RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (7 page)

He went on for a few more minutes and Linsey didn’t say anything.  He repeated some of the boring financial stuff that they droned on about in the meeting and it put Linsey right to sleep.  He laughed a little to himself. “
It’s a good thing I had extra coffee before that meeting,
otherwise I would have fallen asleep just like her
.” 

He didn’t feel too bad about what he told her, she knew about the project she just didn’t know that it was HIS project.

He laid there for a few minutes reflecting about everything that had happened over the weekend, and then suddenly it hit him, where had he put that microdrive? 
“Oh well, I’ll look in the morning.”

The longer he laid there the more he wondered and he couldn’t sleep now for wondering where he had put it.  He quietly slipped out of bed and went down the hall to his study.  He had a pretty good Idea of where he might have put it out of habit.  He went into the study and over to the far window, reached up behind the curtains and grabbed a key that he kept above the sill.  He went to his desk and opened the bottom right-hand drawer and pulled out a small fireproof box that he kept a few very important items in, like the title to his 1969 Pontiac GTO. 
“Very rare.”

He opened the box and began digging around for the microdrive.  He found it quickly because it was easy to spot among the others in there because it was a bright orange color, a limited run promotional issue at the time with ESS’s company logo of a computer chip on it. 

He figured right, he was a creature of habit, he didn’t remember putting it in there but there it was just as he thought it would be.  He tossed it back in and was about to close the box when he remembered he still needed to copy it to his PC for safe keeping.  Microdrives were very reliable but it never hurt to have another back up. 

Chances are he would be asked to look at it soon anyway.
“Well what the heck I’m up already.”
  He grabbed the microdrive and flipped on his computer.  He opened the file up with his now outdated editor just for old times sake.  The huge file was on his screen.  Hours and hours of hard work that paid off well for him and Tim both.  It was like going back in time seeing that old code from ten years earlier.  Now it was time to do what he had forgotten to do years ago, save it to his hard drive. 

He hit the save and found the old file, selected it, and hit save again.  The usual message appeared on the screen as expected. “Replace file LifeCordertracker9 file size 398KTB, with file LifeCordertracker9 file size 1289KTB?” 
“What? Why was the file on the microdrive so much larger?  It should have been only one night’s worth of editing.”
  He always saved it nightly over the weekend with the exception of the very late hours of the night Sunday which ran into Monday morning when he fell asleep at the computer. 

He woke up late the next morning at his desk and had to rush off to work with the finished program neglecting to save the few small tweaks he had made to the program.  That was the whole point of going down to the development lab and making another copy off the work station because in the chaos of the day he forgot to ask for the microdrive back from Tim. 

Tim took off early to go golf that day so instead of bothering him at the club Dodge went and copied one off for himself to take home for his archive.  He was still exhausted so he tossed it into his little fire box and locked it away for safekeeping, forgotten until now.  But now something weird was going on with the file, something he would have noticed ten years ago had he backed the microdrive up to his PC like he should have.

  It was late now and he was tired but he had to take a look at the file, he just had to know why it was so much larger.  He began scanning down through the code page by page.  It was very time consuming as the original program was complex and spanned over three hundred pages, but now his editor info window indicated that the page count was more than eleven hundred pages, weird.  He kept scanning.  The code seemed to go on forever.  It had been so long since he viewed it that it seemed a little foreign to him now.  Several hours later he still hadn’t found
anything that threw up a red flag.  He scanned the first one hundred pages plus a few more.  He thought that maybe the development guys appended something onto the end of the file so he jumped to the last page and began working backwards.

He scanned another hundred pages in reverse and found nothing.  Whatever it was must be in the middle somewhere but why?  He removed the microdrive from the com. port, put it back into the fire safe, locked it and returned it to the bottom desk drawer.  He couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.  The mystery would have to wait until another day. 

He returned the key to the window sill and as he did he noticed a glint of light coming in, he pulled back the shade.  No way, was it nearly dawn?  He had stayed up all night, unbelievable!  He was exhausted but his mind was racing.  He was due back at work in two hours but there was no way he could make it through a whole day of work, he had to get some sleep. 

He went down to the kitchen, grabbed his skyphone and said, “Call in sick,” something he hadn’t done in over a year.  He laid the phone down and let it do its thing.  He had a preprogrammed message that would automatically call him in sick with Steph for the day.  Dodge used his last bit of energy to get into bed, kiss his wife on the neck, and plunged into a deep sleep. 

An hour later he was awakened by Linsey.
          “Dodge! Get up.  You overslept!”
          “No, no Hun, I’m sick today I’m staying home.”
          “Really, are you all right?”
          “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, just had a bad case of insomnia last night so I was up all night.”
          “Oh, okay, well I’m going downstairs to make sure the kids get something good to eat before they run off to god knows where.  Can I get you anything?”
          “No thanks, I just need sleep.” 

Linsey didn’t quite know what to think, her first thought was that maybe Dodge had more to drink while golfing than he let on last night or maybe he was worried about Bobby and his Dad and couldn’t sleep, anyway he seemed fine so she went on about her day with plans to check on him later.

  Dodge slept because he was so exhausted but he kept dreaming about the code and what might be wrong with it.  He felt that he had let the company down by not double checking everything the day that he took the finished code in and gave it to Tim.  

