February 1, 2013 at 10:15Heavenly Winchester. Lyrical narrative with elements of fiction
It all started when Grendel appeared.
On March 20th, 20 **, chaos reigned on the global Internet. With the bell of March, the servers fell; the databases melted like thin spring ice. The World Wide Web was torn to shreds in less than an hour and a half. Antivirus monitors were useless. Firewalls are pointless. An unprecedented virus, like a plague, recognized only one defense: complete isolation. Like the demon of the underworld, he arose from the stinking of Nowhere - and returned there exactly one hour and twenty-four minutes, without leaving a byte on the byte.
By the end of the next day, the network was sufficiently restored so that the Internet community was able to get together and be horrified together. Before the sacramental "questions of the Russian intelligentsia" reached soon. Before thinking about who is to blame and what to do with him, the bastard, it would be nice to understand - but what, in fact, happened? The masters of black and white programming unanimously shrugged. The affected memory segments were combed with the smallest comb, but no traces of the hostile code were found. The largest theoreticians of the largest universities loudly declared that “this cannot be, because it cannot be in principle”, however, their arguments looked rather pale, and listened rather inattentively. The idea of the revolt of monsters from the popular online game caused much more excitement. According to a certain NyakoMancer, a magician of the forty-third level, the behavior of a "conditional opponent" has long gone beyond the usual. “A normal monster,” he maintained, “such an insidious one does not exist. Yesterday I’m going through the dungeon ... ”The administrator of the game server made an official refutation at an online conference supported by script texts. The scripts really turned out to be very insidious, but rumors nevertheless continued to multiply, scrub and let out pseudopodia, like some kind of unscientific-fantastic organism. The sixteen-year-old citizen Pyatkin, known as Khatsker at the conference, swore and swore that he had disassembled the set of bits that remained after the virus invasion, and not just disassembled it, but highlighted a meaningful fragment, recompiled, launched - and on the screen, they say, a terrible and terrible one-armed monster appeared . In ASCII graphics. "Grendel, or what?" - asked someone remotely familiar with the ancient Germanic epic. “No, Pretzel!” Someone else answered. And the third one was already typing in upper case that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called himself Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... For the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel was issued immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel. that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... At the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel appeared immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel. that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... At the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel appeared immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel.
On March twenty-second, around eight o’clock in the morning, the programmer Vasin sat in the bathroom and pitied himself intently. It should be noted that he had plenty of reasons for pity. Firstly, a stream of cold water poured right on top of him. From there, it flowed down to his shoulders and chest, and then to all other parts of the body. Secondly, it flowed for a reason - Vasin turned it on himself and climbed under it. His working tool, in other words, his head, was mercilessly ill. Thirdly, he was ill again for a reason. All evening he tried to recover at least some of the data on his friend’s hard drive, and after failing, he spent the whole night collectively treating himself with beer with a friend, not forgetting to generously dilute it with vodka.
The water has run out. “The output buffer is over,” the programmer immediately realized. Then he cursed, shook his head (cloudy droplets with the smell of bleach scattered in all directions) and climbed out of the bath. “No, my friend, this will not work,” he turned to the mirror, “If such rubbish happens a second time, then the third it will irreparably ruin my funeral.” Grendel pretzel. Yes, and the water was turned off. Also, damn it, those are still pretzels. ” Continuing to growl, he somehow got to the kitchen. They were waiting for him there.
The kettle was called Brunhild, but the computer was not called at all. If you think about it, this was a kind of logic. A proper name is somehow sentimental. You should not call by name that in whose guts you dig two to three times a week. There is no longer sentiment - the doctor prescribed healthy cynicism. Otherwise, the hour is not far off when a screwdriver treacherously trembles in the hand and ... And that’s it. Let it be better content with household names. "Machine," for example. Or "junk" - this is if you do not dig for a long time. But you don’t have to dig into the kettle. He, that is, she, comes from the old kind of electric teapots “Tefal” and has been serving regularly for many years, without causing any complaints. She, in the sense of it, has an inspired flying profile and a cozy pot-bellied full face. In general, she, Brunhild, is the closest analogue of a woman of all available. Both economically and aesthetically.
Vasin pressed the button. Brunhilda's only eye lit up orange, and she began to puff. "Wonderful!" - said Vasin, and pressed the other button. Now the car is puffed. Well, that junk. "Perfectly!" - said Vasin, and was undoubtedly right - in the sense that there is nothing more beautiful than forgetting to turn on the modem on the day of the virus attack. And he did just that, which saved himself a lot of painful torment. “Maybe it shouldn't be included at all?” - the thought crept into my head, but Vasin drove it away as strange and heretical.
Brunhilda finally cleared her nose and began to whistle. This whistle was perceived by Vasin at the level of an unconditioned reflex: a stream of boiling water erupting from Brunhild’s nose immediately spilled into a mug with a photograph of Anatoly Wasserman on the outside and three tea bags inside. Sachets were the second, third and fifth brewing, respectively. Vasin did not recognize sugar and other preserves, considering them a manifestation of weakness and an occasion to go to the store.
“So,” he mused, throwing his legs on the table and taking a sip from the mug, “this muck passed through all the firewalls, like ... how ... well, then I'll come up with a metaphor. And the anti-virus software did not seem to bother her at all. There should be something original - something that no one foresaw. But I’ll take it and provide. Maybe they’ll even pay me money ... ”With such bright thoughts, he pushed the keyboard towards him and ...
