Line of Code

Sunday, 27th.

My name is Sam. I am 39 and this is my first entry in a found diary. Whoever reads this may find it of interest.

I work for the C.E.C, the Clean Earth Commission, formed ‘To Restore the Earth to its Former Worth’. Snappy slogan I must say.

The fallout from the explosion wiped out 99% of the world’s population. After all these years nothing has changed. People are still dying. Those of us left alive exist, we don’t live. Humanity has been relegated to wearing full-body hazmat suits as it goes about its daily existence; far from ideal. I wear a restrictive hazmat suit at work, then scrub down thoroughly at home before changing into a loose, comfortable hazmat suit to spend the rest of the day in. Whether newborn, adolescent or adult, we all dress the same.

These suits are big business now; you can get them in all sorts of cuts and styles and colours. They are designed to protect you from the low-level radiation in the air, but at least they can be fun to wear!

Ridiculous right? Even newborn babies are put straight into infant suits, mask and all. This is the only way of living they will know.

The government mandated decades ago that everyone must wear them to prolong their life. Even at low levels the radiation will still kill you, eventually.

I read somewhere that people before my time lived to around 90 or 100 years of age, and that someone who made it to 110 would be big news. The big new these days is passing 80.

End of my first entry. I’ve never done this before but it felt good to write things down.

Monday, 28th

There isn’t much to look forward to for a 39-year-old single guy. I wake up every morning to a brown earth and an orange sky. I may as well be living on Mars.

In my dwindling neighbourhood live families who try their best to fake it through life. Their houses are brightly painted to add some colour to their meaningless existence. Everyone has fake green turf, front and back; there is only one company that still makes it. Some industry still survives on this wretched wasteland planet.

I don’t even know what real green grass feels like. It grows a strange shade of pale brown, almost white. Leaves on the trees are the same colour, and yet they all still grow. The after-effects of the fallout killed whatever it was that made plants green.

Almost everyone has a birdhouse of some shape on their front ‘lawn’ from which hand-made birds hang by a wire, because all birds are extinct. I don’t remember birds.

Tuesday, 29th

I saw my parents in a dream. I barely remember them. They died three years after the calamity.

The world of their youth must have been exciting. Apparently there were big cities and lots of businesses and parks and places to go and have fun. Battery-powered cars whizzed quietly along the highways and solar-panels covered everyone’s homes and wind farms were everywhere. The world was somewhat ‘green’ and everyone was content. Until that New Energy thing happened.

Wednesday, 30th

I was late for work today. There’s a rusting NewEnergy Corp billboard across the street.

I hate NewEnergy Corp. Some scientists somewhere discovered a new form of energy and the power companies of the world united to form one gigantic corporation that supplied power to the masses. The execs called it New Energy because they weren’t clever enough to give it a proper name. It was never intended for worldwide distribution but executives don’t listen to scientists. This new energy meant dollar signs, big ones.

The world was so reliant on this new energy that everyone who had anything to do with it ‘forgot’ how volatile it was.

For decades NewEnergy Corp supplied power to the world. Then one day their power plants blew up, one after another all over the world. They said it was due to a ‘computer error’.

The computer program that ran the power plants was maintained by clever young techies that were paid enormous amounts of money to sit in their leather chairs and write updates for it. The computer code, of which there were millions of lines worth, was regularly updated to keep the plants running efficiently.

It was during one of these updates that the world changed forever. Apparently, some genius wrote a line of code incorrectly which sent the whole system into meltdown, but not straight away; it was three hours from the moment the update was complete to the time of the first explosion. As soon as the revised program kicked in things started going amiss: gradually more and more warning lights would flash and error signs filled the monitors.

Since NewEnergy Corp’s inception there was training put in place to deal with various emergency scenarios. All one had to do was interrupt the power plant’s operation by hitting a literal big orange ‘Halt’ button. This would halt the computer program, pausing the plant’s production for a time but not immediately causing a blackout in every home. Every plant had a reserve built into it that would continue to supply power to the masses for twelve hours; enough time to set things right and restart the works.

The Halt buttons were supposed to run on their own dedicated computer code, separate to the main. In actual fact the code used to operate them was mistakenly written into the main code for the plants. How no one ever picked up on this I’ll never know. The erroneous line of code must have scrambled everything which is why pressing the button did nothing. No one ever tested this kind of scenario.