Did he not run the compiler right?  What did he do that caused the program to be so large?  Did he accidentally add some other old code to the middle of it because he was so tired?  He had to get up and go back at it to find out what in the world had gone wrong, and if it had gone wrong, how in the world did the thing even work?  Extra code inadvertently inserted in the middle should have locked the system up and caused some major errors, yet the product had been working for years with no apparent problems. 

At 11:00 A.M. with just four hours of sleep under his belt he was up.  After a quick shower and a shave he was dressed and headed down the hall to the study.  He called over the railing to Linsey.
          “Hey darling, can you bring me some coffee?  I’ll be in my study.”  She heard it but she didn’t believe it.  What in the world was going on with Dodge? First he stays up all night then he calls in sick, which he never does.  He gets up with very little sleep and heads right to the study? 
“I wonder what he’s up to?”

“Sure, I’ll make some fresh, bring it up in a bit.”
         “Thanks, you’re a peach,” he said as he headed around the corner and down the hall to the study.  He fired up the PC and began searching through the code again from where he left off.  Within a few minutes Linsey came in with a cup looped in one finger, a full carafe of coffee, and a plate with a cream cheese bagel.
          “Oh, thanks!  Just put it there on the corner,” said Dodge.

  He didn’t really have time to think up a reason for what he was doing or at least not an air tight one.
          “Okay Dodge Joseph Kerrington, what the heck are you up too?  You’ve been acting mighty strange over the last twenty four hours and I’ll demand a complete account of all your activities.  Is there another woman?” 

Dodge looked up from his work.  Linsey was standing there smiling sheepishly at him in a rather attractive pose. 
“Oh boy, he was in trouble now.”
He had piqued her curiosity to the point of no return.  A half-baked story wouldn’t sell it but he took his best shot anyway. 

“Well Linsey Ann Kerrington.  I’ve been up all night thinking about work and Bobby and Dad.  Then while lying in
bed taking it easy I remembered that I had some figures for the third quarter engineering budget.  The whole thing is due to Tim’s boss by tomorrow.  With all the commotion around here I forgot about it.”
          “I have to get it done by tonight so that I can get some sleep and take it to Tim in the morning.  Otherwise Tim is going to get yelled at and Tim is my friend, Okay?” 

Linsey said, “Okay,” but instead of leaving the room she walked around the desk to sneak a peek at the computer screen while pretending to arrive for the sole purpose of depositing a kiss on his cheek.  Dodge knew how stealthy Linsey could be when she got really curious so he had already opened a financial report on top of his code window before she walked around.  All she saw in her quick glance was a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet. 

“You behave in here Mister and just holler if you need anything okay?”
          “Sure thing Babe, I will, thanks.”  Before she got all the way out of the room Dodge already had the code back up on top the financial report and was scanning over it again with even more intensity. 

He spent several more hours and went through the entire middle of the code and found nothing.  How could the file be so much larger and the page count so much greater when there have not been any changes? 
“Of course!”
He must have accidentally pasted something at the bottom of the screen, something inert.  A bit of information that would be placed after the final, “end of code,” command.  If so it would have no effect on the program. 

“I hope I didn’t put my entire personal phone library on the bottom of the programming code.” 
That would mean that every single Lifecorder out there had his entire phone book embedded in it.  How embarrassing that would be if someone discovered it years later?  He thought this might be possible because he would sometimes edit his phone book on his PC and then use copy and paste to move the whole thing to his skyphone for an update.  He had done it that way for years. 

He
scrolled down through all the pages to the last one.  There was hundreds of blank pages on the end of the code but no content and no phonebook, what else could it be?  Why all the blank pages? 

He expected at least a single character at the very bottom as a place holder thinking maybe he fell asleep on the space bar that night years ago and saved a bunch of blank pages, filled with spaces which would certainly explain all the extra pages but it would not explain the ridiculous difference in file size as blank pages would barely take up any file space.  If that was the case, the file would be only slightly larger, not three times larger. 

Then he hit himself in the forehead,
“Idiot,
the phonebook file wouldn’t take up that kind of file space either!”
He felt stupid for even thinking that.  He sat back for a minute and contemplated what to do next. 

His electronics troubleshooting skills were quite sharp so he focused on how he could apply them to this situation.  He was not really a software programmer by trade but back at that time when the code needed to be edited they recently lost John Calhoun, their best programmer to another company. 

They didn’t have time to recruit another candidate for the job or bring one up to speed for that matter.  He knew a great deal about the software end of the design because he was so highly involved in every aspect of the project.  John Calhoun was a good programmer but an even better friend.  Even though he left the company he told Dodge to give him a call if they had any problems with the code. 

One reason Dodge took a copy home was just in case he got stuck and needed some help finishing it up.  John had it completed anyway but after he left the company the development department made a few small changes in the hardware which required tweaks on the software side. 

Dodge only had to call John twice to bail him out.  John was so good he knew how to help him over the phone.  The guy pretty much spoke Trinary and thought in pure F code.  Even though Trinary and F code were considered outdated, they were still to that day the building blocks behind every modern code assembler and John could take them apart and put them back together in his sleep. 

The youngsters coming out of engineering school these days thought that the old code was useless, not realizing that it was running behind the scenes making everything they designed work.  They were all spoiled by the new assembler programs that wrote the code for them by transforming entire pages of Trinary and F code into single command words. 

The ability to read and write raw code made guys like John Calhoun worth their weight in gold.  The young pups couldn’t code their way out of a wet paper bag!  If the assembler program got kinked up, they were useless.