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. ☕