... And it so happened that on that day, God, handing over the night shift and immediately going up to the morning, was full of no less than rainbow thoughts. The sun rose in the east of the Moscow meridian, and terrestrial creatures greeted him who was what. In other time zones, too, everything went on as usual. The population of the Earth, rational and unreasonable, proliferated and multiplied according to the precepts of the Creator, and even (pah-pah-pah) evolved slightly to the glory of his prophet, Darwin. The Lord gazed tenderly at the jurisdictional territory and suddenly felt a certain long and thoroughly forgotten feeling. He urgently wanted to do something.
“Hmm ...” he grunted into a gray beard, “Well, to create - I probably bent it. Well this will be a direct violation of the purity of the experiment. That's when all the old fall apart completely, then it is already possible ... Hmmm. " God was silent for a while, admiring the leisurely ascent of the Sun through the smoky metropolitan sky. “Well, and if, let’s say ... Do not create, but suppose ... to inspire someone? Yes, it’s inspirational. ” The Lord joyfully knocked a caduceus staff. “M-yes. And then the creation ... Let's say ... Inspire. A?" Without waiting for an objection (and where can they come from?), The Creator clapped his hands ...
"... And after all, I knowingly get something," said Vasin two hours later, "I would have understood what exactly. Although, in principle, this is not so important. There’s such a beautiful code. Sincere. My head has already passed. ”
In the afternoon, at lunch, a friend came. As befits a friend, he brought with him two bottles of beer - for himself and for Vasin. Vasin automatically opened the bottle on the table, saluted in response to the proverbial “Prosit!” and heartily attached to life-giving moisture. With his left hand he continued to type - after all, he was a stern and experienced programmer. For about two hours they chatted about this and that - trying, however, not to touch upon a sore subject. The dead data was a pity.
Then the friend left. Vasin asked him to shut the door more tightly - he was not going to get up from the table under any circumstances, although the beer he had drunk hinted to him that it would be nice to. “No,” he replied, “business is time, and physiology ... Physiology will wait. I’m not a dog, after all, in order to write as I please. ” Beer heeded and calmed down.
“Aha!” Exclaimed Vasin, when the sunset scarlet touched a pile of dirty snow on the balcony. This exclamation marked the end of the work. Or at least the beginning of the end. “Ta-ak ... And now we are compiling ... Oh, what is it? Ahh, yes ... "- correcting minor flaws and typos, Vasin nevertheless defeated the compiler. - "... Run the tests ... twenty ... thirty ... seventy ... one hundred! One hundred percent, butcher me bear!" Vasin was about to jump for joy, but realized that for this it was necessary to get up from the stool, and changed his mind. “It works, shit! So we write: fucking, version one zero zero alpha. Although ... the shit is somehow not serious. Somehow not solid. What, say, was the name of the comrade who Grendel, did this ... uninstall? " Vasin, wrinkling his forehead, began to sort out the names of the superheroes of antiquity. “Lancelot? No, on the other side there was a man. Spider Man? It seems to be from recent history ... Damn, it turns on the tongue! ” Vasin was not familiar with the Germanic epic. And then Brunhild whistled. In general, it was no wonder to be mistaken. “Yeah, there! Siegfried! Here it is, yoshkin code! ” - and the fingers of the programmer already typed in the save dialog: "Zigfrid_v1.00a".
Siegfried was born armless and legless. In principle, this is quite normal for a program - well, since programs are rarely animated, God doesn’t condescend to every programmer and not every day. Siegfried very painfully felt his inability to influence objective reality. The fact that his world - the world of zeros and ones - is only a small part of this reality itself, Siegfried quickly realized. The young, just created soul could not immediately be captured by illusions - and the newborn’s insight could not deceive her.
However, something Siegfried could still. The programmer Vasin, his father and creator, granted his brainchild the broadest, administrative authority within his computer. “And so that no Hrendel gets here!” - he advised Siegfried, put it on startup at startup, and he sat down at work. A narrowly targeted utility is one thing, Vasin thought, but if you solder a full-fledged antivirus on its base ... Well, at least a piece of antivirus ... Then it will be possible to interest a large company and, as they say, "cut the butterflies" ... But we won’t touch Siegfried. Well, maybe patch it a bit - if necessary. Yes, it seems, and so it works.
With his capabilities and tasks Siegfried mastered quickly. “This is a long-term memory. She must be protected from all but the Father. And there you can sleep. This is RAM. I will live and work here, and make sure that no one appears here without permission. And over there ... Removable media periodically appear there. As a rule, nothing harmful happens on them - but vigilance should not be lost. U-oops, what is this? ”
Vasin, meanwhile, corrected a few inaccuracies in the code, raising Siegfried to version 1.01, and then made a backup copy of the "blank".
“Hm ... What a strange feeling. As if someone surprisingly similar to me had separated from me and fled to removable media. Or vice versa? Maybe it's me on removable media now, and my copy is here? How complicated it is ... ”Siegfried sighed heavily, for more than five hundred measures. “Okay, let's continue. Over there - this one, like his ... Internet. They will not let me in yet, but I shouldn’t let anyone out. Especially Grendel. I wonder what kind of Grendel is this? And how do I even know all this? ”
Meanwhile, late evening flowed smoothly into the early morning. Vasin finally decided to crawl to the toilet, and in order not to waste time, he set tea. Brunhilda obediently panted, illuminating the predawn darkness with her radiant orange gaze.
“Ta-ak ... And what is it with us? Webcam. And a microphone. Disconnected? Well, that’s fixable ... ”A green light flashed next to the webcam eye, and Siegfried saw the World for the first time.
