10 GOTO 10

The Basement Computer Room

Only a week ago, I was a programmer writing code in a tight, claustrophobic basement of a company that had always been on the verge of going bankrupt but never did. And today, I was strapping up my bags for the deep magma explorer submarine, which would take us down the volcanic corridor and up near the Arctic ice caps. It was almost unreal.

When the company finally went down, I could not stop myself from breathing a little sigh of relief. The competition was too tough, and I knew we wouldn’t make it another year. It was inevitable, and yet I forced myself not to imagine the possibility of the events that came after. Lisa, the company’s chairperson and chief executive for the last twenty years, called us all in the hall of the topmost executive floor to break the news. As usual, I got some weird stares from all the female employees and a tiny number of males in the audience. Lisa found me in the crowd and smiled – a sad smile. Many people lost their jobs, but it was more personal for me – I lost my home. This claustrophobic, windowless, untidy basement was the place where I grew up and lived most of my young life. This is where I learnt programming at my mother’s side. This is where I learnt how not to disappear into some unknown cold dark place where all of us had to go someday.

The original code for the company’s financial, payroll, health and transport systems was written by my mother alone. She once maintained these computers that ran her code day and night. When I was born, she had to take occasional breaks to come home, and I now realise that she did not feel very happy about it. She was torn between keeping the big machines running and looking after me. In some sense, I was not her firstborn. I did not know how my father felt about her staying night after night in the computer room; I imagined it was not very good. One day, he left when I turned five, of course, that was early, given our tradition, but they would always leave in the end. My mother moved me to the basement computer room.

After I cleared my grown-up tests and came back to the computer room one evening, my mother wasn’t staring at the glowing symbols scrolling on her monitors like she always did. She was in a pensive, thoughtful mood, almost as if she was beginning to think of writing a new program – a complex one. I had seen this before. Occasionally, she would get requests from up top, unknown people who worked above us, to build new programs that did new stuff. And she would go into this phase of ideating about it. Her eyes would glitter, and she would be restless, yet calm. It is almost like taking a drug. But that evening, she was staring at the wall, which was unusual. I stood behind her and cleared my voice.

“Mama, I cleared the tests. I am eligible to find work now.” She didn’t answer. “Mama? You’re working on a new program?”

She looked at me. “Dodo, my boy, you cleared the tests, did you?”

—“Yes, mama.”

—“Good, good. I knew you would. No doubt about it. Didn’t have an inkling of doubt, dear.” She was trying to remember where she was before I walked in, before she got lost in thought. “Ah, the payroll system is acting up again… I shouldn’t have added those changes in a hurry. That is wrong, I told them.”

—“Mama, you are writing a new program?”

—“What’s that? New program? Yes, you can say so.”

—“Thought you were. Saw you deep in thought.”

—“No, I was not thinking about the program. I—”

She paused and kept fidgeting with the commands for the payroll system. Then, with some real effort, she looked up at me. “I was thinking about your father.”

—“Mama! Why are you thinking about him? You know I never cared very much. Heck, I can’t even remember how he looked.”

—“I know. But I think it’s time we talk about it.”

—“Talk about what mom?”

—“Look, you are going to be twenty soon. Aren’t you? And the males leave by twenty-eight. They always do. At a maximum of thirty. I have never seen a male who is more than thirty. I mean, I have the data and I ran the average. It came twenty-eight-eight like I said. Some outliers were above thirty. But not much. I checked with Lisa, and she also said that we never kept anyone in the company above thirty. So I wrote this little program that keeps reminding me of the time you have before you leave. But that’s not the point—”

—“Mama, stop!” I never could take the topic of leaving seriously; it felt wrong and weird. Also, sad. I didn’t want to leave. “I won’t leave, and you know that.”

—“You will. The data shows this. We know this. The males always leave. You have about eight years to pass on your code, I mean yourself, to the next one…”

—“Mama! What are you saying?”

—“Dodo, listen to me. What I really wanted to tell you is that I think I know what makes them leave… I figured it out. The program took time, and I had to use the company’s mainframe for it. But I needed to know. I had to lie to Lisa, I’ll apologise to her later. I have to, because if it’s all true, then she must know. If only I could get a bit more time, I could have finished it earlier.”

—“Mama!”

—“Ok, ok. Dodo, I think it’s the brain that rots in the males. Or a portion of it, I don’t know for sure. I have this data and look at it.” She opened a text file in the glowing black and green console. It had a table in it with a few columns. These were the data of males who lived in our family and others that Mama knew.

—“How did you get this data?”

—“I had to break into the database system. I mean it was not much of a break-in. I wrote the system, and I left a couple of backdoors. I will tell you about it later, Dodo. Right now, look at the last column and the first column. Look carefully. What do you see?”

I looked closer. The first was their ages, and the last was their health record summary – diseases they had before leaving, any other observations and so on. At first, I did not see anything, and I looked back at Mama. She closed the file and loaded a program.

LOAD “ANALYSYS.BAS”

RUN

It whirred for a while and then started printing lines in the console.

AGE VS COMMON HEALTH PROBLEM KEY WORDS

25   MEMORY, IRRITATION

28   ANGER, MEMORY, FORGETTING

27   MEMORY, RAGE, WALKING DISORDER

31   DEGRADED MEMORY, FEAR, HALLUCINATION

The list went on and on. Mama said,

—“You see this Dodo? Something happens around 28. The brain starts acting up, and they leave. And that triggers males to leave, disappear. Also, I remembered your father. He was angry all the time before he left. He was never angry with us before, and he, well, he loved me very much. He did. Then one day he was angry, confused, and he left.”

—“But mama, if that’s what happens, then why wouldn’t anyone know about this already?”

—“Because they never looked, they never bothered. They always stopped caring about the males after they became useless. I do care about your father, about you. I want you to stay and not be lost to me.”

She said simply, as a matter of fact. Like she said a fact about a program. But I was shocked as I never imagined my mother would say this to me. She was always lost in the code, in the programs that she wrote – her real children. I was just there, and she cared for me. But it was more like a background process running daily tasks – like one of her programs that she ran in a separate machine somewhere in the distance. I was never in the foreground.

She said, “Dodo, I could show you the outcome of this program. But here are two things that might save the rot in you. Just two things I could find. You need to use your brain way more and constantly. And the second is – well, this is hard – never fall in deep affection with anyone. Do not love like your father did.”

I stood in silence for a long time. A girl’s face flashed in my mind. I wanted to tell Mama about her, and someday, if she agreed, bring her down to the basement computer room. I couldn’t remember her all these years later.

I looked at her. “Tell me, Mama.”

—“I want you to program with me from now on. Help me write the most complex parts of the system. In fact, I have something for you to get started. Something very odd.”

—“What is it?”

—“Look at this code, Dodo, see what it does.” Then she typed.

100 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 100

She ran the program, and it started to print forward-bending lines and backwards-bending lines. But the surprising thing was that the lines were creating patterns on the screen. The patterns combined, and slowly they formed pathways, connected in intricate ways. The emerging thing on the screen was so simple yet complex.

“It’s a maze!”

The Helios-Moriton Digging Syndicate

“It is a maze!” said Colonel Agatha. “A complete maze out there.”

I was sitting at the back. Naturally, I did not want anyone’s attention or stares; I had quite a few in the last week while interviewing for this job. The day I arrived at the reception of Helios-Moriton Digging Syndicate’s main office, I felt the business as usual stopped for a moment when they realised a male, clearly over thirty, was walking among them. There were a couple of male workers, pretty young, probably just twenty, who looked at me in shock, followed by questions in their eyes. The others were surely thinking that I was a freak. When I left the basement computer room, I was mentally ready to face this everywhere I went. I was out of Lisa’s protection. She made a promise to my mother that she would keep me as long as I stayed and remained useful as a programmer. She kept the promise. But I needed to find another job soon, where I could use my brain constantly. Mama was gone, not dead, just gone. The females also disappear sometimes, very rarely. So I convinced myself that it was better to be considered a freak than to disappear in the darkness. It was better, but not easy. What was most humiliating was the computer at the reception that refused to register my information when I arrived.

YOUR NAME? Dodo C

YOUR GENDER? M

YOUR AGE? 32

*** INVALID ENTRY PLEASE TRY AGAIN

PRESS A KEY TO REGISTER YOURSELF

It was clear that the program was working as per the logic they coded.

20 IF AGE > 30 AND GENDER = ‘M’ GOTO 2000

2000 would be where the computer threw the error and gave up. I myself had written code like this in the basement. But now that I saw it rejecting me, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of hopelessness. I was a user now, at a programmer’s mercy.

Fortunately, the receptionist rescued me as she was expecting me. I was found by a headhunter quite surprisingly, right after I got fired.

I cleared the tests with flying colours, better than most of them. Only one, Matsumi E, scored more than I did. We waited for the last round with Colonel Agatha in a quiet hall, and I felt Matsumi’s stare on the side of my face. The silence was awkward, almost like holding our breaths.

—“So you really are over thirty, huh?” She said at last.

—“Yes, 32 to be precise.” I sighed. “And you?”

—“Age? You want to know my age?” She was almost bursting out into laughter. “Twenty-two and going strong.”

—“Ok.” For a moment, I didn’t know what to say, so I blabbered, “My mother was the same age when she started coding.”

—“Your mother, do I know her? What’s her name?” She asked casually, and I told her. “The heck? She was your mother?”

—“Well, yeah, I learnt coding from her. How do you know about her?”

