It’s all gone horribly wrong — part three
The panic sets in
This is the second part in the legend of the man from nowhere series. In the second part Nick was really bored. Like really really bored…
Last night while browsing through a few of the more obscure corners of the web Nick came across the file structure, as he drilled down he saw a folder called ‘future self’ and inside the folder was a random photo of a miniature sausage dog and a text file with the word ‘echo’ repeated 734 times. Puzzled he bookmarked the folder and went for a cup of tea, when he came back the folder was gone, in fact the whole file structure was gone, the IP address seemingly non-existent and with it no sign of the sausage dog or the repeating echo.
Sat at his computer in the offices of ‘Supreme Solutions’, Nick decided to see if he could find the folder again, but from a different computer. He pulled out the scrap of paper he had written the IP address on 199.999.239.43.55 and there it was, sausage dog, echo chamber and all. He heard the unmistakable sound of Martin and his stupid toe shoes slapping on the linoleum. He quickly closed the browser window and opened the work schedule inbox.
“Finished with the button already Nick? It’s good to see you working hard after the little incident earlier, nice to know our little chat did you good. Why not work on the trash cycle problem for LettsGoShop.com and see if you can finally get to the bottom of it eh,” he droned on.
As an alternative to ripping Martin’s stupid ears from his stupid head and shoving them up his nostrils, Nick opened the fault log and resigned himself to another hour of stupid work for stupid clients who had no idea what they wanted, what the problem was or the boundaries of the laws of physics. The LettsGoShop fault wasn’t really a fault at all, it’s just their CEO didn’t like the way the trash bin worked and kept logging it as a fault. By trash bin he means people who put something in the shopping cart and then don’t end up buying it “why can’t you just take their money when they put it in the cart” he would scream, “why do you let them put it in the trash”. No amount of explaining, talking through the law or rights and wrongs of forcing sales could get through to him and every time he saw a report someone hadn’t gone through with a sale, which was several times a day, he would log a fault.
Martin was of the wrong opinion that the customer is always right and so would happily accept the fault log, hand it off to a bored looking code monkey and tell them to fix it. This wasn’t the first time Nick had this task, last time he had a great solution, he put a notification in place that would appear every time someone tried to leave the site with an item in the basket. Unfortunately the CEO didn’t take very kindly to the message “Please buy this, don’t just leave it in the basket as the CEO is a moron and will log a fault thinking there is a trash problem.” This time Nick decided to play it safe and have it say “Are you sure you don’t want to finish buying ‘enter item name’, how about a 10% discount if you buy now”, he thought “that should do the trick” and pretended to carry on working on it for another hour.
After finishing the work, but while still keeping it open in one window to look like he was working on it, Nick re-opened the browser and entered the mysterious IP address — but it was gone. No sign of the sausage dog or the recurring echo, “this is getting weird” he said to himself.
He finished the job and went out for a coffee, when he got back the office, smelling slightly off cheap beer, the office had been trashed. There was blood and bodies everywhere and his computer had been gutted. All that was left was a note pinned to the back of his chair saying “echo echo echo” and one on the front with the word “REPEAT!”.
Scared, Nick ran for his life, he left the office and headed straight for his flat just around the corner. When he got upstairs his door had been kicked in. His flat had been trashed and all that was left in one piece was the old kitchen chair he used at his desk. Pinned to the back was a note “we’re watching you, we know what you’ve found” and on the front a note saying “RUN!”.
In a panic, not knowing what to do, who to turn to or what the hell was going on, he left the flat and when outside in the cold October air, called 999 from his phone. Instead of “which service” all he heard was the word “RUN” with a long, deep echo.
