The old man sat in the dark room. The only source of light was the computer monitor into which he was staring. The only sounds were his own short breaths and the dull roar of the electrical equipment that surrounded him.
He adjusted his glasses and read again through the hundreds of lines of programming code that made up this subroutine. There was an error in this subroutine. If he didn’t fix it, the program would never work. And if he didn’t find it, he couldn’t fix it.
When the old man had awoken as a boy, he could read the code and he could find the errors. But as the night wore on, even the individual characters–the letters and the numbers–began to lose their meaning.