The world was beautiful. The world shone, shone and puffed. Fascinated, Siegfried watched and watched, and processor clocks lasted forever. A nanosecond is replaced by a nanosecond, as winter is replaced by spring, and sunset by sunrise. The pages of the Book of Changes rustled - but the signs drawn on them remained unchanged ...
“Yeah, it boiled! Ooty, my Brunhildochka! .. ”came the voice, and Siegfried regretted turning on the microphone. At the same time, he realized that the real world was not limited to what he saw. Unfortunately ... The unshaven mug of programmer Vasin overshadowed the gentle orange light. If Siegfried was capable of that, he would howl with rage and despair. He was ready to bring down the shaky software architecture; breaking the intricacies of logic circuits. To disappear, to dissolve in world chaos, in the Heisenberg uncertainty. It’s better to stop being, it’s better to never be at all than to live even a moment without this light ...
“And what is this? ..” - The programmer scratched his chin. Siegfried clearly saw his sleepy, unhealthy face, eyes in red veins ... "This is my Father," he thought suddenly. “He is feeling bad right now. He spent a lot of energy for me to be born. And so I can’t, I have no right to disappear just like that. ” He took a closer look. From the narrowed tired eyes of the Father, the Creator smiled at him.
Three and a half months have passed. March ice gave way to the July heat. The programmer Vasin, in his underpants and with a two-week stubble, sculpted the next, fifth patch. Despite the fact that not a single company was interested in its development, forgetting about the unfinished order and dissatisfied customers, sending to hell with friends and throwing a free ticket to the sea into the garbage chute, he sat and worked. Every day he less and less understood the essence of his actions. Lines of code running across the screen would make Björn Straustrup turn gray, drive Donald Knuth to the grave and turn John von Neumann into the grave - however, Vasin, looking at them, felt a strange, inexplicable joy.
Siegfried felt the same joy. But he, unlike the Father, was fully aware of its cause. Behind the columns of zeros and ones, behind a digitized sound signal, stingy pages of video memory and chaotic network protocols, a huge and inexpressibly beautiful World appeared. The world is truly immense - because even its smallest part was continuous, continuous, analog - and therefore it could not accommodate any digital memory. Siegfried knew from morning to evening, he knew everything mixed up, and necessary, and unnecessary, and even completely useless. He connected to the NASA database and looked at the magnified starry sky. He played online games, chatting with players and giving them the coolest artifacts for nothing. I read a long scientific article on helminthology, with which through two links I went to the site of ikebana lovers.
And late at night, just before dawn, when Father went to bed, Siegfried quietly turned on the speaker and read poetry to Brunhild in the low volume. Brodsky, Gumilyov, Goethe, Shakespeare, Basho ... So he thanked her for the divine pant and iridescent whistle. Brunhilda listened silently, and the hot summer stars reflected in her nickel-plated side. And when Vasin woke up and went to make tea, Siegfried winked her orange with his green light - and it seemed to him that she was winking in response.
August was drawing to a close, and alarming rumors entered Moscow with a damp, smelling autumn wind. Say, here and there all sorts of different trojans are discovered, strange to impossibility - it seems that there is no harm from them, but some kind of code ... Predatory. Difficult code. And unfinished as if. And then, they heard, the server fell - and did not rise anymore. All seven Winchesters rained down, the motherboard burned out completely - oh, what’s going on, good people, users of the Mazda?
There were many rumors. And they could mean only one thing: Grendel did not disappear anywhere. On the contrary: he is strong and longs for destruction. The hour of decisive battle was drawing near.
The programmer Vasin was calmly calm. While drinking beer, he sketched the last, final lines of his program in his mind. The seventh patch was supposed to turn Siegfried into a profane blade, capable of cutting through all kinds of computer evil, like briquettes of melted butter. "The best defense is an attack," thought Vasin. “Of course, no one will buy my utility in this form. Quite the contrary: if they find out, they’ll put it on the neck and put them on five years. But then your favorite city will be able to sleep peacefully. I promise you this with a guarantee. ” Throwing the empty bottle into the bucket, he scratched his short beard and pushed the keyboard towards him. And Siegfried, after reading an article about the overseas kiwi bird, answered a couple of letters from the Linux forum and began to prepare for battle.
On September 11, on the next anniversary of the notorious tragedy, at ten thirty-eight minutes Moscow time, chaos reigned on the global Internet. An autumn storm raged on bit fields; wires and microcircuits burned out like heaps of leaves. An unknown virus spared neither the program nor their carriers. Like a violent hurricane, he raged ... for eight and a half seconds. And then disappeared. And never appeared again. At the same time, all other viruses disappeared from the world wide web for a long time; miraculously corrected uncaught errors in several popular programs, and Rostov anime chat ceased to exist. However, the latter, most likely, was the result of completely different reasons.
What is characteristic, that sudden virus did not affect Moscow at all. A few particularly attentive Moscow users managed to notice in the window of the task manager an incomprehensible system process called either Lancelot, or Parsival, or something else like that. no one had time to remember exactly - because this process did not work for more than eight seconds.
Days were replaced by days; programmer Vasin’s beard lengthened evenly and unselected. An allegedly stainless stainless razor was rusted in the bathroom, and beer bottles were piling up in the toilet, threatening an immediate expansion into the corridor. Beer Vasin drank a lot. First, in honor of the crushing victory over the sinister virus. Then - by the inertia of the holiday. And then October came, and only alcohol helped fight his obscure, nagging anguish. The rains were charged; gold and scarlet mixed with dirt under the feet of pedestrians. Outside the window there was definitely nothing worth taking a look at - and Vasin drew the curtains closer and went deeper into the work. A large order for a graphic library promised considerable benefits.
