Alex rubbed his eyes and reached for his third cup of coffee. The digital clock in the corner of his monitor
glowed 3:47 AM in harsh blue numbers, but he was in the zone. Lines of code flowed across his screen
like a river of logic, each function building upon the last in perfect harmony.
He was close to cracking the encryption algorithm that had been driving him crazy for weeks. The client—
some big tech company he'd signed an NDA for—wanted their security system bulletproof. Alex lived for
challenges like this. While other people his age were out partying or building social media followings, he
found his thrills in the elegant dance of code and logic.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, muscle memory guiding each keystroke. The familiar click-clack
rhythm was almost meditative. This was his world. Clean, logical, predictable. Unlike people, code didn't
lie or betray or leave without explanation. It just . worked.
Or it didn't.
Alex frowned at his screen. There, nestled between two perfectly normal function calls, sat a line that
made no sense:
void_transfer_run();
void_transfer_run();
He hadn't written that. He was absolutely certain. Alex might not be the most social guy, but he had a
perfect memory for his own code. Every semicolon, every variable name, every indentation—they were all
his digital fingerprints.
"What the hell?" he muttered, highlighting the mysterious line. The syntax highlighting showed it as a
valid function call, but there was no definition anywhere in his codebase. No import statement, no library
that contained it.
He tried to delete it. His cursor moved to the line, but when he pressed backspace, nothing happened.
The line remained, almost mockingly solid against his screen.
A chill ran down Alex's spine. In fifteen years of programming, he'd never encountered code that refused
to be deleted. He tried cutting it, commenting it out, even closing the entire IDE and reopening it.
The line was still there.
His monitor flickered. Once. Twice. The familiar blue glow of his development environment began to shift,
colors bleeding and warping like watercolors in rain. The mysterious line of code started to pulse, each
character growing brighter with every heartbeat.
"No, no, no ." Alex frantically pressed Ctrl+Z, trying to undo whatever was happening. But his keyboard
wasn't responding. The keys clicked uselessly under his fingers as the pulsing grew faster, more insistent.
The room around him began to dissolve.
It started at the edges of his vision—his cluttered desk, the stack of empty pizza boxes, the motivational
poster his mom had bought him that he'd never had the heart to take down. Everything became
pixelated, breaking apart into individual squares of color that drifted away like digital snow.
The last thing Alex saw before the world collapsed entirely was that single line of code, now burning
white-hot against the darkness:
void_transfer_run();
void_transfer_run();
Then everything went black