The Impostor and Other Dark Tales by Marlena Frank

Author:Marlena Frank [Frank, Marlena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781955854009
Publisher: Marlena Frank

Execute

It all began with a few lines of missing code. I swear if I had known what was going to happen, I never would have touched that program. I probably would have walked out of the office completely, put in my two weeks' notice, and ended my career for good.

I have a good eye for detail, and a sometimes unhealthy determination to fix things that are broken. Sometimes that leads to good things, like landing me a job as an applications developer with a small company right after getting my bachelors. Sometimes it means I lack the common sense to know when to leave something alone. I have a tendency to get obsessive over fixing code, either by writing out lengthy comments or straightening out the formatting. So, when a few lines of code went missing, I had to solve it.

I first noticed it when the program refused to compile cleanly. That means there was some typo or missing bracket that was preventing it from being readable, like forgetting an accent in Spanish class or forgetting to add conjunctions to a sentence. It happened overnight, a line cut here, a few more cut there. At first, I suspected it was due to hardware failure. When a hard drive begins to fail, that can be a symptom, but it would normally cause file corruption that would make the file difficult to open, not remove a short piece of text. Still I emailed our systems administrator, who maintains our servers, to give it a look. He ran scans and checks, but found nothing wrong.

"All clear here." He replied back with typical terseness. "Check with Deon."

I sighed. Deon was a fellow applications developer and the only other person who had access to this code. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to him, he and I were actually good friends. I just didn't want this to end up being my mistake and having Deon tell me so. There's a lot of unspoken pressure being the only woman in an IT group. I worked hard to appear competent even when I felt like I wasn't. I suppose it's the lingering effect of being one of the few women in my Computer Science classes in college. Still, even if the missing code was my fault somehow, Deon wouldn't give me grief over it. He would probably just laugh about it with me. I went down the hall to his office and gave a light rap on the door. Deon had a single earbud in, and gave me a smile as he leaned back in his chair.

"Morning, Imari. How are you doing?"

"Fine," I said, unable to prevent the worry from creeping into my voice. "You haven't had to work with any of my projects in the last few days, have you?"

He laughed and rocked in his chair. "Not lately. Why?"

I gave him the details and watched his relaxed expression turn to consternation. He pulled off his earbud.

"That's... strange," he said at last. "Let's take a look at the logs and see what we can find.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.