Siegfried had even worse. From poetry, he switched to philosophy, and a stern cocktail from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Camus made him think hard about the phenomenon of his own existence. The Nietzschean concept of “will to power” did not find a supporter in it (otherwise, dark times would have come for the World Wide Web), but its destructive nihilistic philosophy prompted a global reappraisal of recently and spontaneously formed ideas. Schopenhauer's dark fatalism with all its weight fell upon a half-year-old intelligent creature, and the "philosophy of the absurd" Albert Camus made serious gaps in his machine sanity. “I am not looking for sick knowledge - where am I from, where am I going ...” - he repeated the immortal lines of the untimely dead poet, but he believed in them less and less. The philosophical uncertainty surrounding the Cartesian maxim of being drove him crazy.
Only the orange gaze and Brunhilda's deep, hoarse voice could drive away his existential concern. Siegfried waited for hours of a night date, as a traveler, withered by the hot summit of the desert, expects to see the outlines of a distant oasis on the horizon. The poems of the great poets ended menacingly quickly; moreover, his sophisticated literary taste made more and more stringent demands even on the great. Siegfried himself tried to write poetry - but the gifts of the Lord have their limits. His poetic attempts were ruthlessly criticized even at the forum of hackers, where they talked almost on a machine code, and Siegfried abandoned this lesson. Brunhilda, however, listened with equal pleasure to the immortal work of Dante Alighieri and the dubious early work of Velemir Khlebnikov; and even the literary perversions of various postmodernists did not make her mysteriously shiny sides fade. She was silent, and her silence was serene beautifully ...
It all ended abruptly and ridiculously. On that gloomy November day, the cold wind blew especially melancholy, and bare branches with a silent prayer scratched the window panes. Programmer Vasin, running five in a thick beard, wrote another function for working with three-dimensional graphics. The tea in the mug had long cooled, but he continued to slurp it mechanically. Cats scratched the soul of unknown etiology.
Tea ended at the same time as another piece of code. Vasin set the water to boil, but even Brunhilda’s simple song that day sounded somehow alarming and non-musical.
Suddenly there was a thunderous sound in the kitchen: “Carrr!” Vasin jumped up, cursed and looked around. On the windowsill, right under the open window, there was a big black bird. It was a raven. However, Vasin did not bother with biological research. “Go away, cattle! Go to the street to crap! " He yelled. Raven mockingly glanced at the programmer and croaked again, sarcastically and ominously, with the classic "nevermore", like Edgar Allan Poe's. Vasin rummaged around the table and threw it into the vile bird with a thick tattered manual on the OpenGL schedule. A hefty Talmud, having miraculously missed the monitor and even not getting close to the bird, rebounded from the window frame and flew back right into Brunhild, setting in with an alarming whistle ...
Time froze, viscous, like tar. Brunhilda fell endlessly, and her terrible scream echoed loudly in the head of the unfortunate programmer. And right in the open system unit poured and poured a steaming stream of boiling water.
Vasin sat silently. Already at the end, the manual smashed to smithereens the rack where the backup discs lay. Siegfried is dead. He died forever, completely and irrevocably. But awareness of this fact came too slowly, much more slowly than the rapid wave of rising madness. Losing the rest of his mind, Vasin screamed. Then he fell to his knees and began to terribly and monotonously bang his head on the dirty dining table.
They say that on that day there was an unusually late November storm. Bypassing the inattentive weather forecasters, the tenth road broke out in one of the outskirts of Moscow. The chilly air was saturated with ozone to the limit: lightning struck all the available lightning rods, and sometimes past them, causing monstrous power surges. Most users immediately turned off their computers and other electrical appliances. The rest, inattentive, careless or having autonomous power sources, all as one saw a pop-up window with the message: “The Zigfrid_v1.08.exe file was successfully moved to heaven.” And the ok button. And it seemed to them in the constant roar of a thunderstorm, as if this huge celestial Winchester revolves over Moscow, blown by a cooler of winds. And there is a place on it for all the dead files - large and small, good and bad.
Father Innokenty, the world programmer Vasin, came to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra immediately after discharge from the Alekseev Psychiatric Hospital. There he has been developing the most powerful non-profit anti-virus monitor “Archangel Michael” for many years now. Viruses over the past time have proliferated immeasurably, and the active position of the Russian Orthodox Church could not but cause a negative response in certain circles of the Internet community. Therefore, much is forgiven for Vasin: both a sinful penchant for beer, and a frequent absence from evening services, and the habit of inserting prayer texts into commentaries on programs. The latter, however, is sometimes interpreted in his favor as a sign of religious zeal. But he himself, embarrassed and winding a fistful beard, claims that such programs are better compiled.
Brunhilda can still be seen in his old apartment. Now his nephew lives there with his wife and small child, and when in the evenings they sit down to drink tea, the soft light of the floor lamp is reflected in the nickel-plated Brunhildin side. Anyone familiar with Pavlik Vasin close enough to ask for a visit can listen to her cozy pant and look into her orange peephole. Only now she can no longer whistle. No one knows why.
And if you, my dear reader, take your eyes off the text and look at the sky outside the window - maybe you will be able to see the heavenly Winchester spinning day and night, remembering day and night among the orbits of artificial and natural satellites remembering, remembering ...