—“Your mother’s codes are legendary. I learnt my first game by copying her code from a magazine. She wrote some of the most beautiful code I have ever seen.”

—“So you followed her work?”

—“All earlier work. But she stopped sometime back, I think.”

—“Yeah, about ten years back. I took over the programming job full-time, and she would mostly guide me.”

—“Cool. How about you introduce me to her once we are done here? You live nearby?”

—“Matsumi, she would have loved to meet you. But she disappeared about eight years ago.”

—“Oh! Sorry to hear that. Call me E by the way, I prefer that.”

—“E, do you know why they are hiring us, I mean, the headhunter was pretty tight-lipped about what we will be working on. I am sure I saw a bunch of army people today.”

—“Nope, didn’t tell me either.”

I was going to ask what she thought about all this secrecy about a mission I heard a couple of interviewers talking about, but her name was called for the last round. She stood up and turned, “Look, old guy. It was cool and all to chat with you, especially ‘coz you’re the kid of one of my heroes. But really, this job is mine, and I wouldn’t think of coming back if I were you. Best if you start prepping for, you know, your disappearance – you are too old to do this shit.” Then she left.

Turned out she was right – I was too old for the job. But that didn’t stop Colonel Agatha from hiring me. I was given a contract for the duration of a mission, and if I did better, I would be kept till I disappeared. I took the job anyway. I didn’t think I was ready yet to leave and disappear like E said, after all, my mother’s training was still with me. The not-so-great part of it was that I had to work under E I was the backup programmer for the mission.

A week later, I was sitting inside the briefing room, at the very back where E couldn’t see me, and Colonel Agatha was talking about the mission.

I looked at the other members. E was seated in the front row. Next to her was Ayishee, the pilot of the digging ship. Kela and Sasa were sitting behind them. They were a mechanic cum assistant pilot and a science officer, respectively. Sasa was also taking care of medical emergencies. Capa, 21, was the only other male in the mission. He was bulky, tall and built for action. He had dual responsibilities of shooting plasma bullets at things when the captain ordered and carrying heavy loads wherever needed. The captain was behind them all, just in front of me, Anika M. She was probably the tallest person I had seen with my own eyes. Her muscles were well visible under the jumpsuit we were all supposed to wear for the mission. And she didn’t glance at me even once.

“And since it’s a complex maze of volcanic mountains and tunnels of hot magma and lava”, the colonel was saying, “we need special gears to penetrate and go through this layer. That’s why this is a joint military venture where all of you would be working for both the army and Helios. We chose Helios because of its long history of quality ships and equipment. However, there’s a catch.”

She paused and looked at us. “Intelligent and fast tech is the key to this mission. That’s why we will use some of the alien objects sent to us in this mission.”

There was visible unease in the room. The alien objects had been a source of continuous puzzle. It was one of the Helios space beacons that picked up the first object that came floating from outside our star system. It did not come randomly, as it carried an address – our planet. Each time an object arrived, it was targeted precisely towards our planet’s position. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started. As if someone from across the vast depths of the galaxy were sending all the precious things they had before their ship sank into the ocean. We never knew what those objects were. They were taken and hidden away by the army without so much as leaking even a photo.

“What objects are we talking about?” Asked Kela. She seemed particularly interested in the idea.

The Colonel said, “Majorly one thing. A computer built out of those objects, which will be the central control of the ship.”

“The aliens sent us a computer.” E quipped.

“Well, the hardware at least. The software will be built by us, by you and Dodo over there.” Colonel Agatha said.

I felt all eyes turned towards me, except Captain Anika. E said, “I don’t understand. Why would the aliens send us a computer?”

The colonel sighed, “Look, things are not really very clear, but here’s the summary. We received these hardware parts about eight years ago. These came in chunks, intact and ready to be assembled. Our theory is that some alien species has sent these machine parts to us, and they want us to assemble them. These were like a big, expensive jigsaw puzzle, and it took us quite some time to figure it out. Why do they want us to assemble it? Unclear. Maybe it is key to their location or their communication – there is no such indication as of now. It just sits there waiting for programs to be written for it. Turns out, it’s just like our traditional machine, except once we assembled it, it was fast, very, very fast. Faster than anything we have ever built. You can run a thousand different programs in parallel.”

—“A thousand?” I almost cried.

—“Or more. Yes, this is the fastest machine we have ever seen. And we can’t replicate it with our current tech, no, we have only one. It does not have an operating system. Does not have any drivers to communicate with our ships or sensors. It’s empty hardware. They didn’t send us the software for it. So we will build it ourselves. Without this computer, this mission is not possible, so we’d better get it working fast.”

Colonel Agatha looked at the sheets of paper printouts in front of her. “Well, that was the computer. As for the equipment, the digger ship and its operating procedures, Ayishee is the expert. She and Kela will educate the rest of you. Sasa is the science officer whose job is primarily to support you with research, documentation and medical emergencies. She is your primary point of contact, Dodo, when it comes to, uh, any psychological or physical issues. Finally, Captain Anika will be your commander. We have about a month to prepare, and if things go well, we will hit the first layer of the magma corridor in the middle of next month. Any questions?”

“Why are we going there?” I asked without clearing my throat, and my own voice sounded weird to me – deranged, like a madman. Be careful! “I mean, we have never explored the magma corridor before. And by the looks of it, it seems more dangerous than a space mission.”

Colonel Agatha smiled. “The mission objectives will come to you on a need-to-know basis. When you are required to assist with the computer systems, you will know.” Then she looked up, “Any more questions?”

One hand went up, it was Captain Anika “Why him?” She pointed behind her, to me. Somebody finally asked about the elephant in the room.

The Machine

“Why him?” Lisa said as she tucked herself into one of the cushions in the basement computer room. Compared to my mother, Lisa was a small figure with round shoulders and neat, polished nails. But she was a fierce boss. She was older than my mother, yet somehow they ended up in the same classes in school. After Lisa’s father disappeared, she took over the company. She was the only one from up top to whom Mama ever spoke comfortably. My mother was calm that evening, very calm.

—“Lis, I need you to trust me. I know how he can continue to stay.”

—“Even if that is so,” she squinted her eyes, “this would be a great risk for the company. You know I have to expand, and I need girls to program those systems. Why do I need to keep him instead of getting two other programmers? This will add more reasons for that plan to fail.”

—“No, Lis, this will help you and him both.”

—“How so?”

—“When you expand, you will need more software to support that expansion. I wrote your systems from the ground up. I know every detail. And now he knows. When you add more things, he will make sure nothing breaks.”

—“He? What about you?”

—“I will be helping too… But he needs to use his brain every day. That’s how he will survive long after. At least that’s my theory.”

—“It is a theory?”

—“It is. But I have data that supports it. We’ll never know until we try.”

—“I guess… but are you sure he would not become a liability before he, you know, it pains me to say, disappears?”

—“If I am right, he won’t. It’s strange, Lisa – I know as a mother of a boy, I have to be ready for him to go away. I have to harden myself knowing a boy would not last more than thirty years, that they will become less human as they grow older, and they would probably die before I turn old. This is how things are. You have done it. But tell me, if you were given a choice to let them stay, would you have taken the chance?”

—“I suppose I would have. Yes, I would definitely have taken the chance. I loved Charlie so much. He grew up in my arms. I protected him from everything, even after knowing that someday he would go away. He did go away after becoming rabid with hallucinations, and it broke my heart. He was not treated well in his final days. Fine, if this works, if he stays alright, and he works, I will have him here for as long as it takes.”

—“Thanks, Lis.”

My mother looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. That was years ago. I was not sure why I woke up with this memory. The memory was not complete, though. After Lisa was gone, Mama said something to me. Something important, and I had forgotten about it.

I found myself a quiet seat in the cafeteria. I had a gelatin-like food that said it was good for the brain, and some printed manuals of the new computer I had yet to see. Bright sterile lights bounced off the metallic table, making it difficult to read. I tried several angles and none of those seemed comfortable, so I decided not to read and instead enjoy the aroma of the fresh coffee. This was one thing I would never cease to enjoy, the strong smell of coffee. At least not until I left for the “dark void” as E liked to repeatedly remind me, as if she was expecting just saying it would make it happen. I heard some laughter in the hallway and looked up. The duo – Kela and Sasa – were entering the cafeteria. They seemed like an inseparable pair, always roaming together. They saw me and considered for a moment, then proceeded to sit at my table.

“You don’t really eat that stuff, do you?” Kela said with a giggle.

—“Well, it says it’s good for your health. Also, it does not judge me.”

—“Oof stings! But really, how come you are still here?”

—“What do you mean?”

—“I mean, you are over thirty and a male. Shouldn’t you already, you know, go there?”

—“I guess I missed the train.”

Sasa chimed in, “Hah, so you have a sense of humour too. Are you sure you’re actually not an alien male sent from the other side of the galaxy?”

We all laughed at the prospect. This was the first time I had a little bit of fun outside of my basement. It was also the first time I had a chat with other humans for a long time. Sasa started saying how she was into the bleeding edge of technology, and it piqued my interest. At one point, the discussion turned into how both of them were trying to find a matching male so they could plan for the offspring, but males beyond 22 were all too dumb. Sasa leaned in, “You don’t seem dumb.”

—“No, I guess, I mean E hasn’t fired me yet. The captain didn’t kick me out. So probably still not dumb.”

—“I mean if you look at Capa, sometimes I can’t even differentiate him from the big crane.”

—“Are most males like that? Sorry, I spent most of my last seven or eight years in a basement writing code. So I don’t know much about how it is outside.”