Nobody was aware that humanity had three hours of existence left, and for all of those hours the highly-paid executives cracked the whip on every techie on earth to sift through millions and millions of lines of computer code hoping to find that one line that had an error in it before disaster struck. Nobody could have predicted the catastrophic results.

It’s insane to think about, but humanity was almost wiped out by one single line of computer code.

Losing 99% of earth’s population seems incomprehensible. There are now around 80 million citizens on the planet. That sounds like a big number but in reality the earth is a ghost town. I could live in a different house every day for the rest of my life.

The company I work for was put in place to clean the resulting worldwide mess and ruin, and restore the Earth to its former glory. The initial phase of removing debris and rubbish and dead bodies after the explosions lasted several years. Over the course of the following few decades people everywhere succumbed to the radiation. Hundreds died every day. The deaths decreased once the hazmat suits were put in place.

Sometimes I think to myself what am I working for? I have some savings but what am I going to do with it when I retire?

I hate NewEnergy Corp. I wonder what my life would be like if it had meaning.

Enough ranting for today.

Thursday 31st

The first half of this diary contains girly talk and scribbles. I wonder if she had nice parents. Did they all die together? Did she die alone?

I like being alone. I live in a two-bedroom house with an empty pool out back. Sorry, the pool is not empty, it has weeds growing in it. There are framed photos of people on every wall but I don’t know who they are. It’s not my house, I just live in it.

The water everyone uses to drink and bathe in is bought from a purification plant. No one eats meat anymore; you can’t put a hazmat suit on a cow to keep it from becoming tainted. We eat fruit and vegetables grown in indoor farms, free from radiation. I feel like a sci-fi movie without an ending but this is the only life I know. I grew up in a hazmat suit and mask. The only time I take the mask off is to eat and drink; it’s risky but you gotta live.

There’s no power in this area so there’s no need for a radio. I read books that I find. I like reading.

My two favourite books are called ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquezis.

Quite fitting titles for the worlds’ current condition, don’t you think?

Friday 1st

I don’t know why I’m writing things in some dead schoolgirl’s half-filled diary. For posterity? Who will read this? Does anyone care?

Every day I am a mouse on a running wheel with no ambition, no vision, no goal and no plan.

I have no relatives that I know of, and no friends by choice. What good are friends when they may suddenly die from this evil in the air? I’ve seen too many older co-workers die. A tickle in the throat becomes a lingering cough which turns into cancer of the lungs and then death.

Some die sooner than others though. These ones don’t get the sore throats or the weak lungs. They drop to the ground lifeless, with their only warning being a steady uncontrollable nose-bleed just before dying. Some die within minutes, others linger for a few hours watching their life drain away.

At least they get some time to wrap things up!

These infernal hazmat suits are only effective to a degree. It may be low-level radiation but it is everywhere. There is no chance of never breathing some of it in.

Saturday 2nd

I worked 12 hours today. I’m very tired and I go to bed now with a heart-shaped locket around my neck, as I have done every night of my life. It has something in it but I don’t know what. It was left for me by my parents in a black velvet box. The message inside the box requested that I don’t open the locket until I turn 40 years old, so that is what I shall do.

I barely remember my parents. I was once told they were horticultural scientists. They knew a lot about plants and crop production and that sort of thing. Were they excited about New Energy?

Mother and Father were 40 years old when they died, ultimately succumbing to the radiation. They were born one week apart, same month and year. They died exactly one month apart. Amazing, eh?

I lay in bed every night in my hazmat pyjamas and mask playing with the locket until I fall asleep, then I wear it most of the day. It is my way of being close to them.

Sunday 3rd

Today is my day off. Today I am 40 years old.

I opened the locket with a tiny key that was in the velvet box. Inside the locket was a single rolled-up blade of green grass enveloped by a note, all placed carefully inside a small vacuum-sealed bag.

At first I was disappointed that I had waited so long for what I thought was an anti-climactic discovery but my eyes filled with tears when I read their words. In case it gets lost I have written it down:

‘Dearest Son, you will never play in a field of green. This is what real life felt like. Love, Mum & Dad.’

I sit here now as I gently stroke the green blade of grass, imagining I am a boy playing with my parents in a meadow.

I very much doubt I shall write again. I am tired and have stained these pages with drops of blood coming from my nose.