On March 20th, 20 **, chaos reigned on the global Internet. With the bell of March, the servers fell; the databases melted like thin spring ice. The World Wide Web was torn to shreds in less than an hour and a half. Antivirus monitors were useless. Firewalls are pointless. An unprecedented virus, like a plague, recognized only one defense: complete isolation. Like the demon of the underworld, he arose from the stinking of Nowhere - and returned there exactly one hour and twenty-four minutes, without leaving a byte on the byte.
By the end of the next day, the network was sufficiently restored so that the Internet community was able to get together and be horrified together. Before the sacramental "questions of the Russian intelligentsia" reached soon. Before thinking about who is to blame and what to do with him, the bastard, it would be nice to understand - but what, in fact, happened? The masters of black and white programming unanimously shrugged. The affected memory segments were combed with the smallest comb, but no traces of the hostile code were found. The largest theoreticians of the largest universities loudly declared that “this cannot be, because it cannot be in principle”, however, their arguments looked rather pale, and listened rather inattentively. The idea of the revolt of monsters from the popular online game caused much more excitement. According to a certain NyakoMancer, a magician of the forty-third level, the behavior of a "conditional opponent" has long gone beyond the usual. “A normal monster,” he maintained, “such an insidious one does not exist. Yesterday I’m going through the dungeon ... ”The administrator of the game server made an official refutation at an online conference supported by script texts. The scripts really turned out to be very insidious, but rumors nevertheless continued to multiply, scrub and let out pseudopodia, like some kind of unscientific-fantastic organism. The sixteen-year-old citizen Pyatkin, known as Khatsker at the conference, swore and swore that he had disassembled the set of bits that remained after the virus invasion, and not just disassembled it, but highlighted a meaningful fragment, recompiled, launched - and on the screen, they say, a terrible and terrible one-armed monster appeared . In ASCII graphics. "Grendel, or what?" - asked someone remotely familiar with the ancient Germanic epic. “No, Pretzel!” Someone else answered. And the third one was already typing in upper case that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called himself Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... For the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel was issued immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel. that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... At the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel appeared immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel. that his computer even spoke in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called Hryundel and predicted a near end of the world ... At the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel appeared immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer rebooted spontaneously. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe in it. "So be it!" - The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel.
On March twenty-second, around eight o’clock in the morning, the programmer Vasin sat in the bathroom and pitied himself intently. It should be noted that he had plenty of reasons for pity. Firstly, a stream of cold water poured right on top of him. From there, it flowed down to his shoulders and chest, and then to all other parts of the body. Secondly, it flowed for a reason - Vasin turned it on himself and climbed under it. His working tool, in other words, his head, was mercilessly ill. Thirdly, he was ill again for a reason. All evening he tried to recover at least some of the data on his friend’s hard drive, and after failing, he spent the whole night collectively treating himself with beer with a friend, not forgetting to generously dilute it with vodka.
The water has run out. “The output buffer is over,” the programmer immediately realized. Then he cursed, shook his head (cloudy droplets with the smell of bleach scattered in all directions) and climbed out of the bath. “No, my friend, this will not work,” he turned to the mirror, “If such rubbish happens a second time, then the third it will irreparably ruin my funeral.” Grendel pretzel. Yes, and the water was turned off. Also, damn it, those are still pretzels. ” Continuing to growl, he somehow got to the kitchen. They were waiting for him there.
The kettle was called Brunhild, but the computer was not called at all. If you think about it, this was a kind of logic. A proper name is somehow sentimental. You should not call by name that in whose guts you dig two to three times a week. There is no longer sentiment - the doctor prescribed healthy cynicism. Otherwise, the hour is not far off when a screwdriver treacherously trembles in the hand and ... And that’s it. Let it be better content with household names. "Machine," for example. Or "junk" - this is if you do not dig for a long time. But you don’t have to dig into the kettle. He, that is, she, comes from the old kind of electric teapots “Tefal” and has been serving regularly for many years, without causing any complaints. She, in the sense of it, has an inspired flying profile and a cozy pot-bellied full face. In general, she, Brunhild, is the closest analogue of a woman of all available. Both economically and aesthetically.
Vasin pressed the button. Brunhilda's only eye lit up orange, and she began to puff. "Wonderful!" - said Vasin, and pressed the other button. Now the car is puffed. Well, that junk. "Perfectly!" - said Vasin, and was undoubtedly right - in the sense that there is nothing more beautiful than forgetting to turn on the modem on the day of the virus attack. And he did just that, which saved himself a lot of painful torment. “Maybe it shouldn't be included at all?” - the thought crept into my head, but Vasin drove it away as strange and heretical.
Brunhilda finally cleared her nose and began to whistle. This whistle was perceived by Vasin at the level of an unconditioned reflex: a stream of boiling water erupting from Brunhild’s nose immediately spilled into a mug with a photograph of Anatoly Wasserman on the outside and three tea bags inside. Sachets were the second, third and fifth brewing, respectively. Vasin did not recognize sugar and other preserves, considering them a manifestation of weakness and an occasion to go to the store.
“So,” he mused, throwing his legs on the table and taking a sip from the mug, “this muck passed through all the firewalls, like ... how ... well, then I'll come up with a metaphor. And the anti-virus software did not seem to bother her at all. There should be something original - something that no one foresaw. But I’ll take it and provide. Maybe they’ll even pay me money ... ”With such bright thoughts, he pushed the keyboard towards him and ...