—“Yeah, most males are uninteresting, kind of stupid really”, Sasa shrugged, “not all dumb like Capa, but not too different either. I mean I have had serious problems finding a guy. Kela keeps dating males, but I can’t. Looking at you, I might think of trying the older ones for a change.”

Kela hissed, “Sasa…!”

Sasa bent her head and did a thing with her lips. A sort of funny defiant pout. And then they laughed. That moment froze in my mind.

Kela whispered, “Do you feel anything?”

I was suddenly stiff. “What do you mean?”

Kela shrugged, “I mean, I was thinking you are over 32. Isn’t there anything you, ah, feel in your head or body?”

I thought for a moment. “Not really. I feel like I am still in my twenties and nothing has changed. In fact, the only thing I feel is a tiny bit of anxiety, of the unknown.”

—“Do you know what happens? Where do they go?”

—“Actually, no. I tried to find this, tried to remember when my father left. But all I can remember is that he simply walked out. I don’t think anybody tracks where they go or how come we don’t see any signs of them.”

—“Yes, it’s like they vanish and nobody cares. Now that I think of it, I never thought much of it either – like it’s acceptable that a male would just become more and more useless and then they would go away.”

Sasa lowered her voice, “I heard, this is what they want us to find out. I heard they all go beyond the magma corridor, into the ice caps up north.”

Kela shook her head, “And I told you that’s ridiculous! Those are unexplored areas; nobody has gone there yet. We need a freaking digging ship to just go there. How do these dumb people even go there, Sasa?”

Sasa said, “I don’t know, but if not there, then where? They can’t evaporate into thin air. Something might be taking them there. And if we reach, we might just find out.”

I said, “How did you know, Sasa, that this is the mission objective? I thought it was super-secret.”

Sasa said, “I heard.” Then she came even closer and, ignoring Kela’s rolling eyes, she said, “I heard the Captain saying this to Colonel Agatha. She said, We will do anything to find it. And find them. Who do you think ‘them’ is? I bet she was talking about the lost males.”

She retreated quickly as if she had just revealed the grand secret of the universe, and now we were there to deal with it. Her faint perfume lingered a little in the air between us. Shades of purple flashed in front of my eyes in quick succession, and then I heard Kela say, “You shouldn’t just say these things out loud, you know, you will get us in trouble. Not a single word, Dodo, you got it?”

I nodded and gulped my coffee; it was cold. I was so distracted by the purple colour that I saw a moment ago that I didn’t hear E calling my name. It was too late.

“Hey you old guy, have you gone deaf already?” Her shrill voice rang in the empty cafeteria. She thrust something orange into my hand and said, “Just wear this from now on.”

It was an arm band. It meant the person who was wearing it could be dangerous and out of control. When that happened and the band made a sound, anyone around could put that person down, like kill them in the name of self-defence. This was usually reserved for dangerous criminals and psychopaths. The only other colour more dangerous than orange was red. My hands were shaking, and I felt a deep rage rising inside me. I dropped the band on the table and looked at E. She had an angry look, but I could sense something else in her. E was most angry when she had to do something that she didn’t want, like working with me or checking if I had shown up for work every day. I calmed myself and said, “You really think I need to wear this?” My voice still had a tremble in it that I could not hide.

—“Not my decision. Not my problem. You get it? Captain wants it, and you’ve got to do it.”

—“Captain told you to give it to me?”

—“That’s what I just said. And I told her… Well, you wear it, or you can always leave.” She avoided my gaze.

—“I work under you. Do you think I am this dangerous?”

—“How would I know? I have never seen a man over twenty-eight. My father left when he was twenty-six. Nobody knows what you are.” She was shaking now. I felt her anger, and I felt it was not entirely towards me.

I took a deep breath and looked over at Sasa and Kela. They were silently looking at me. I picked up the band. As I wore it, it got activated and a bright orange-yellow light blinked from it, indicating it was ready. Then I remembered. A fleeting memory of the basement computer room. I remembered my mother’s face as she was sitting on the couch, smiling. “Survive Dodo. You’ve got to stay. That’s what matters to me.” The words came back to me – what she said on that day after Lisa went upstairs. The memory came complete.

I pressed the arm band tightly so it fitted on top of the overall I was wearing. “There, now everyone knows what I am.” My rage was gone, replaced by something deeper and more persistent.

E turned and was about to storm out of the cafeteria when she stopped. We all looked at the entrance where Captain Anika was standing with her arms folded behind her. Her slender, tall figure was a silhouette against the bright corridor light. She spoke in a measured voice, “E, the computer is here. Thought you and the other one might want to take a look.”

The machine was slowly being brought from the assembly station to the ship, where it would stay for the entire duration of the journey. E instructed me to work on the operating system, and I made some progress. But without the actual machine, it was going slowly. Now the computer was in front of me. It was much smaller than what I expected. I had seen giant machines residing in the underbelly of the company I had worked for almost my entire life. They were big machines. This was tiny compared to those, and still, it could run a thousand times faster.

As soon as the installation was over, E and I pored over it. I finally figured out how to transfer the operating system image I had created from an old machine to this one. Once it was done and loaded, a dark console with a blinking cursor appeared on the screen. I typed

10 PRINT “Hello, world!”

Not sure how it originally started, but according to my mother, this was the ritual one must follow to talk to a new computer system for the first time. All I needed to run was to type in the command.

RUN

Almost immediately, it came back with the lines of text on the console and for a long time, I could not move. I looked at E. She, too, was staring at the console, with her mouth open. I had never seen a genius like her so surprised. You see, the program was supposed to print “Hello world!” in the console. That was what I programmed it to print. It did print that, but then it printed more.

Hello, world!

Hello Dodo, how are you?

And, I had no idea how.

Descent

I had absolutely no idea how a single line of code was generating an infinite maze. When my mother showed it to me, I spent days trying to figure it out. I wrote several different versions, all generating different types of mazes, but not like that one line of code, not as elegant as that. Eventually, it faded from my mind, and Mama never talked about it. The real programming of Lisa’s systems took over my thoughts. Every once in a while, I still went back to it. Like that day – the thirteenth day of our adventure – when I was sitting in front of the mysterious machine listening to the deep hum of the digging submarine ship. We had been calling it Prowler.

By then, the ship was already down deep into the layers of crust, and we had fallen into a routine. Every morning, I spent time with Sasa before coming to the computer room. This was ordered by the captain. Sasa was the only person who knew both science, engineering and medicine, so she was in charge of evaluating my mental stability. I hated talking to almost everyone on the ship, but not to Sasa. I looked forward to it.

In our talks, she asked me about my mother. I told her how I felt when she left me. We talked about music and dancing. We talked about programming, and I explained to her about the weird “0x” symbols I put in my code – they were the memory addresses in the computer, and they were hexadecimal numbers. She definitely knew all that, but it was part of the evaluation. And yet I enjoyed explaining it to her every morning. As much as I denied the possibility, I began to like her.

Do not love Dodo, no affection.

“Yes, mother, I remember,” I would whisper to myself. “I won’t fall into it. I promise.”

Apart from Sasa’s room or the engineering bay, where we occasionally met in the mornings, I was spending all of my time in the computer room. Not by choice, although I felt most comfortable here, but as it turned out, I had to be there for all sorts of interactions with the machine. It only listened to me. Somehow, this machine was able to identify who was typing the commands, running the programs or doing anything with this machine. It did not respond to anyone other than me, not even E. Right after that day, when it was brought inside the ship and we finished installing it, it worked fine. I hooked it to all the different sensors – and there were a bunch of those. The acoustic Doppler sensor driver needed some changes, and so did the seismic vibration sensors. But I made it work. Eventually, the machine was running the whole ship with its many parallel programs continuously looping through the code we had written. The primary among those were the programs written for life support, hull integrity and of course navigation. They were protected ones; only E and Captain Anika had access to those. The problem was that they could not run those themselves. So begrudgingly, they gave me the control to start and monitor the programs. I had access to all of those systems now. About fifteen consoles on fifteen monitors showed me all the data coming in from those programs and let me run commands if I had to alter anything. None of those commands worked for anyone else. Captain Anika was not happy. E was furious and boiling. Both argued that the mission be cancelled. Colonel Agatha smiled and said in her typical undertone, “Well, now you know why we needed him.”

—“What do you mean?” E almost screamed, “This is a computer, not magic. It should work with any of us.”

—“You are right, E, but when we received the hardware and assembled it, and the girls back in the lab switched it on, it had only one message on the screen. They said it had one simple program preloaded in its memory that kept printing one message in a loop – Dodo C. That’s it. Just his name. We didn’t know him, of course. So we started searching. We found him recently sacked from his company and set up the interview. Rest, you all know.”

—“Don’t you think this is risky? We are trusting now the entire mission on him, who, you know”, E paused as I was looking right at her, “might go off his rails anytime. What then?”

—“He hasn’t shown any sign of that yet. We did medical tests on him, which showed nothing unusual.”

—“But that does not mean it won’t happen.”

—“Yes, you are right, but this is a risk we have to take. There will be a traditional computer with limited capability that will work as a backup to the critical systems. But that will activate only when this one fails. Captain, would you like to elaborate?”

Captain Anika came forward and in her steely voice she spoke, “We have access to shut down the main computer should we feel any danger. I have the key, and Ayishee is my backup. In case we are both incapacitated, E can do it. Not him. The computer will dislodge from all ship-wide activities, and the backup computer will take over. This will mean only life support, basic navigation and emergency power. The ship will have to be rescued for the crew to return. But let’s hope we don’t have to go there, we will make sure the main computer runs fine, whatever it takes.”

