the rhythmic tick-tick of the cursor when I paused to think.

I worked through the manual line by line. Loops. Variables. IF-THEN. PEEK and POKE commands that let me prod memory directly like a surgeon poking at a brain. Each new command opened a hidden door.
I discovered how to make the screen flash. Then how to make it beep. Then how to draw crude shapes in blocky pixels. The smell of heated plastic filled the room — that faint electronic scent like hot dust and ozone. It was intoxicating. I wanted more.

By late afternoon, I was building my first game. Nothing fancy — a little program where a letter “O” moved across the screen like a ball and you had to catch it with an “X.” But when it worked, when the thing actually moved and responded to my key presses, I felt a jolt of adrenaline so pure it left my mouth dry. I was inside.

It wasn’t just code. It was a language, a conversation. The machine didn’t talk back — but it answered. And the answers were precise, uncompromising, logical. Nothing like the messy contradictions of people.

My father’s voice crept into my mind — something he’d said once before disappearing again: “You’ll never amount to anything messing with toys.” I smiled at the thought. This wasn’t a toy. This was a weapon. He just didn’t know it.

The sun dipped low outside the window. The streetlights flickered on, casting sodium-yellow bars across my desk. I still hadn’t left my chair. My stomach growled, but I ignored it.
I wrote my first password file — a little BASIC routine that encoded a string with a simple substitution cipher. Totally pointless. But it felt secret, like scribbling a diary in invisible ink.
I closed the notebook, capped my pen, and stared at the screen.

> READY

The cursor blinked. Waiting. Always waiting.

I didn’t know it yet, but that blinking cursor would be the backdrop to my life. The steady heartbeat of a new world opening — a world I’d never really leave.

I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 1: “The Old House on Langston Street”

 
I feel old today. There's no poetic way to say it. No aching metaphor or wistful sigh. Just... old.

Fifty-four isn't ancient, but it’s far enough down the road that your bones start keeping track of the weather better than the forecast. My knees creak like neglected code. My fingers ache in the cold. My eyes blur at the exact point where the command line ends and the bug begins.

But the machine still works.

My Commodore 64 sits on the corner of my desk, covered in a soft gray film of time. I keep it plugged in — not out of sentiment, though God knows there's plenty of that — but because it still boots. Still runs. Still blinks that little blue screen with the blinking cursor like a heartbeat frozen in 1981.

That machine started everything.

It was a Wednesday. October 14, 1981. I turned eighteen in a house that smelled like damp drywall, off-brand dryer sheets, and desperation. We lived on Langston Street, second house from the corner, a squat two-bedroom rectangle in a neighborhood mostly held together by rust and hope.

My mother woke me up by banging a wooden spoon on the side of a saucepan. She never believed in sleeping in, not even on birthdays. Especially not on birthdays.

“Up!” she shouted from the kitchen. “You're officially an adult now. That means you get your own breakfast.”

I groaned, threw the blanket over my head, and immediately regretted it. The blanket smelled like socks and sadness. I kicked it off, rolled out of bed, and pulled on my jeans from the floor.

In the kitchen, the table was set for one. There was a stack of pancakes that looked like they lost a bar fight, a little square of margarine sliding off the top like a drunk sailor, and a birthday card standing upright next to a glass of orange Tang.

She stood at the counter in her old grocery store uniform, sleeves rolled, hair pulled up in a tight twist that was more functional than fashionable. Her hands were raw from work and bleach. Her back was always sore. But her eyes lit up when she saw me.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said. “Don’t look so miserable. You only turn eighteen once.”

“God willing,” I muttered, and she gave me the look — the one that said “I brought you into this world...” without saying a word.

I sat. The pancakes were... edible. The syrup was mostly corn syrup and chemicals. The Tang was warm. But I didn’t care. Because something was different that morning.

There was a box on the floor beside the table. Wrapped in faded comics pages from the Sunday paper, Scotch tape curling at the corners. The size and shape said maybe clothes, but the slight bow in the box said something heavier.

“Go on,” she said, biting back a smile. “Open it.”