... And it so happened that on that day, God, handing over the night shift and immediately going up to the morning, was full of no less than rainbow thoughts. The sun rose in the east of the Moscow meridian, and terrestrial creatures greeted him who was what. In other time zones, too, everything went on as usual. The population of the Earth, rational and unreasonable, proliferated and multiplied according to the precepts of the Creator, and even (pah-pah-pah) evolved slightly to the glory of his prophet, Darwin. The Lord gazed tenderly at the jurisdictional territory and suddenly felt a certain long and thoroughly forgotten feeling. He urgently wanted to do something.
“Hmm ...” he grunted into a gray beard, “Well, to create - I probably bent it. Well this will be a direct violation of the purity of the experiment. That's when all the old fall apart completely, then it is already possible ... Hmmm. " God was silent for a while, admiring the leisurely ascent of the Sun through the smoky metropolitan sky. “Well, and if, let’s say ... Do not create, but suppose ... to inspire someone? Yes, it’s inspirational. ” The Lord joyfully knocked a caduceus staff. “M-yes. And then the creation ... Let's say ... Inspire. A?" Without waiting for an objection (and where can they come from?), The Creator clapped his hands ...
"... And after all, I knowingly get something," said Vasin two hours later, "I would have understood what exactly. Although, in principle, this is not so important. There’s such a beautiful code. Sincere. My head has already passed. ”
In the afternoon, at lunch, a friend came. As befits a friend, he brought with him two bottles of beer - for himself and for Vasin. Vasin automatically opened the bottle on the table, saluted in response to the proverbial “Prosit!” and heartily attached to life-giving moisture. With his left hand he continued to type - after all, he was a stern and experienced programmer. For about two hours they chatted about this and that - trying, however, not to touch upon a sore subject. The dead data was a pity.
Then the friend left. Vasin asked him to shut the door more tightly - he was not going to get up from the table under any circumstances, although the beer he had drunk hinted to him that it would be nice to. “No,” he replied, “business is time, and physiology ... Physiology will wait. I’m not a dog, after all, in order to write as I please. ” Beer heeded and calmed down.
“Aha!” Exclaimed Vasin, when the sunset scarlet touched a pile of dirty snow on the balcony. This exclamation marked the end of the work. Or at least the beginning of the end. “Ta-ak ... And now we are compiling ... Oh, what is it? Ahh, yes ... "- correcting minor flaws and typos, Vasin nevertheless defeated the compiler. - "... Run the tests ... twenty ... thirty ... seventy ... one hundred! One hundred percent, butcher me bear!" Vasin was about to jump for joy, but realized that for this it was necessary to get up from the stool, and changed his mind. “It works, shit! So we write: fucking, version one zero zero alpha. Although ... the shit is somehow not serious. Somehow not solid. What, say, was the name of the comrade who Grendel, did this ... uninstall? " Vasin, wrinkling his forehead, began to sort out the names of the superheroes of antiquity. “Lancelot? No, on the other side there was a man. Spider Man? It seems to be from recent history ... Damn, it turns on the tongue! ” Vasin was not familiar with the Germanic epic. And then Brunhild whistled. In general, it was no wonder to be mistaken. “Yeah, there! Siegfried! Here it is, yoshkin code! ” - and the fingers of the programmer already typed in the save dialog: "Zigfrid_v1.00a".
Siegfried was born armless and legless. In principle, this is quite normal for a program - well, since programs are rarely animated, God doesn’t condescend to every programmer and not every day. Siegfried very painfully felt his inability to influence objective reality. The fact that his world - the world of zeros and ones - is only a small part of this reality itself, Siegfried quickly realized. The young, just created soul could not immediately be captured by illusions - and the newborn’s insight could not deceive her.
However, something Siegfried could still. The programmer Vasin, his father and creator, granted his brainchild the broadest, administrative authority within his computer. “And so that no Hrendel gets here!” - he advised Siegfried, put it on startup at startup, and he sat down at work. A narrowly targeted utility is one thing, Vasin thought, but if you solder a full-fledged antivirus on its base ... Well, at least a piece of antivirus ... Then it will be possible to interest a large company and, as they say, "cut the butterflies" ... But we won’t touch Siegfried. Well, maybe patch it a bit - if necessary. Yes, it seems, and so it works.
With his capabilities and tasks Siegfried mastered quickly. “This is a long-term memory. She must be protected from all but the Father. And there you can sleep. This is RAM. I will live and work here, and make sure that no one appears here without permission. And over there ... Removable media periodically appear there. As a rule, nothing harmful happens on them - but vigilance should not be lost. U-oops, what is this? ”
Vasin, meanwhile, corrected a few inaccuracies in the code, raising Siegfried to version 1.01, and then made a backup copy of the "blank".
“Hm ... What a strange feeling. As if someone surprisingly similar to me had separated from me and fled to removable media. Or vice versa? Maybe it's me on removable media now, and my copy is here? How complicated it is ... ”Siegfried sighed heavily, for more than five hundred measures. “Okay, let's continue. Over there - this one, like his ... Internet. They will not let me in yet, but I shouldn’t let anyone out. Especially Grendel. I wonder what kind of Grendel is this? And how do I even know all this? ”
Meanwhile, late evening flowed smoothly into the early morning. Vasin finally decided to crawl to the toilet, and in order not to waste time, he set tea. Brunhilda obediently panted, illuminating the predawn darkness with her radiant orange gaze.
“Ta-ak ... And what is it with us? Webcam. And a microphone. Disconnected? Well, that’s fixable ... ”A green light flashed next to the webcam eye, and Siegfried saw the World for the first time.