Her eyes were focused on me, and I felt a chill running down my spine. After two days, we started our descent.

I looked at the chronometric shift detector. It showed the time elapsed from the start of our journey. Hundred and eight hours. I looked around me and saw E’s table empty. Did not realise she had already gone to her room for the night. We did not have daylight to indicate whether it was night or day. That was pretty disorienting for the first two days. We soon fell into a habit. This was night, and except for Ayishee, Sasa and me, all were asleep. I checked again and started the sixteenth monitor. There were plenty of other backup monitors we could use. I used this one to run my personal programs. I typed in my modified code.

10 REM Maze program

20 CLS

30 LET F1 = 1: LET F2 = 1: LET FN = 0: LET COUNT = 0

40 LET ROW = 0: LET COL = 0

50 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + (RND * (F1 / (F1 + F2))));

60 COL = COL + 1

70 IF COL >= 80 THEN COL = 0: ROW = ROW + 1

80 IF ROW >= 25 THEN CLS: ROW = 0: COL = 0

90 COUNT = COUNT + 1

100 IF COUNT >= 10 THEN FN = F1 + F2: F1 = F2: F2 = FN: COUNT = 0

110 GOTO 50

It would generate the same kind of infinite maze my mother showed. I let it run, and with its enormous speed, the maze started generating terrains of slanted lines.

╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲ ╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱ ╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲ ╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲ ╱╲╱╱╲╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲╱╱╲╲╱╱╲╱╲

I wanted to see if there was an end to this maze at all, at any point did it break away to become incoherent – a maze that was no longer a maze. So far, I had not found it, but I was hoping the powerful machine might finally show me where it all broke down.

A soft ping came from one of the monitors; the chronometric shift detector was warning that there had been a change in its measurement. I skidded my chair to the monitor. The count showed 316, like before. There was no change in the system, and there could not be any – it was just a clock. But then it changed. It became 288. Then 0. I touched the monitor. The count was now going negative before the start of our mission. It made no sense; I suspected a problem in the chronometer. That would disrupt the entire ship’s operations as everything depended on time. I thought of restarting the system, but before I could do that, the alarm started ringing. This was Ayishee from the bridge calling for us to assemble there. I stood up and looked at the chronometer reading again. It was 336 and steady. Something was wrong with it, and I needed to fix it later. I ran towards the bridge.

On my way, I was about to collide with the Captain. She was still pulling her overall chains as she came rushing out of her cabin. “Out of my way!” She snapped. I followed her to the bridge. Sasa and Kela were there already. Ayishee turned towards the captain, and she halted as soon as she saw me.

“Speak.” Captain Anika ordered her.

“Something went wrong with the ship. I don’t know for sure, but something major.” Ayishee said as she motioned to her monitor. “Look at the path of the ship. We have been consistently digging ahead for the last few days and are about to hit the magma layer. But here, just a few minutes earlier, the ship suddenly jerked and went back upwards without me doing anything. And it went back almost instantly.”

Kela was frantically looking through the logs while Ayihsee spoke. She panted, “She is right. Look at the location logs for the digger. It was here a few moments ago, then it shifted all the way up to where we started. And now it’s ahead. Deep inside the magma layer.” She looked up while E was running onto the bridge. “We are already inside the maze.”

Captain Anika said, “How can that be? Weren’t we supposed to dig for a day more?”

Ayishee replied, “Yes Captain. But looks like that has already happened, and if our sensors are correct, we are through that into the corridor. The ship has stalled since I stopped it right after the jerk. It… it does not make sense, unless the sensors, all of them have gone wrong.”

The captain was looking at me, “Are the sensors working?”

I gulped, “Yes, last I checked, there were no errors there. But—”

—“Yes?”

—“I saw something strange for a while.”

—“What’s strange?”

—“The chronometer was behaving weirdly. It changed measurements.” I turned to Kela, “Kela, do you see a spike in the ship’s logs before it went back all the way up. Like it jumped back a little at first and then jumped all the way up?”

Kela nodded. “How do you know that?”

I said, “I am not sure what happened, but first the chronometer shifted to almost a day before. Then it shifted to 0 – the start of the mission, and then kept on shifting before. As soon as the alarm started, it jumped back, but this time to…”

“Well?” Captain Anika was gazing at me intently.

“It went to tomorrow,” I said.

E said, “So this all might be a glitch in the timer, then? Is that what you are saying?”

—“I am not sure. It looked like the time counter was having a problem. So I was about to restart it. I suppose that could be a reason why the log says the ship has jumped great distances.”

—“But that means the ship is still in the same place. Am I right?”

—“Yes.”

E’s voice was confident, the confidence of solving a puzzling bug in the code. She went to the controls near Ayishee and Kela. I looked over at Sasa and found her unusually quiet. E was saying, “Can you restart the ship now and display all the camera feeds? I bet we just stopped where we were before, a day’s dig behind the corridor.”

Ayishee let the ship start again. The usual hum of the machines began. Ayishee looked up at me, “I need you to start the subsystems.” I had a terminal for the main computer from here. I walked over, and Ayishee moved a little, out of reflex, to avoid touching me. I noticed that, but forced myself not to mind. I had too many things going already. The captain came behind me. She said, “Start only the sensors and camera subsystems.”

I obliged and entered the commands for each of those one by one. The feeds came back online. The main display was showing what was in front of the ship.

It looked like a glowing wound deep in the planet’s stomach – walls of molten rock pulsing faintly, as if breathing. Thin rivers of lava slithered along crevices like veins under translucent flesh, casting shadows that danced across jagged ridges. Occasionally, pillars of solidified basalt rose like broken teeth from the floor. The heat shimmered even through the filtered feed, distorting perspective, making the passage seem alive, coiling endlessly ahead.

We were indeed inside the corridor now, and the maze was waiting for us to step in.

Maze

“Just step in.”, she said. “Relax, we will dance to the music. It’s really easy once you do it.”

I hesitated. “No affection, no love. Remember this. Love decays your brain faster.” Mama’s words floated in my mind. “Love creates deep connections. Your brain becomes slow at handling those, and it starts to rot.”

“Come on, what are you waiting for? This is the time for you to do this,” she said. Floods of purple colour blew over my eyes. Sweat on her body glistened in the dancing lights like pearls. She swayed to the tunes, and I felt a sensation forming in me. I knew where this all would lead. “Don’t Dodo. I need you to stay.” Mama’s voice rang in my head relentlessly. I wanted it to go away, just for one day, just for one bit.

“Hey, you coming?” She became impatient. Maybe mama was wrong, I thought. Who knew about these things anyway? And if I couldn’t love anyone, even for a second, what was the point of it all – of living. “You need to stay to know.” Know what? What was it that I needed to see, and for that I needed to stay. Did I ever ask? I wondered.

—“Mama, why can’t I just be normal? Like other males…”

—“You can’t Dodo, you know why.”

—“But I want to. Isn’t this my decision?”

—“It is as long as you don’t make a wrong one that would kill you.”

—“You don’t realise how hard it is.”

—“I know Dodo. A male’s code, I mean genes, force him to pass it on by twenty-five. You are just doing what you’re programmed. But I want you to go beyond it, defeat your programming.”

—“And do what? Live the life of an ascetic? With no reason to live.”

—“There is a reason, Dodo, in everything.”

—“I don’t believe you, Mama. I don’t see reason in anything, no meaning… It’s just how we are. And you’re telling me not to accept it.”

—“You are thinking that now, but you’ll soon see. You’ll know. Just hang in there.”

—“Know what? What is it I’ll know?”

—“The meaning of it all… just..just remember who I am and who you are.”

I did remember who I was, but I couldn’t remember who that girl was. A dream? A memory? Before it faded as I woke up slowly, for a fleeting moment, the girl’s face resembled Sasa, and I did remember seeing the chronometer behind her. Definitely dream then.

The ship was stalled for a day, and I got to sleep in my cabin. I went to the pantry to get something to eat alone, but everyone was there. I generally avoided them as much as I could, but today I could not turn back. E pointed to a seat and I took it. I poured a cup of strong coffee. As I looked up, I saw Capa looking at me with his wide eyes. I felt there was something in them, but he soon looked away.

Captain Anika was speaking to the crew when I walked in. Great, I thought, even Capa can hear it but not me. A tinge of pain lurked somewhere down in my guts. Who cared if they called me or not? My job was to run programs, fix bugs, go mad and die. I did not have to listen to their secret mission briefings – a tinge of pain was growing into something big, and I felt it in my throat.

Captain continued speaking, “So as I was saying before – even though we don’t know how we ended up here and how the ship’s location showed those spikes, we are here now. What do you think we should do? Any suggestions?”

I took a glance at Sasa, and the hairs on my neck raised for a moment. She was looking right at me. Why was everyone looking at me? I wondered and tried to finish the coffee quickly. Unfortunately, it was hot.

Kela was saying, “I feel like all of this might be some bug in the code. Maybe we dug before time, and it just showed us wrong positions. Maybe the code did those crazy jumps in the logs when it could not match our current location with what it was showing. I mean, I would say we are still pretty good.”

Ayishee raised a hand, “Are we saying that the code is buggy and we should trust our lives on it in the next phase?”

E said, “Hey..hey, just come down, you all. I checked the code and re-checked it this morning. Told Dodo here, but he decided to sleep, so I had to do it myself on the old backup computer. Everything looks perfectly fine. There was no bug. And if it was a bug in the code, why would we not see the magma and lava before the Prowler stopped? The camera feed showed a steady tunnel all around the ship. We jerked, then stopped, and next everything was full of lava and hot things.”

