I know how it happened. If anyone knew my mistake, I’d be staked out on the dark side of the Moon. The side that always points away from home.
I knew the computer I was working on was important. I knew that it was one of the data collectors from NASA’s outer system probes. I knew because I’d been working on it for a week and I still hadn’t fixed it. The job sheet said it had stopped responding shortly after receiving a telemetry burst from a probe mapping Jupiter’s moon Titan… no, that’s Saturn. Anyway, one of them.
It received this burst and about two days after it stopped responding. And that’s how I know. It’s that two days thing. Anyway, it showed up in the shop, and I did the usual checks. Fans, power supply, the hardware seemed fine.
We keep a skeleton machine in the shop, online to get drivers when you need to test input devices or user stuff. We also sometimes plug in machine internals we’re not sure of, to see if they’re working or not. So I don’t know if it was when I tested the memory, or the hard drive, or what. But it was plugging the data receiver’s parts into the skeleton test machine. That’s how it got out.
Not that I knew that at the time. All I knew was I was going to have to explain to some pretty high powered nerds that their data was lost. The memory was burnt and the hard drive was full of ones and zeroes. Only, not like binary, no discernible files. Just ones and zeroes. There was a lot of saying “I don’t know” in my future.
But sometimes things break. And then every two days, more things break. The elevators stop working. Security camera motors burn out. Two days after, all the traffic lights in town went haywire. Two days after that, every ATM on the eastern seaboard spat out their cash.
Two days later, Facebook went down. Two days again, and China’s power grid went down. Another two days and it was every plane in the sky that went down.
And so on, every two days.
Sometimes things break. And sometimes, everything breaks forever.