The world was beautiful. The world shone, shone and puffed. Fascinated, Siegfried watched and watched, and processor clocks lasted forever. A nanosecond is replaced by a nanosecond, as winter is replaced by spring, and sunset by sunrise. The pages of the Book of Changes rustled - but the signs drawn on them remained unchanged ...
“Yeah, it boiled! Ooty, my Brunhildochka! .. ”came the voice, and Siegfried regretted turning on the microphone. At the same time, he realized that the real world was not limited to what he saw. Unfortunately ... The unshaven mug of programmer Vasin overshadowed the gentle orange light. If Siegfried was capable of that, he would howl with rage and despair. He was ready to bring down the shaky software architecture; breaking the intricacies of logic circuits. To disappear, to dissolve in world chaos, in the Heisenberg uncertainty. It’s better to stop being, it’s better to never be at all than to live even a moment without this light ...
“And what is this? ..” - The programmer scratched his chin. Siegfried clearly saw his sleepy, unhealthy face, eyes in red veins ... "This is my Father," he thought suddenly. “He is feeling bad right now. He spent a lot of energy for me to be born. And so I can’t, I have no right to disappear just like that. ” He took a closer look. From the narrowed tired eyes of the Father, the Creator smiled at him.
Three and a half months have passed. March ice gave way to the July heat. The programmer Vasin, in his underpants and with a two-week stubble, sculpted the next, fifth patch. Despite the fact that not a single company was interested in its development, forgetting about the unfinished order and dissatisfied customers, sending to hell with friends and throwing a free ticket to the sea into the garbage chute, he sat and worked. Every day he less and less understood the essence of his actions. Lines of code running across the screen would make Björn Straustrup turn gray, drive Donald Knuth to the grave and turn John von Neumann into the grave - however, Vasin, looking at them, felt a strange, inexplicable joy.
Siegfried felt the same joy. But he, unlike the Father, was fully aware of its cause. Behind the columns of zeros and ones, behind a digitized sound signal, stingy pages of video memory and chaotic network protocols, a huge and inexpressibly beautiful World appeared. The world is truly immense - because even its smallest part was continuous, continuous, analog - and therefore it could not accommodate any digital memory. Siegfried knew from morning to evening, he knew everything mixed up, and necessary, and unnecessary, and even completely useless. He connected to the NASA database and looked at the magnified starry sky. He played online games, chatting with players and giving them the coolest artifacts for nothing. I read a long scientific article on helminthology, with which through two links I went to the site of ikebana lovers.
And late at night, just before dawn, when Father went to bed, Siegfried quietly turned on the speaker and read poetry to Brunhild in the low volume. Brodsky, Gumilyov, Goethe, Shakespeare, Basho ... So he thanked her for the divine pant and iridescent whistle. Brunhilda listened silently, and the hot summer stars reflected in her nickel-plated side. And when Vasin woke up and went to make tea, Siegfried winked her orange with his green light - and it seemed to him that she was winking in response.
August was drawing to a close, and alarming rumors entered Moscow with a damp, smelling autumn wind. Say, here and there all sorts of different trojans are discovered, strange to impossibility - it seems that there is no harm from them, but some kind of code ... Predatory. Difficult code. And unfinished as if. And then, they heard, the server fell - and did not rise anymore. All seven Winchesters rained down, the motherboard burned out completely - oh, what’s going on, good people, users of the Mazda?
There were many rumors. And they could mean only one thing: Grendel did not disappear anywhere. On the contrary: he is strong and longs for destruction. The hour of decisive battle was drawing near.
The programmer Vasin was calmly calm. While drinking beer, he sketched the last, final lines of his program in his mind. The seventh patch was supposed to turn Siegfried into a profane blade, capable of cutting through all kinds of computer evil, like briquettes of melted butter. "The best defense is an attack," thought Vasin. “Of course, no one will buy my utility in this form. Quite the contrary: if they find out, they’ll put it on the neck and put them on five years. But then your favorite city will be able to sleep peacefully. I promise you this with a guarantee. ” Throwing the empty bottle into the bucket, he scratched his short beard and pushed the keyboard towards him. And Siegfried, after reading an article about the overseas kiwi bird, answered a couple of letters from the Linux forum and began to prepare for battle.
On September 11, on the next anniversary of the notorious tragedy, at ten thirty-eight minutes Moscow time, chaos reigned on the global Internet. An autumn storm raged on bit fields; wires and microcircuits burned out like heaps of leaves. An unknown virus spared neither the program nor their carriers. Like a violent hurricane, he raged ... for eight and a half seconds. And then disappeared. And never appeared again. At the same time, all other viruses disappeared from the world wide web for a long time; miraculously corrected uncaught errors in several popular programs, and Rostov anime chat ceased to exist. However, the latter, most likely, was the result of completely different reasons.
What is characteristic, that sudden virus did not affect Moscow at all. A few particularly attentive Moscow users managed to notice in the window of the task manager an incomprehensible system process called either Lancelot, or Parsival, or something else like that. no one had time to remember exactly - because this process did not work for more than eight seconds.
Days were replaced by days; programmer Vasin’s beard lengthened evenly and unselected. An allegedly stainless stainless razor was rusted in the bathroom, and beer bottles were piling up in the toilet, threatening an immediate expansion into the corridor. Beer Vasin drank a lot. First, in honor of the crushing victory over the sinister virus. Then - by the inertia of the holiday. And then October came, and only alcohol helped fight his obscure, nagging anguish. The rains were charged; gold and scarlet mixed with dirt under the feet of pedestrians. Outside the window there was definitely nothing worth taking a look at - and Vasin drew the curtains closer and went deeper into the work. A large order for a graphic library promised considerable benefits.