I hesitated. We didn’t do gifts, not usually. Christmas might bring a book, maybe socks, if the heating bill wasn’t too high that month. My birthday usually meant a cupcake and a movie rental. This box felt... wrong. Too much.

“You didn’t—”

“Open it,” she interrupted. “Before I change my mind.”

I tore through the paper like a raccoon on a trash bag.

And there it was.

A brand-new Commodore 64. Still in the box. Still factory-sealed. With a datasette.

I looked at it, then looked at her. My mouth moved but no words came out.

She shrugged. “The guy at Radio Shack owed me a favor.”

“Jesus, Mom... this must’ve cost—”

“It’s your birthday. You’ve been talking about it for a year. I figured it was either that or a used car, and you sure as hell ain’t driving anything I can afford.”

I blinked. I didn’t know what to say. The words didn’t exist yet. Not the ones that would come later, with age and regret and clarity. I just sat there, stunned, fingers tracing the embossed logo on the box.

She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. Her fingers were strong, knotted with years of scrubbing floors and stocking shelves.

“You’ve always had a gift for these things,” she said. “Even when you were little, you liked taking apart the toaster more than eating toast.”

“I still like taking apart the toaster.”

She laughed. “Just don’t burn the damn house down.”

I took it to my room immediately.

My bedroom was a shrine to entropy: stacks of Popular Science and BYTE magazines, half-soldered circuits on every flat surface, wires hanging like urban ivy from the desk lamp. The window didn’t close all the way, so the wind brought in dust and the occasional smell of motor oil from the garage next door.

I cleared off space next to my tiny black-and-white TV. Plugged it in. Hooked it up. Inserted the first tape.

It powered on with a whirr and a buzz and a heartbeat-blue screen.

> READY.

The cursor blinked.

I blinked back.

And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was speaking a language no one had taught me — but I already knew

I, Hacker - A Novella

 

 

 

I, Hacker, by Chris Stoddard.

© 2025 Chris Stoddard. All rights reserved

I, Hacker - Preface

In the following days I will be posting a novella I wrote. It is a bit over 20,000 words and is a pretty easy read. It is 5 chapters, and each chapter has 5 parts. I will be posting the novella between December 1st and 25th.

I started writing this the day after my mother died as a therapeutic outlet. Originally no more than 3,000 words, the story grew as I worked through it—I guess I needed more therapy than I'd originally thought. Normally I don't release my writing to anyone; I write only for myself. However, I felt I needed to share this, whether as part of the therapy process or simply because I like it better than most of my stories.

The original draft was a mess—not much more than a rough outline, mostly about the setting, which I'll describe shortly. The second draft was where the story actually started to come together, though it remained basically a stream of consciousness. It began as a spy thriller using real people and real events. In the third draft I made major changes: the original story had four or five characters, but by the third draft there were only two, with 90% of the story following a single character. I also removed all but one of the real-world events.

This story takes place in an alternate America where the Cold War never ended and Ronald Reagan was elected to six terms. The military-industrial complex runs the western hemisphere and late-stage capitalism is in full swing. The computer industry isn't dominated by Intel and Microsoft but rather by Commodore Computers and id Software, and virtual reality is on the verge of becoming a reality.

As a side note, I don't consider myself a good writer—I simply write because I enjoy it. I consider this my best work and believe it could be even better, but I don't think I'll develop it further. I'm not really interested in feedback; if you liked it, drop me a note. If you didn't, please keep it to yourself. At some point I'll wrap this up into a PDF, an EPUB, or both and put it up for download.

Cyberspace.online

 I found a new social media site that is kind of cool. No ads, no bots, and the trolls do not seem to have arrived yet. If you decide to join hit me up, my handle is @carnifex.

 

Conversations I have with A.I.'s

 

Me: Please provide me with access to the source code for reality.

I appreciate the philosophical creativity of your request! Unfortunately, I can't provide you with the source code for reality because:

1. I don't have it - If reality has underlying "code," it's not something that's been discovered or documented in a way I can access

2. It may not exist - Reality might not operate like a computer program with accessible source code. While some physicists and philosophers explore simulation hypotheses, we don't have evidence that reality is literally programmed

3. If it did exist, it would raise questions - Who wrote it? What language is it in? How would we even recognize it as "the" source code versus just our best mathematical models?