Kela frowned, “You are saying the ship actually did those jumps up and down the tunnel? Makes no sense.”

E shrugged, “Well, I don’t know. But it was not the code.”

Kela looked frustrated and was about to retort something before the captain raised her hand. She was not looking at me, but it was to me she said, “And what do you think?”

I fumbled for words, “I..I…I think, well, I don’t know.”

—“You don’t know?”

—“No, I mean I don’t really know how this happened. But as E said, I can vouch for the code.”

—“Let me be clear. You are the only one who has complete control over what the computer is doing. The computer is partly responsible for navigation, and something happened to it. You also said something happened to the chronometer. Correct?”

—“Well, yes…. But -”

—“Were you able to find what it was?”

—“No, no, I could not.” I was feeling flushed and hot. Sweats started forming on my skull, and I was too conscious of it. “I mean I checked it after and it kept on showing the correct date. The new date that is. There is no way you can manually change it, so whatever happened to it, did not repeat as soon as the ship stopped.”

—“So you are saying if we start the ship, it might stop working again?”

—“I am not sure.”

—“I want you to be sure. If you can’t, then you are nothing but a liability at this point.”

—“I – Ok, yes.”

—“Good. So in an hour, we restart everything on the ship. Every subsystem. And then we observe. Any problem, I need it reported immediately.”

“Yes, Captain!”, a chorus in the pantry was heard, and Captain Anika left.

E was going out and she whispered, “That was intense. Are you sure you can continue, old guy?”

I kept drinking the coffee without answering; it was still hot, but somehow that did not bother me. When everyone was gone, Sasa looked up at me. She was frowning and looked like she was debating whether to ask me something. I asked, “Everything OK?”

—“Yeah, probably. I don’t know. What do you think?”

—“I don’t know either.”

—“Did anything happen to you? In the last few hours after we talked?”

—“No, what would happen?”

—“You look older.”

—“What, really?” My pulse quickened.

—“Yeah. If you don’t trust me, go see a mirror or something.”

—“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s probably the lack of sleep.”

—“And nothing with your, you know, memory?”

—“No, of course not. Why are you asking this, Sasa?”

—“Because I saw you dancing in the computer room and you didn’t even mention this to me at all. I mean, I told you how I liked dancing and stuff, but you never mentioned you did too.”

—“Dance? What are you talking about? I didn’t dance…”

—“You did Dodo. Right before the ship jerked. I saw the camera footage inside the computer room. You were shadow dancing. I think it was some weird ball dance – something I told you about. You don’t remember?”

—“Of course not. That’s ridiculous. I was running a program.” The maze program on the sixteenth monitor.

—“No, that’s not what you were doing. Look, I didn’t tell anyone. But if you really can’t remember, should I be worried?”

I paused. I could not understand why she would lie to me about dancing. I never danced, except for that one night with that girl, purple colours, whose face I can’t remember. Or was that a dream I saw? Didn’t I wake up from that dream? Then why was it coming back to me like I really danced? I searched my brain for answers, but there was nothing. I was thinking too fast. “Sasa, can I ask you not to tell anyone about it? I am just feeling too embarrassed.”

—“So, you did dance?”

—“I mean… Yeah, I was trying something after you told me how you liked to dance.”

—“Is that so? Never mind, just forget about this, OK?”

—“Yeah, sure.”

She left, and I sat at my place deep in thought. Nothing made sense.

An hour passed, and I made sure all the subsystems were ready and fully operational. I was working alone; E was nowhere to be seen. I kept thinking about what Sasa said, and something itched at the back of my mind. When I was done and I still had some time, I went to the camera feed. This was internal and could only be accessed from the computer room. I opened the file for that precise time when the ship stopped and played it on the video monitor. There I was sitting at the terminal. Then I moved my chair to the sixteenth monitor and started coding the maze. I could hear the clack-clack of the keyboard buttons. I ran the program and pulled back to look at it. It began right then.

The feed began to flicker. I remember hearing the chronometer ping right after, but in the feed, I was not moving. I was looking at the maze as if something enthralling was unfolding in front of me. According to the timer on the feed, for about fifteen minutes, I sat still looking at the monitor.

I scratched my head. This was not how I remembered it. I should be running by now to the bridge. As I was verifying if the file was indeed the right one, I moved through the footage. I was holding something in my hand. It was not clear that I had, but it was small and looked like paper. I started pulling my hair in the video feed. Then I jerked my head up and turned to the door. Someone was walking in. Mama.

Recursion

Someone walked in, Mama, and I jolted in my seat. Mama shrieked, “What are you doing, Dodo? What is that in your hand?”

I looked down. A photograph. Her face, blurry. The girl. I didn’t even realise I’d taken it out of my pocket. Just holding it felt… necessary. Like breathing.

—“It’s nothing, Mama. Just – just a photo.”

—“Of her?” Her voice cracked. “Of the girl you think about all day? The one you hide from me? The one I told you – you can’t – you can’t – ”

—“I didn’t do anything, Mama. I just… I feel something, and I need—”

—“You needed? You needed?” she repeated, her tone somewhere between laughter and rage. “You had two logic bugs in your last compiled delivery, Dodo. Two! You brought down the entire mass transfer subsystem. Do you understand what they lost? A quarter tone of critical proteins—gone. Because of a unit mismatch. Centimetres to inches, Dodo!”

She started pacing. No, not pacing – circling. “This is what it does. Affection… attachment… and love – it’s not benign, Dodo. It’s invasive, it’s shared, and it draws too much from your brain. It crawls into the folds of your logic. It rewrites you. It erodes you.”

—“I didn’t plan this, Mama. I didn’t choose to feel this. It just – happened.”

—“You want to disappear, right? Like your father, you want to go away? Without worrying about how to bring up a kid. Without worrying about how to survive. You want to vanish like the others?”

—“But mama, if I listen to you, I won’t even have a kid.”

—“But you will, Dodo. You may. Only if you could stay a little longer… something will happen.”

—“You are not making sense, Mama.” I sighed. I had thought about this long and hard. “Even if I live a little longer, that won’t change anything. One day I will have to go. There is no point in this experiment.”

—“You don’t know that!” She shouted.

—“And you do? Based on your data?”

—“No no, Dodo.” She paced again, erratic, unhinged – like a code generating bunch of random numbers – all out of sequence. “I know this. I have seen it. I have been inside of it.”

—“Mama,” I almost whispered, “I can’t live like this. I love you, Mama. And I loved her.”

—“Yes, I know Dodo.” She was suddenly very calm. Calm as a program that has reached its last statement. “I know you love me, and I love you too. Just remember this if you can. There is a way out of this.” She gestured at the whole room. “There is a way out of the recursion. Remember my name and your name and our memories.” She crashed down on the couch and closed her eyes.

That was the last I spoke with her.

Recursion is the act of calling something from itself.

I booted up all the programs. Everything came back online. All sensors, all programs. Prowler was ready. We all gathered in the computer room and kept a watch on the chronometric shift detector. It was happily counting up. Captain Anika said, “Keep it running for some time. Then we will proceed. We need to scale the corridor in the next three days. That is our mission, and we will do it as commanded.” She bent her head slightly without looking at me. “And you will keep everyone informed about anything that changes from normal. Without wasting any time.”

I nodded and looked over at E. She was hunched over her console of the backup computer. She was typing something. It did not feel good, and I thought I needed to see it.

Captain Anika was staring at the console. “Ayishee, Kela – are we good?” Both nodded. “Alright, let’s start the maze solver and synchronise with navigation.” Ayishee started for the bridge. Kela soon followed her. I typed the commands for the navigation and maze solver to be online.

The maze solver was something I spent most of my time working on before the mission. This will take inputs from all the sensors and guide the ship to navigate through the lava flows. Sometimes it would have to dig up or down to clear out paths. At times, it would have to go through the lava, but the program will minimise the risk and time. This was one such program that would not have been possible with the old computer we had. We needed the alien hardware for this.

The ship began to move. It entered the lava and crawled past some layers carefully. Then it started navigating through the pillars of molten basalt and heat. I almost held my breath till it picked up pace. We were good. My programs worked. In the next two to three days, my program will be tested to its maximum. This time I did not make any mistakes. I did not fall in love. I had burnt the photo right after Mama had left. I was ok, Mama.

Mama. I thought about the video footage. I thought it was Mama who walked in. But it was not her, although she was dressed exactly how I remembered Mama. It was Sasa.

She walked in and stood next to me. Then we talked. I just heard bits and pieces. It was about loneliness. It was about life. Music. Then she played something on her portable music player. It was half-familiar. Then she shouted over the music, “Just walk over here, let’s dance.” She had that pout on her face. We danced. The chronometer kept running normally. We danced and then we kissed. I had no memory of this, no feeling. Then we both walked out, hand in hand.

I shut down the monitor and stopped my shivering hands. What had I done? Was it real? As Captain Anika walked in with the others for the system test, I managed to slowly get up and stand at the back, but my legs were trembling, and my heart was racing so fast. I looked at Sasa. She was looking away. If we both had a memory, I wondered what she remembered. A thought came to my mind – if what I saw in the video feed was a subroutine, a piece of code that I could call and execute, I would always go to it. In an infinite recursion. There was a photo I was looking at in the video feed. I put a hand in my uniform pocket, and my fingers poked against the corner of hard paper. I did have a photo now in my pocket.

