Dan is sitting in the dark warmed only by the glow of his laptop computer run on a small bio-diesel generator he keeps ticking by running small errands and delivering rats for the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. His beard is long, his finger nails warn short from the endless typing on his laptop keyboard. He wears tattered smelly clothes, no-doubt 'hand-me-downs' from a family who once sort to help the lowly fool. There is a draft along the long dark alley where he perches himself against an old tired mattress fashioned from straw. His eyes are deeply sunken and red around the edges but opened as wide as they will go. A smile adores his face, a smile that has been all to seldom of late. His worn and dirty teeth begin to show under the bushy, filthy beard as the compiler finished it's final object linking cache.
His fingers shake as he anxiously presses the final key. He feels proud of himself as the achievement of finally compiling the first; multi-threaded, object oriented, 5-dimensional, temporal simulation of all of the universe's heavenly bodies to a precision of 5 nanometres. As he stands in triumph, the calculations are elegantly drawn on his screen. But just as quickly; the universe he created falls from his lap only to shatter in to a million pieces on the floor. He slumps to his knees, his face falls toward the ground and his shoulders hunch forward. Tears fall from the tip of his noes which make ripples in the puddle he is now kneeling in.
A door creaks opens behind him and a gentle hand is placed on the back of his neck. A faint whisper in his ears persuades him to get up and follow inside. He is warmed by the fireplace and fed with soup. He looks up to see a familiar face. One just as dirty as his, and a face almost transparent from the lack of sun. It is his old friend Dan W and his old supervisor Alec D only a few steps behind. He forces a wry smile, slowly realising they too had followed this path. The smile leaves quickly as he his mind travels back to that first day. The fateful day that started his decline from sanity and his eventual demise. A day that started with a few innocent physics simulations and ended in obsession.
*Dan wakes with a startle*
"Wow! was that an epiphany? better get back to my thesis, right after I try runing this code again, but this time with ....... "
A door creaks opens behind him and a gentle hand is placed on the back of his neck. A faint whisper in his ears persuades him to get up and follow inside. He is warmed by the fireplace and fed with soup. He looks up to see a familiar face. One just as dirty as his, and a face almost transparent from the lack of sun. It is his old friend Dan W and his old supervisor Alec D only a few steps behind. He forces a wry smile, slowly realising they too had followed this path. The smile leaves quickly as he his mind travels back to that first day. The fateful day that started his decline from sanity and his eventual demise. A day that started with a few innocent physics simulations and ended in obsession.
*Dan wakes with a startle*
"Wow! was that an epiphany? better get back to my thesis, right after I try runing this code again, but this time with ....... "