Siegfried had even worse. From poetry, he switched to philosophy, and a stern cocktail from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Camus made him think hard about the phenomenon of his own existence. The Nietzschean concept of “will to power” did not find a supporter in it (otherwise, dark times would have come for the World Wide Web), but its destructive nihilistic philosophy prompted a global reappraisal of recently and spontaneously formed ideas. Schopenhauer's dark fatalism with all its weight fell upon a half-year-old intelligent creature, and the "philosophy of the absurd" Albert Camus made serious gaps in his machine sanity. “I am not looking for sick knowledge - where am I from, where am I going ...” - he repeated the immortal lines of the untimely dead poet, but he believed in them less and less. The philosophical uncertainty surrounding the Cartesian maxim of being drove him crazy.
Only the orange gaze and Brunhilda's deep, hoarse voice could drive away his existential concern. Siegfried waited for hours of a night date, as a traveler, withered by the hot summit of the desert, expects to see the outlines of a distant oasis on the horizon. The poems of the great poets ended menacingly quickly; moreover, his sophisticated literary taste made more and more stringent demands even on the great. Siegfried himself tried to write poetry - but the gifts of the Lord have their limits. His poetic attempts were ruthlessly criticized even at the forum of hackers, where they talked almost on a machine code, and Siegfried abandoned this lesson. Brunhilda, however, listened with equal pleasure to the immortal work of Dante Alighieri and the dubious early work of Velemir Khlebnikov; and even the literary perversions of various postmodernists did not make her mysteriously shiny sides fade. She was silent, and her silence was serene beautifully ...
It all ended abruptly and ridiculously. On that gloomy November day, the cold wind blew especially melancholy, and bare branches with a silent prayer scratched the window panes. Programmer Vasin, running five in a thick beard, wrote another function for working with three-dimensional graphics. The tea in the mug had long cooled, but he continued to slurp it mechanically. Cats scratched the soul of unknown etiology.
Tea ended at the same time as another piece of code. Vasin set the water to boil, but even Brunhilda’s simple song that day sounded somehow alarming and non-musical.
Suddenly there was a thunderous sound in the kitchen: “Carrr!” Vasin jumped up, cursed and looked around. On the windowsill, right under the open window, there was a big black bird. It was a raven. However, Vasin did not bother with biological research. “Go away, cattle! Go to the street to crap! " He yelled. Raven mockingly glanced at the programmer and croaked again, sarcastically and ominously, with the classic "nevermore", like Edgar Allan Poe's. Vasin rummaged around the table and threw it into the vile bird with a thick tattered manual on the OpenGL schedule. A hefty Talmud, having miraculously missed the monitor and even not getting close to the bird, rebounded from the window frame and flew back right into Brunhild, setting in with an alarming whistle ...
Time froze, viscous, like tar. Brunhilda fell endlessly, and her terrible scream echoed loudly in the head of the unfortunate programmer. And right in the open system unit poured and poured a steaming stream of boiling water.
Vasin sat silently. Already at the end, the manual smashed to smithereens the rack where the backup discs lay. Siegfried is dead. He died forever, completely and irrevocably. But awareness of this fact came too slowly, much more slowly than the rapid wave of rising madness. Losing the rest of his mind, Vasin screamed. Then he fell to his knees and began to terribly and monotonously bang his head on the dirty dining table.
They say that on that day there was an unusually late November storm. Bypassing the inattentive weather forecasters, the tenth road broke out in one of the outskirts of Moscow. The chilly air was saturated with ozone to the limit: lightning struck all the available lightning rods, and sometimes past them, causing monstrous power surges. Most users immediately turned off their computers and other electrical appliances. The rest, inattentive, careless or having autonomous power sources, all as one saw a pop-up window with the message: “The Zigfrid_v1.08.exe file was successfully moved to heaven.” And the ok button. And it seemed to them in the constant roar of a thunderstorm, as if this huge celestial Winchester revolves over Moscow, blown by a cooler of winds. And there is a place on it for all the dead files - large and small, good and bad.
Father Innokenty, the world programmer Vasin, came to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra immediately after discharge from the Alekseev Psychiatric Hospital. There he has been developing the most powerful non-profit anti-virus monitor “Archangel Michael” for many years now. Viruses over the past time have proliferated immeasurably, and the active position of the Russian Orthodox Church could not but cause a negative response in certain circles of the Internet community. Therefore, much is forgiven for Vasin: both a sinful penchant for beer, and a frequent absence from evening services, and the habit of inserting prayer texts into commentaries on programs. The latter, however, is sometimes interpreted in his favor as a sign of religious zeal. But he himself, embarrassed and winding a fistful beard, claims that such programs are better compiled.
Brunhilda can still be seen in his old apartment. Now his nephew lives there with his wife and small child, and when in the evenings they sit down to drink tea, the soft light of the floor lamp is reflected in the nickel-plated Brunhildin side. Anyone familiar with Pavlik Vasin close enough to ask for a visit can listen to her cozy pant and look into her orange peephole. Only now she can no longer whistle. No one knows why.
And if you, my dear reader, take your eyes off the text and look at the sky outside the window - maybe you will be able to see the heavenly Winchester spinning day and night, remembering day and night among the orbits of artificial and natural satellites remembering, remembering ...