Leah had dreamed of this moment her entire life: ever since she was 6, and her mother had taken her to a tech convention as a way to kill time while her brother was at taekwondo. She had been enamoured with it ever since, the way that energy and electricity could be harvested form the air like a crop and wrangled together through wires and coding until it created something tangible. It felt like magic. It felt like wizardry. While her friends dressed up as princesses and ghosts for Halloween, Leah Minchin came to every event adorned in lab-coat and fake laptop, in her best approximation of Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper.

It was that admiration that had propelled her for so long, that had driven her every waking moment. And now she was here, it was everything she had hoped it would be: the beautiful sprawling campus of MIT, the greenery, the labs that stretched in immense white tiles with their whirring machines and glowing terminals. But now, in the dim light of 2am, with Lean hunched over a stupid piece of junk in an isolated lab, it is quiet. Her hands shake from the caffeine, and the whole lab feels haunted, if she believed in things like that. She did not. But the shadows were beginning to settle, and her laptop had been glowing at its lowest capacity, leaving darkness to pool in the corners of her vision. She tapped at the keys lazily: the lump of metal in front of her had laid dormant and unresponsive for weeks now, and it was supposed to be a simple program, a sorting algorithm.

She tapped at the command again.

5657po8297e26m it replied.

Leah stared at the screen. She blinked, rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm, and looked again.

5657po8297e26m

It was not an error message. She knew every error message the machine could produce, all of them written in the same flat, apologetic syntax. This was something else. She typed the command again, slower this time, as if the problem had been her haste.

5657po8297e26m

“Okay,” she muttered. Her voice sounded strange in the empty lab, too loud, bouncing off the white tiles. “Okay. It’s printing a hash.”

But a hash of what? She had written the sorting algorithm herself. Forty lines, maybe fifty. There was no hashing function in it. There was no output function at all beyond the one that printed the sorted array, and the array she had fed it was just integers: 4, 91, 17, 3, 58. Nothing that should come out as letters.

She pulled up the source and scrolled through it line by line, her finger tracing the glass of the screen. Variables, loops, a swap function. Everything was exactly as she’d left it. She checked the timestamp on the file. Last modified three weeks ago, by her, at 11:42 p.m.

She ran a diff against her backup. Identical. She turned back to the machine. The thing had sat dead for weeks, unresponsive, a lump of metal and wire. Then tonight, at two in the morning, it had woken up and said something. Leah typed a different command this time: a single character, a question mark.

The cursor hung there for a long moment. Then the screen scrolled, and for the first time the string was different.

5657po8297e26m -- unsorted.

She stopped breathing.

“Unsorted,” she said aloud. “Unsorted what?”

Behind her, in the dark corner of the lab where her laptop’s glow no longer reached, one of the other terminals flickered quietly to life.