Activated

chapter 3 (There are no programs)

There are no programs 

“Greetings! I’m Beika from northwest, and I sit in the second row in Rudi-Pro.” She stopped in front of him and smiled. Most people chuckled soon after this and introduced themselves in turn. This was the first time it did not work.

The program trainee she addressed sat on the grass beside a sapling and stared at the weeds at his feet. He had sturdy pants on, and dark leather shoes, which was probably why the grass did not bother him. His hair was colored like the evening roses. Her own salt-and-pepper hair was boring compared to his.

The young man sighed as he stood up. “Stay away from me.” He walked away, dragging his feet.

“Can’t I get your name, at least?” she called out.

“Lan.”

#

“Not everything can be solved by a program.” the teacher said. Which was odd, because this one taught rudimentary programming: making sure that all the new trainees knew how to correctly activate any program, and how to deactivate any program.

All things and all life is controlled by programs. Programs kept the world in place, kept bodies intact, kept life going. Heal programmers controlled and manipulated lifecodes. Fire programmers controlled fire programs. There were many other types of programs, all controlling some aspect of life in the world. Everything IS because of programs.

So what did the teacher mean? She was a heal programmer, after all — at least, she was training to be one. How was she supposed to be helpful to others if not everything could be solved by encoding a program, correcting lifecodes, and healing someone?

Beika mulled over the question instead of watching the teacher demonstrate how to deactivate a simple attack program. She asked him about that statement after class.

“Take him, for instance,” Teacher Fauci gestured toward the window. He directed her attention to a young man with rose-colored hair, seated under a tree and staring at the grass. She knew that he was a classmate who sat at the back of the room, but nothing else. “There are no programs for his problem.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Beika asked.

“Why don’t you find out?” the teacher replied with a smile. “If you manage to solve it…I will let you pass the culminating examination, no questions asked.”

Beika’s eyes grew wide. Her grades were not particularly good in Rudi-Pro. There were rumors that Fauci gave a difficult culmi. “You promise, Teacher?”

Fauci placed his hands together and closed his eyes for a moment. They almost disappeared inside the billowing sleeves of his ocean-blue programming tunic. When he opened them again, he presented Beika with a very small memory ruby. “Present this to me at the culmis.”

Beika resurfaced the memories the teacher encoded into the memory ruby, and confirmed that it contained the conversation they just had. She pocketed the memory ruby and grinned at Fauci.

Find out what was wrong with a classmate, and deal with it. How hard could it be?

#

The basic training hall was a large and lengthwise stone-brick edifice that sprawled across two blocks, with an open area in the middle for programming practice and special occasions. Trainee programmers of all types first passed through basic training to learn the fundamentals of their skills, before being trained by their specific guilds at the advanced training halls. Generations of programmers had passed through its corridors and rushed through its grand staircase from one class to the next. Beika could point to a certain brick at the staircase that her father had effaced in his trainee days.