{"id":1528,"date":"2014-02-06T16:22:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T21:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/?p=1528"},"modified":"2018-04-09T16:24:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T21:24:30","slug":"day-343-prompt-virus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/day-343-prompt-virus\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 343 – Prompt: Virus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2014-02-06<\/a><\/p>\n

I know how it happened.\u00a0 If anyone knew my mistake, I\u2019d be staked out on the dark side of the Moon.\u00a0 The side that always points away from home.<\/p>\n

I knew the computer I was working on was important.\u00a0 I knew that it was one of the data collectors from NASA\u2019s outer system probes.\u00a0 I knew because I\u2019d been working on it for a week and I still hadn\u2019t fixed it.\u00a0 The job sheet said it had stopped responding shortly after receiving a telemetry burst from a probe mapping Jupiter\u2019s moon Titan\u2026 no, that\u2019s Saturn. Anyway, one of them.<\/p>\n

It received this burst and about two days after it stopped responding. And that\u2019s how I know.\u00a0 It\u2019s that two days thing.\u00a0 Anyway, it showed up in the shop, and I did the usual checks.\u00a0 Fans, power supply, the hardware seemed fine.<\/p>\n

We keep a skeleton machine in the shop, online to get drivers when you need to test input devices or user stuff.\u00a0 We also sometimes plug in machine internals we\u2019re not sure of, to see if they\u2019re working or not.\u00a0 So I don\u2019t know if it was when I tested the memory, or the hard drive, or what.\u00a0 But it was plugging the data receiver\u2019s parts into the skeleton test machine.\u00a0 That\u2019s how it got out.<\/p>\n

Not that I knew that at the time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Only, not like binary, no discernible files.\u00a0 Just ones and zeroes.\u00a0 There was a lot of saying \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d in my future.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And so on, every two days.<\/p>\n

Sometimes things break. And sometimes, everything breaks forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know how it happened.\u00a0 If anyone knew my mistake, I\u2019d be staked out on the dark side of the Moon.\u00a0 The side that always points away from home. I knew the computer I was working on was important.\u00a0 I knew that it was one of the data collectors from NASA\u2019s outer system probes.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3,1072,1036,1073],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7380,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528\/revisions\/7380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillwellgray.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}