Reconfigure

Roisin Kincade is a young, talented, full stack techie. Her mind is full of thoughts, ideas, film quotes and analogies. She knows and understands Flow, allowing herself to be in the zone when coding. That takes it out of her. Dropping out of Flow, as she did that night, means inattention. She is not a great fan of command lines, nor of systems admin, at the best of times. Finishing a long coding session she just had to do some minor file system tidying up. We have all done it, typed the wrong thing into the wrong window, deleted the wrong file, messaged the wrong person. This time she typed a Linux command in the wrong place. She missed the terminal window and managed to Tweet the World instead. She expected the public ridicule, the trolls and the bot responses, but she did not expect an automated Direct Message. Neither did she expect to spend the next few days using a game engine to help her talk to a new system. It seemed like she was hacking an old school text adventure game, by invitation, but it was much more! A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her. Reconfiguring anything in the real world might attract some attention? It might attract attention from parties more interested in controlling the World themselves? She didn't know who they were, she had never heard of them. The corporate cartels have the world pretty much to themselves. They exist above governments and security agencies. She knew they dodged taxes but she didn't know they watched everything everywhere. She didn't know they kept an eye out for such things, such anomalies. A late night Tweet led her to be able to do things for real she had only done in game code and virtual worlds. Now she was alone, off the grid, with no signal. She had a plan, but it might, like those hated command line interfaces, be terminal!