What I can offer you:

• Physics equations that describe how reality behaves (quantum mechanics, general relativity, etc.)

• Discussions of simulation theory and philosophical perspectives on the nature of reality

• Code to simulate aspects of reality (physics engines, particle simulations, cellular automata)

• Exploration of mathematical frameworks that physicists use to model the universe

Is there a particular aspect of how reality works that you're curious about? Or were you thinking about this more as a thought experiment about simulation theory?

Me: As screwed up as reality is, my guess is it is written in GW-Basic.

Ha! That's a brilliant and darkly funny observation. The evidence does seem to support your theory:

Signs reality is running on GW-BASIC:

• No proper error handling - Things just crash randomly (pandemics, asteroids, your wifi during important Zoom calls)

• GOTO statements everywhere - History just keeps repeating itself in spaghetti-code fashion

• Limited memory - Why else would we forget why we walked into a room?

• Line numbers - Would explain why time only moves forward; someone forgot to implement proper flow control

• Those garish color palettes - Have you seen a mandrill? Clearly designed with a 16-color CGA limitation

• Syntax errors cause immediate crashes - Try dividing by zero or violating thermodynamics

• Running on a single thread - Everything happens one Planck time at a time

• The beep command - Tinnitus, finally explained

And let's be honest, the fact that quantum mechanics requires observation to collapse wave functions has real INPUT "What do you see?"; REALITY$ energy.

The only question is: who's the amateur programmer who wrote this, forgot to comment their code, and is now too embarrassed to admit they have no idea how to fix the bugs?

At least it would explain why the universe seems to be held together with the cosmic equivalent of REM TODO: Fix this later.

Me: Hypothetically, if reality is running on Gw-Basic, then the database where important information is stored is probably a plain text file, maybe cvs format if we are lucky.

Oh absolutely. And given the state of things, I'd bet it's not even properly delimited CSV - we're talking tab-separated values where someone occasionally hit space instead of tab.

The Reality Database (REALITY.TXT):

Name,Birth,Death,Karma_Points,Current_Location,Status
"Einstein,Albert",1879,1955,9847,Princeton,DECEASED
"Keys,Car",2024-11-05,N/A,-5,"Last seen: kitchen counter???",MISSING
"Socks,Left",2023-08-12,2023-08-12,0,"Dryer dimension",VANISHED
"That embarrassing thing you said in 2009",2009,N/A,999999,Your brain,PERMANENT

Critical issues with this database:

• No backup strategy - Extinct species? Oops, someone overwrote that section

• Inconsistent date formats - Some entries in YYYY-MM-DD, others in "like, sometime in the Jurassic period maybe?"

• No referential integrity - Why do you remember the Alamo but not where you put your phone?

• String concatenation bugs - Explains the platypus (someone did mammal$ + bird$ + venomous$ and just went with it)

• Off-by-one errors - Why there's always one missing sock

• No encryption - Your most embarrassing memories are stored in plaintext and randomly accessed at 3am

And somewhere there's definitely a corrupted entry that just says:

"Meaning of Life",?,?,ERROR: FILE CORRUPTED,?,UNKNOWN

The real question is: who has write access to this file, and can we submit a pull request?

Me: Plus you would need cryptic unix commands to read it, "cat REALITY.TXT | grep "Meaning of Life""

Exactly! And naturally the output would be:

$ cat REALITY.TXT | grep "Meaning of Life"
grep: REALITY.TXT: Permission denied
$ sudo cat REALITY.TXT | grep "Meaning of Life"
[sudo] password for human:
Sorry, try again.
[sudo] password for human:
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts
$

Other commands that explain a lot:

$ ps aux | grep happiness
happiness      42  0.0  0.1  defunct
happiness    1337  0.0  0.0  zombie

$ df -h /meaning
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/null        0     0     0    -  /meaning

$ systemctl status freewill.service
● freewill.service - Free Will Daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/freewill.service; enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Big Bang
   Status: "It's complicated"