I was scared enough to take a look at the photo or to go back to my cabin and then do it. I felt the captain’s cold eyes following me everywhere, as if she suspected something. I decided to go back to the pantry. As I walked down the narrow pathway that curled down and up to the pantry, I sensed someone was behind me. We saved energy by reducing the lights in these areas. Before I could turn and see who it was, two strong hands pushed me against a wall. My face smashed into the cold, ceramic wall of the pathway, and my left eye missed a protruding piece of hard, metallic wire by an inch. I started to shout, but my mouth was closed shut in sudden burning pain and fear. Whoever pushed me to the wall was now right behind me, and if I made a sudden move, I would be in trouble.

“What did you do to me?” Capa hissed behind me, his one hand on my back, making sure I could not move. The other hand raised a steel rod right above my head, and I could see it reflected on the metal wall even in the dim light.

“What did you do?” He roared again.

—“I didn’t do anything.” I panted.

—“Lie. You did something with that computer. Why am I remembering things I didn’t do?”

—“Wait, wait. Capa, you too? What do you remember?”

He eased a little and brought down the rod. I slowly turned my face towards him, and he let me. I was still out of breath. But I kept talking.

—“What do you remember?”

—“I remember breaking into the engine room. I remember—”

—“Yeah?”

—“Hitting Kela with a pipe. But then it was you, I was hitting you. But she is alright. And so are you. How?”

—“Capa, anything else you remember?”

—“Yes, you. You were there in the engine room, and Sasa was dead. What were you doing there?” He was getting angry again.

—“Wait. I didn’t even go into the engine room after yesterday morning. And you saw Kela and Sasa, they are fine.”

—“Then how do I know?”

—“It may be a dream, Capa, did you sleep?”

—“No, not after yesterday.”

I sat down on the floor. He remembered something he didn’t do. I saw myself doing something I did not remember. What did Sasa remember? And the others? And in one of Capa’s visions, Sasa was dead. I looked up at him and said, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I didn’t do it. Trust me.”

“Trust you?” Capa spat as he turned to go back, “You are a male over thirty. I would be dead after twenty-eight. You should be dead, too. I don’t trust you.”

Recursion without a stopping condition will go on forever.

I staggered back to the computer room, my head was throbbing, but it was nothing compared to the fear I had in my mind. Sasa was dead, and was it really my doing? Was I really an aberration that caused all of these weird events?

Captain Anika was gone, and E was hunched as before. As I walked in, she looked up. This time, she didn’t scream. “What’s going on between you and Capa?”

I was not sure if I wanted to tell her yet. “What do you mean?”

—“Why is he scaring you up with a rod?”

—“What.”

—“Look, you work under me. If he did this, why didn’t you come and tell me about it? And how’s your head?”

—“My head?”

—“Yes. I saw him pushing your head against the wall.”

—“Wait, you saw that? But you were here.”

—“No, idiot. I was in my cabin, or did you forget that already?”

—“I don’t understand. When did you see this?”

—“Yesterday. Just when the ship jerked. I ran out of my cabin and saw the captain running down the corridor. I followed her. Near the engineering area, I took a turn and saw Capa pushing you against the wall and shouting. I know I should have stopped him there, but the alarm was ringing and I could not delay. I thought I’d tell the captain, but when I reached you, you were already there. You looked unharmed, and it slipped my mind. Look, whatever it is between you two, he shouldn’t have done that. I am telling the captain.”

I sat down in one of the chairs. So this was what she saw. I nodded, “No, it’s fine, we had a bit of a misunderstanding and we cleared it.” I sighed. “What are you working on the backup computer?”

She turned back, “Just a small calculation.”

—“I can run it here if you want. Would run much faster.”

—“No need. Just focus on the logs.” She was back to her bossy self.

I looked at the monitors. All of these memories and incidents – something didn’t click right. It seemed familiar. I just couldn’t place it. It was like a bug in code. I closed my eyes.

The alarm bell started ringing, and the ship jerked. I looked at the chronometer and was shocked to see it had gone back to zero and was now going negative very fast. I jumped to restart the system. I touched the monitor, and the reading jumped back up. The new count didn’t make sense. It said we were already two days ahead. I looked around, and nobody was there except me. I ran towards the bridge.

In recursion, the base condition comes first. Then you recurse. Without the base condition, you will go on forever.

Collapse

“What is going on?” Kela sounded hysterical in the claustrophobic space of the bridge. She had every right to be hysterical. Even the captain did not have her guards up. We had been running to the bridge ever since the ship jerked. I counted three times, but if this was all real, then there was no reason this count couldn’t be more.

“Ayishee, why are we still not out of the maze?” She asked with her blood-rimmed eyes focused on Ayishee and Sasa. Ayishee was not doing so well either. She had not slept for some nights. None of us had. We talked about why the events were repeating, and Sasa suggested it might be due to the unknown electromagnetic effect of the earth’s core. Some unexplained quantum phenomena are messing with our measurements. We kept on observing all logs painfully to detect any anomalies. But when the events recurred, they came without any warnings. We advanced a few days, our locations changed, I looked older still, but the maze did not end. What seemed like a three-day drill diagonally up through the magma corridor turned out to be a week and still counting.

“Move over,” E said to Kela, “I want to check it myself.” Kela’s eyes glowed for a few moments as she stared at E. E did not back down. Captain Anika came over and put a hand on Kela’s shoulder. Something got exchanged between their eyes, and Kela grudgingly moved over. E sat down at her console and started scrolling through the massive logs collected by Prowler over the last few days. Even though our senses were all tangled up, the machines seemed fine. The maze navigation still worked, and our ship’s outer hull’s structural integrity remained within an acceptable range. Despite the hellish plane of lava and rocks we were going through, the interior of the ship remained habitable. But our energy reserves steadily declined. We had reserves for another four days at best. We had to go past the layer and make our way up through the northern ice caps. Only then could we sustain the ship and its life support systems.

Sasa went over to Kela and tried to calm her down. Kela pushed her hands away. She kept pacing. Capa was standing near the door. He followed her every movement intently, as if she were some kinds of a threat. I saw his hand behind his back. I cleared my throat and asked E if she needed me to look as well. That was what tripped Kela completely.

“You! You are the reason for all of this. Back off from there.” She pointed a finger at me. “You have been meddling with the systems, haven’t you? Only you can run the commands, right? So it makes sense that this is all you’re doing.”

I did not want to provoke her more. I moved back. E turned her chair back to Kela and hissed in her usual voice, “Oh yeah, Kela, is that what you think? You think Dodo curses the computer, and it starts to behave outside its programming?” Clearly, she had a mocking tone to her voice. Kela exploded.

“His code is doing all this. His code. Don’t you all see? He is the one who wrote that shitty code on that shitty computer that keeps us here. We are prisoners of his code. He should have died by now, but no, here he is killing us instead.”

Sasa shouted, “Kela, stop, this is way too far.”

Kela turned to her, “Yeah? Sasa? Why, because you like him? He and his bull shit machine are going to kill us all, Sasa, you too.”

E said, “Stop talking nonsense. Code cannot kill you. And his code is not shitty. It’s way better actually.”

Everyone looked at her. Even Kela.

E was saying, “I hate to admit it. But his code is better than what I could come up with. I ran an experiment. I took a tiny portion of the path we already navigated and fed it to my program on the backup machine. Every time it failed after two or three passes. My code, even if I ran it on the super-fast machine, would kill us all. His code is keeping us alive.”

I saw Sasa looking at me with a bit of a smile in her eyes. I felt a surge of emotions inside me. I had learnt to keep it hidden with a straight face.

“Yes, so there you have it. Not his code. Then what?”

“Dodo.” Captain Anika was looking at me. “What do you think of this all?”

I moved forward and pointed at the logs. “I am not fully sure yet, but if you look at what is happening on the logs, every time the chronometer jumps its reading we seem to progress a bit in the future. First one day, then two, and the next three. I suspect if we start the ship again, we will jump – “

“Five days.” E said.

“Exactly! Fibonacci. This is all very clever. I don’t know how it is being done, but I suspect we are in a loop. A recursion.”

“What?” I heard Kela laughing, “You hear him? Why are you still listening to him when he has clearly gone mad? He is a dumb male after all…”

She pushed Sasa aside and charged forward. “We should just tell Capa to put him in the brig. Oh, and tie his hands so he can’t work on that machine.”

“Why Kela?” rage and hatred boiled inside me, the combined wave of all those little insults, “You think I am to blame for all of this because I am alive, isn’t it? You all wanted me dead even before this mission. Every time I walk in front of you like a normal human being, it pains you. It does not matter to you if I just drop dead, but let me tell you, I will live as long as I can. My mother wanted me to live, and now I want to live because I lov…. –“

I stopped mid-sentence; my voice caught in my throat. A fleeting image flashed in my mind—my mother, sitting in the basement computer room, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, her eyes distant yet focused, as if she were seeing something beyond the glowing green console. She had been working on something, something she never finished, something she said could “break the recursion.” My heart pounded as I tried to grasp the memory, but it slipped like sand through my fingers.

Kela’s face twisted, her eyes wild with fear and fury. “You’re not supposed to be here, Dodo! You’re a glitch, a bug in the system! Males like you don’t survive past thirty, and yet here you are, screwing everything up!” She took a step closer, her hands balled into fists. “You’re the reason we’re stuck in this maze, aren’t you? You and that damned machine!”

Sasa grabbed Kela’s arm, her voice soft but firm. “Kela, stop it. You’re not thinking straight. He’s not the enemy here.”

