Dare to Know by James Kennedy

Author:James Kennedy [Kennedy, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683692614
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2021-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

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For a long time I didn’t know how Renard had died.

There was no straightforward way for me to find out back when it happened. No internet. And like I said, when I tried to contact Renard’s parents, they never responded.

But later, in my senior year of college, while browsing the early web—this was before the computer-nausea started—I found myself looking up Renard Jankowski’s obituary.

It came up immediately. Renard’s hometown was a forward-looking community of wealthy techies and had naturally scanned their old newspaper microfiches early on and put them online. I saw a grainy picture of Renard, a face I never thought I’d see again.

The obituary said Renard had died in a bike accident. He zoomed through a red light and was mowed down by a car.

I read the obituary again. I was surprised at how little emotion I felt. The obituary seemed unconnected to the kid I knew. Here I was, in my new life, years later, sitting in the gleaming new computer lab of the very college where Renard and I had met and become friends. Whatever happened to the FARGs, whatever happened to the old Apple IIe computers that had been in the library? The FARGs had gone on to other colleges, the computers had been mothballed. Life continued. Only Renard was stuck back in time. More irrelevant every year. Reading the obituary made me feel the last vestiges of Renard evaporate.

But then the odd thing happened.

A few months later, in programming class, I was examining a memory dump during a debugging session and I came across something that forced me to think of Renard again, in a way that I hadn’t in years.

A memory dump is when the contents of a computer’s RAM are written out to a log file in the event of a system crash. Examining that log file helps you diagnose the problem that led to the crash. The file shows you basically what the computer was “thinking” at the moment of the failure—that is, the numerical values in its memory registers. A memory dump just looks like endless eight-digit clumps of random numbers and letters, not easily readable by humans—numbers and letters because computers don’t use our base-10 counting system (in which the digits used are 0123456789) but a base-16 counting system (in which the digits used are 0123456789ABCDEF, the letters A through F expressing the values from 10 to 15). So if you were to open up a memory dump to a random place, you could expect to see lots of eight-character chunks like 14F3C587 or 6BD094C9.

In the memory dump I encountered that day, instead of the expected random hexadecimal values that are the by-products of the normal data processes, I saw this:

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