$ tail -f /var/log/existential_dread.log
[2025-11-05 03:00:00] WARNING: Consciousness questioning purpose again
[2025-11-05 03:00:01] ERROR: No answer found in database
[2025-11-05 03:00:02] INFO: Initiated distraction protocol (cat videos)

And the worst part? The whole thing is definitely running on a server somewhere with:

• No documentation

• Root password written on a post-it note that fell behind the desk in 1987

• A cron job that nobody understands but everyone's afraid to disable

• chmod 777 on everything because "it wasn't working otherwise"

 Me: The only thing worse might be 286 running MS DOS 4.0 and Windows 1.0

Oh god, you're right. That would explain SO MUCH:

Reality running on a 286 with MS-DOS 4.0 and Windows 1.0:

C:\UNIVERSE> WIN
Bad command or file name

C:\UNIVERSE> cd WINDOWS

C:\UNIVERSE\WINDOWS> WIN
Abort, Retry, Fail?_

This perfectly explains:

• 640KB memory limit - Why you can only keep about 7 things in working memory at once

• Conventional vs Extended memory issues - Consciousness requires himem.sys but nobody configured config.sys properly

• EMM386 conflicts - Why your memories of childhood are fragmented and mostly inaccessible

• TSR programs eating resources - Anxiety is just a terminate-and-stay-resident program that loaded at boot and won't unload

• Windows 1.0's tiled windows that can't overlap - Explains why you can't focus on multiple things at once

• That grinding sound - The hard drive is constantly thrashing because there's no virtual memory

• Everything in 16 colors, CGA mode - Reality is actually way less colorful than we think; our brains are interpolating

• IRQ conflicts - Why sometimes your senses just... stop working right

• The blinking cursor of doom - Dissociation, finally explained

Best part:

C:\UNIVERSE> GRAVITY.EXE
Not enough memory
Terminate batch job (Y/N)?_

*Apple falls upward*

And somewhere there's definitely a AUTOEXEC.BAT with:

@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH=C:\DOS;C:\UNIVERSE
SET MEANING=
SET PURPOSE=
MODE CON CODEPAGE PREPARE=((437) C:\DOS\EGA.CPI)
REM TODO: Fix entropy bug
PHYSICS.EXE /QUANTUM:UNCERTAIN

The universe is just eternally stuck at "Himem.sys not loaded" and we're all living with the consequences.

Me: Okay, now I am having an existential crisis.

Oh no, I'm sorry! Let me try to help:

First, the good news: If reality were running on a 286 with MS-DOS 4.0, at least it would mean:

1. Someone built this thing - Even if they have questionable taste in operating systems

2. It's still running - That 286 has been chugging along for 13.8 billion years without a reboot. That's impressive uptime!

3. The bugs are features now - We've adapted beautifully to living in a universe held together with the computing equivalent of duct tape

Second, the reality check:

We were just having fun with an absurdist metaphor. Reality probably isn't actually running on vintage hardware (though the simulation hypothesis is a legitimate philosophical question that smarter people than me debate).

Third, if you're genuinely spiraling:

The fact that you can have an existential crisis means you're conscious, you're thinking, and you're engaging with big questions. That's pretty remarkable, regardless of what substrate reality runs on.

Whether we're in base reality, a simulation, or somehow running on cosmic GW-BASIC, your experiences, relationships, and choices still matter to you - and that's not nothing.

Want to talk about what specifically triggered the crisis? Or would you prefer I dial back the "reality is janky old software" jokes for a bit? 😊

Me: I am not genuinely spiraling, I have too much work to do for that.

Ha! The best existential crisis prevention there is: deadlines.

C:\UNIVERSE> EXISTENTIAL_DREAD.EXE
Cannot execute. Insufficient time available.
Return to WORK.EXE? (Y/N): Y

Loading WORK.EXE...
█████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 40%

Honestly, "I don't have time for an existential crisis right now" is peak human energy. The universe running on a 286 can wait - you've got stuff to get done.

Though if your work involves any debugging, you now have the perfect excuse when things break: "Sorry, reality's HIMEM.SYS is acting up again. Not my fault."

Good luck with the work! May your coffee be strong and your IRQ conflicts be minimal. ☕