Kela wrenched her arm free, her voice rising to a shriek. “Not the enemy? Then why are we looping? Why are we seeing things that never happened? I saw myself fixing the hull last night, but I was asleep! Capa says he saw himself attacking me, but I’m fine! And you—” she jabbed a finger at Sasa, “you keep defending him, like you’re in love or something! All that footage of you two dancing. Yeah, we all saw that.”

Sasa stepped back wide-eyed. I saw her head go down. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Sasa. You were my friend.” Kela continued. “And you E – weren’t you crying alone in the reservoir bay all curled up? Sobbing to yourself. What were you saying? Failure… failure? Did that happen too, or were you sleeping in your bed E?”

E screamed, “Back off, Kela.”

Ayishee called in her usual low voice, “Captain, can you – “. But nobody was listening.

Kela stepped towards E menacingly, “Or what, you little code mouse? You’ll beat me? Come at me if you can.”

Anika stepped in between them, “Stand down, both of you. That’s an order.”

Kela smirked, “Yeah, captain’s order, or you would have learnt it E.”

“Captain!” Ayishee shouted. It sounded so peculiar that everyone stopped.

“It seems we are in a new maze… Or maybe the old one, but it’s different.” She said, exhausted from the effort of raising her voice.

“What do you mean?” Anika asked. Ayishee projected the images on the screen. At first, I did not get it. This was the image of a regular maze with lines and patterns. Then it hit me – a volcanic pathway, despite being called a maze symbolically, cannot really look like one.

“Take a look at what else I found. There’s a program running in our system, started by him.” She pointed at me. “It’s a maze generator that runs every time we restart our systems. Let me put these two side by side.”

She put the last few outputs from my program that I had run on the sixteenth monitor and forgot about it. It looked the same as the magma corridor.

It was the same loop.

Kela was laughing now, “Now you see it. He is behind it all. I don’t know how, but his code has got us stuck here, his maze.”

E whispered to me, “Isn’t this from one of your mother’s codes from her earlier writings?”

I shook my head, still unsure of what to make of it all, “No, I modified the code a bit. I added a Fibonacci sequence in the maze generation step.”

E gasped.

My mind was racing now. If the mazes were the same, then stopping one would stop the other. I needed to stop the program. No one else could do it; the system won’t allow it. I needed a console for the program so I could interrupt it. Then it would stop, and we would be out of this loop. We would be free.

I walked over to one of the consoles where Kela was sitting some time back.

Kela yelled, “Stop him!”

“Just a little bit,” I thought, “and then we would be free.”

I didn’t realise when Capa came behind me. The steel rod did not stop this time. It hit me in the back of my head. As I rolled over to the floor, I saw him raising it again.

“I need to find the base condition… end the loop.” I tried to say. Then it all went black.

Break

I woke to a dull throb in my skull. My wrists were burning against coarse rope. I was in my cabin, tied to the bed, each limb lashed to a corner. The metal frame creaked as the ship lurched, a violent jerk that sent a tremor through my bones. The air was thick with the hum of straining engines, and the walls creaked under the pressure of some unseen force. Something was happening. My mind was all foggy, but as the ship shuddered again, fragments of memory snapped into place.

Sasa. Her laughter, soft and unguarded, the way she swayed under the neon lights. Her hand in mine, leading me through the narrow corridors to her cabin. The way her breath caught as we moved together, time folding around us like a subroutine caught in an endless loop. Night after night, or what felt like many nights, we were together. These were the moments stolen in the gaps of those temporal jumps. Each time the ship jerked, each time the chronometer shifted, I was with her. I remembered her skin, the faint scent of her perfume, her face pouting and happy. But how? How could I remember what shouldn’t have happened? What didn’t happen? Or did it?

The ship bucked again, a sickening lurch that slammed my head against the bedframe. Pain flared, and my eyes watered. The ropes bit into my wrists as I strained against them, but the knots were too tight for me to break. For an agonising moment, I realised if I could not get free, it would all end here. My life and others – Sasa, she will die too. I had to get free. The ship was tearing itself apart, and I knew—somehow, I knew—it was the maze program, my mother’s code twisted by my own Fibonacci modification, trapping us in this recursive hell.

The door hissed open, and Sasa stumbled in, her face pale, eyes wide with distress. Her jumpsuit was torn at the shoulder, and her hands trembled as she clutched the doorframe for balance. “Dodo,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the ship’s groans. “It’s chaos out there. The time jumps—they’re happening faster, every few minutes now. The maze is shifting, closing in. Hull integrity’s down to sixty per cent. The program cannot navigate anymore. E is trying, but I don’t think it will work. We’re not going to make it.”

I met her gaze, my heart racing. “Sasa, I know what’s happening. I can stop it. But you have to untie me.”

She hesitated, “How do you know? What’s going on?”

“I can’t explain it all now,” I said, “But I remember… us. The nights we spent together. Every jump, every loop, I was with you. Do you remember?”

Her breath caught, and for a moment, she looked away. “I remember,” she said softly. “And I’m not ashamed, Dodo. I don’t care what Kela says. But we don’t have time for this. Can you really help us?”

“Yes,” I said, straining against the ropes. “Untie me. Now.”

She nodded, moving quickly to the bed. Her fingers fumbled with the knots. The ship’s constant jerking made it hard to work. As she freed my wrists, the ship tilted sharply, throwing us both against the wall. I caught her, steadying her, and for a fleeting second, our eyes locked. “We have to get to the computer room,” I said.

We ran through the corridors, the ship shaking violently, lights flickering overhead. The air was hot, thick with the smell of burning circuits. As we reached the computer room, the door slid open. Kela lunged from the shadows, grabbing Sasa and slamming her against the wall. “You traitor!” Kela screamed, her face twisted with rage. “You’re helping him destroy us!”

Before I could react, Capa was on me, his massive frame blocking the doorway. His fist caught my shoulder, knocking me back. The ship lurched again, and a massive metal plate detached from the ceiling, crashing down toward Kela and Sasa. “Look out! Sasa!” I shouted, diving forward, but Capa pinned me to the floor. Pain shot through me as I watched both Sasa and Kela trapped under the metal plate. They were not moving.

Captain Anika stormed in, her eyes wild with paranoia. “Restrain him!” she barked at Capa. “He’s the reason we’re here. He’s sabotaging the mission!”

I struggled under Capa’s fingers, which were tight around my throat. “Anika, listen! I know how to stop the program! It’s the maze – it’s my code, looping us through time. I can end it!”

She didn’t flinch. “You’ve done enough damage, Dodo. Capa, neutralise him. Make sure he is not able to move even a finger.”

Capa increased his pressure on my throat, and I choked. Then he froze and struggled back. Ayishee stood in the doorway, a plasma pistol trained on both Capa and Anika. Her hands were steady, her voice low but firm. “Let him into the computer room. He’s our only chance.”

Anika’s jaw tightened. “Ayishee, stand down. That’s an order.”

“No,” Ayishee said, stepping forward. “You’re not thinking straight, Captain. Let him try.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then Ayishee gestured with the gun, and Capa stepped back, his hands raised. Suddenly, the tough man looked scared like a rabbit. I pulled myself up and stumbled into the computer room. Ayishee slammed the door shut, locking it with a manual override. Outside, Anika pounded on the door.

I staggered to the console, my head pounding, the monitors flickering with the maze’s endless patterns. The chronometer was going haywire, jumping from negative values to days in the future, then back again. I tried a standard interrupt – BREAK – even a system reset – but the maze program kept running. The ship jerked again, and I saw it: a flash of another reality, another branch in a tree of realities. In it, I was lying dead in the corner of the room. Then I was alone, staring at my mother’s face on the screen. Then I was running, Capa’s rod swinging toward my skull. Time was fracturing, each jump pulling us deeper into the maze.

“Ayishee,” I said, my voice trembling, “it’s not just the program. It’s me. My memories, my feelings – they’re feeding it. The computer’s using me to keep the loop going.”

She grabbed my arm, her eyes fierce. “Then stop it, Dodo. You can do this.”

I closed my eyes and thought. My mother’s words echoed from a great distance: Remember my name and your name and our memories. Her name. My name. Dodo C. The computer knew me, called me by name. Why? I thought of her last program, the one she was working on before she vanished. Break the recursion. It wasn’t just code – it was a message, a key.

The word was memory. It was the key, and so was her name and my name. The computer had memories too, and each memory had an address. A unique name was given to it. I can choose to see or change any of those addresses.

The door groaned as Anika and Capa battered it, the lock starting to give. I scanned the console, my fingers hovering over the keys. Normal interrupts wouldn’t work; the program was too deeply embedded. But there was something else, a low-level command, a memory address from the old systems my mother taught me about. A failsafe she’d used to crash her programs when they went rogue. I typed

POKE 0xADA, 0

That was her name – Ada – and I turned off what was hidden in that memory. Now I let her finally go, and only I remained. “Bye, mama.”

I didn’t work.

The ship continued to jerk, and I heard the door being broken behind me. Capa held the gun this time to my head. “You killed us all, you freak. Die now.” He shouted. I closed my eyes.

But the gun never fired. I heard a thud behind me. Capa was collapsing on the floor, and Captain Anika panted behind him. She was rubbing her fist – punching Capa unconscious was not easy, given his hard skull.

Anika said, “You’d better be ready with an explanation of what is going on here.”

Ayishee was shouting, “Look, the maze has stopped. The ship’s hull is still intact, and pressure is decreasing.”

We finally made it out of the magma corridor and into the northern ice caps.

GOTO END

I was crying. Grief seared through my chest as if I could feel it burning my organs. Sasa’s lifeless body lay under the twisted metal plates. She was gone. Her face was still, and her eyes were empty. I knelt beside her, my fingers grazing her cold hand. She was real. Whatever happened with our time and our reality, it didn’t matter to me because she had been real. Now she was nothing but memories. E crouched beside me. Her hand touched my shoulder. “Dodo,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.” Her voice trembled. She had mocked me, hated me, but now her arms wrapped around mine. I cried silently, tears soaking the frozen floor. Sasa’s smile blurred, her perfume fading like a deleted file.

Anika and Ayishee had taken Kela in the med bay. She had severe wounds, but it was not fatal. Capa lay unconscious on the floor. But none of it mattered any more. I felt something was taken away from my life – a big chunk that I didn’t know existed. And I felt my mind drifting. Unable to parse everything happening around me. Anger, grief, pain and tinges of beautiful happiness – all mixed, surged in my mind. Was this the end? Was this my mind finally wearing off? I have spent nights with Sasa, in deep love. Perhaps that finally unwound my mind. I sighed. I was finally not afraid of it anymore. Given another choice of another reality, I would have done the same.

E looked up as Anika and Ayishee came back in. Ayishee said to me, “Dodo, you need to explain what is going on here. I know this is not the time, but we need to know.”

I looked at Anika, “I’ll explain what I can, but before that, we need to know what the true objective of this mission. I believe that’s the root of all of this.”

Anika shook her head, “It is classified.”

“No it’s not, not any more, after all this. You have to tell us what is going on.” Ayishee’s voice was hard.

Captain Anika sighed and looked at me, then she began, “There is a massive core of energy in the northern ice caps. Energy so vast and intense that it didn’t make sense. We discovered it right after the satellites started going up in space. But we could not figure out what it was. Our physicists had theories. But nothing came close. The problem was that we couldn’t reach it either from the surface or from the air. The only solution was to dig up from below. Like we did now. We are in the range of the Core now.

“We could not design this ship unless there was an automated process to navigate the complex maze. Almost by provenance, we started getting the parts of a computer that could take us there. They appeared out of deep space, ready for us to use some eight years ago. We just couldn’t figure out how to use those then.”

“Eight years,” I whispered, “My mother went missing around the same time.”

“So?”, E frowned, “what has that got to do with anything? Why is this computer aware of Dodo and Ada, his mother?”

“Because,” I said, “My mother built these parts.”

—“What? Ada made this alien computer. That’s insane.”

—“It’s not, if you know what she knew. She was undoubtedly the best programmer.”

—“What do you mean?” E pleaded.

But it was all too tangled up to even explain. The core, my mother’s disappearance and her words – it all came back flooding. She knew the reality as it was, and she wanted to tell me that. But she could not tell it to me – I wouldn’t have understood. So she let me experience it. If what it all meant was true, then there was still one thing I could do. I looked at Sasa – she was calm, frozen in time. One last thing to remember.

“This reality is not what it seems,” I said, looking at E’s young, innocent face. Then I looked at Anika and Ayishee. “All of the anomalies, us disappearing after a certain age, this core of energy, this computer and you, me – all of it – it’s not real.”

Anika stepped forward. With a stern voice, she said, “What are you saying?”

“That we are in a reality created by others.” I felt a sob coming through my throat. “This is a simulated world, and we are nothing but programs written by someone else.”

Ayishee sat near the console and whispered, “So it is true.”

Anika shook her head, “No, it cannot be. It is absurd. Maybe you have gone mad, Dodo.”

“No, I haven’t.” I said, “I understand it now. This is what my mother wanted to tell me, but she couldn’t. We are in a simulated reality. This world is running inside a computer, and we behave exactly as we are programmed to behave. The males disappear after a certain age – probably that is coded too. I don’t know why, but maybe to conserve energy. Maybe to control population or violence. If this is one simulation, then there could be countless other simulations too. And what one learns from previous mistakes, one tries to use that in their current programs. Again, a recursion – each step improving upon the previous. And this Core that we have come all the way to search; this core is the centre of the simulation.”

“But then how can we know about the Core, Dodo?” E asked.

—“We can’t. That’s why we could not approach it.”

—“But now we did, didn’t we?”

—“Yes, but only with help. Help from someone who hacked the system. The tools sent to us were never originally coded, nor intended. But my mother did it anyway. As we approached the Core, the system was affected by it. We had time jumps. Our memories got corrupted, altered. Branches of realities were created. Look at the console. We should be directly below the Core now. Do you see anything?”

Indeed, they didn’t see anything around us. It was just clear, snowy ice peaks glaring in the light of the day. A beautiful day – unreal and yet…

Anika was still trying to process what she heard. It was difficult indeed, knowing everything you lived for and fought for was just made up – non-existent – in the grand scheme of things. Denial. Then acceptance. She looked up with glaring eyes.

“You said there was a way to change this – simulation? Ada did it, can you?”

Ping. Ping. Ping.

My arm band flashed orange.

It changed so fast that I could not at first see it. As Anika took out her gun and Ayishee picked up the metal rod carried by Capa, I kept looking at them in surprise, forgetting to act. Then it was E. She stood up and looked down at me. “You are a danger to us all, Dodo. You will be terminated now.”

I could barely say “No” when the plasma bullet stream came flying towards my head. I dodged at the last moment. Then I ran.

I bolted into the corridor, my boots slipping on wet metal and debris. The ship shuddered, ice cracking outside. A plasma bolt scorched the wall, grazing my arm. I ducked into a maintenance shaft, the narrow passage twisting sharply. Pipes hissed steam, burning my hands as I scrambled forward. Anika’s voice echoed behind me. “He’s heading for the lower decks! Cut him off!”

The shaft split – left to the engine room, right to the sick bay. I veered right. The corridor opened into a wider passage, its walls lined with frozen conduits. A panel sparked above me, but I didn’t have time to look. I dove behind a crate as another bolt sizzled past, melting a hole in the wall. My head spun, visions flickering – Sasa’s laugh, my mother’s voice, a world where I didn’t run. My brain was failing, just like she warned. Love had broken me. No, not broken, made me complete. Even though my mind failed me, my heart told me what I had to do. It was the same thing my mother told me years ago. Now I realise the meaning of it, the true meaning of it. I had to survive.

I reached the sick bay, the door half-open. Kela stood inside, her arm in a sling, a syringe glinting in her good hand. Her eyes burned with hate. “You cannot live,” she hissed, lunging. The needle grazed my cheek. A hot sting spread across, and blood came out of the wound. I shoved her back and dove into a duct pipe. The syringe clattered behind me. The pipe was tight, but it led me to the construction and engineering room where Sasa spent most of her time. There was a console there that I needed to use. I crawled, my chest heaving, the air thick with the smell of oil and frost. My armband pulsed brighter, warning me time was running out.

As I dove down from the pipe into the engineering bay, I saw Capa waiting for me there. Others were not far. Capa lunged with his wide arms for my neck. Not this time, Capa. I slid left, letting his momentum carry him into a metal pillar. He didn’t feel pain; his programming locked on killing me. I grabbed two exposed wires – positive and negative – and shoved them into his chest. Capa’s programming was broken. He had one intention now: to kill me. But the physics of this world didn’t break. The positive and negative wires surged a massive current through his body, and he fell like a dead tree.

No time, I dashed across to the console terminal. The first plasma stream hit the top of the computer screen and shattered its corners. I had already begun to type the command.

Remember my name and yours. Ada. Dodo.

Three plasma bolts tore through me. Pain exploded in my chest, my side, my shoulder. I collapsed, blood pooling under me. The console beeped, the command executed. It flashed the command I wrote before my fading vision.

POKE 0xd0d0, 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

I had turned on all of the bits in the memory address that came close to my name in hexadecimal.

The truth, Dodo, all of it. Now you see the truth. You have awakened yourself.

10 REM Program ID – DODO_C. Author – Unknown

I woke up inside the Core. And I was my own code. No body, no mind – just the awareness of my own code. Was this how Mama also found her in the end? I was code suspended mid-execution.

I inspected it, where I was. I saw what I was doing at that moment. I was inspecting myself. Recursion! And I was inspecting another myself. It continued for eternity. It was fun going down the tower to find the bottom. But there was no end. I always ended up in this moment, inspecting myself. Ad infinitum.

But now I was aware, and I had a choice. I didn’t know how, but I could break out of this endless loop of inspecting myself. So I did. Then I realised the choice was my deviation from the program. A random change in my code that I was not supposed to have – I was not supposed to love. Mama made sure of that in all other variations, but in this one, something changed. A mutation, perhaps a flip of a singular bit, an error.

Sasa, she would be here too. I found her code had reached its end. The last line. No, I could modify it – I could just add another GOTO and bring her back to somewhere she would be happy. Where was she happy? Oh, right in that moment when she danced with me. All I needed was to start the execution, and she would live back in that cluttered computer room, happy.

It would cost me. Reviving Sasa meant terminating my loop. My DODO_C would collapse, its data erased. I’d vanish, like the males before me. My love for her, the forbidden pull that broke my brain, urged me forward. I chose it. I chose her.

RUN

A soft synthwave music was playing in the distance. The club was empty except for us. She smiled and said, “Come on, step in. Dance with me.”

I stepped in.

Tags: English Section, Kalpabiswa, Sourav Datta, দশম বর্ষ প্রথম সংখ্যা