A D Tier's Breaking Point

Chapter 21

Getting Morgan to finish their breakfast before poking at Monday's primary console felt like the only victory Alex was going to get today. It was a good victory to have, sure, but he struggled to enjoy it when Morgan kept rubbing at their eyes, and Alex couldn't tell if it was from the contacts or tiredness. Or both. It was probably both.

Morgan however had finally eaten and cleaned up enough to start tapping away at the keys, pulling up windows filled with scrolling text.

'I'd probably concede this one,' Joey whispered to Alex. 'Morgan gets very protective over Monday's code, they don't let most people near it.' Alex raised a curious brow at Joey, who shrugged, 'They stole her from some mad scientist that couldn't get her to work and basically rewrote all her core code.'

Alex's jaw dropped, 'Morgan built Monday?'

'Yes I did,' Morgan replied, not looking up from the screen. 'Don't look surprised, you're terrible at whispering Alex.'

Alex tried to not look insulted, and folded his arms as he watched the text scroll on the giant screen. 'So how long is it going to take to fix her?' he asked.

'Not sure yet,' Morgan said, scanning over the windows like they could actually understand the ridiculously fast scrolling pages. 'Depends on how much of the code has corrupted, and if the corrupted code is in core processing or in the external functions.' They started pointing at the various windows as if Alex was following along. 'If the core processing is fine then Monday herself is up in five minutes and can pick up some of the basic security tasks to free the teams up to fix everything else.'

Just as they finished explaining the computer sounded what felt like an alarm to Alex, as the smaller windows opened up to fill the entire wall, the text going to match it, and Morgan and Joey both swore as whole swathes of the text began to turn red. 'That doesn't look good,' Alex said.

Morgan's face was in their hands, shoulders taunt, before they slowly dragged their fingers through their hair. Alex winced as Morgan clearly hit some knots in their hair but they didn't seem to either notice or care. 'So the red code is corrupted.'

Alex looked up at the screen again. At least 2/3rd of what he was seeing was red text. 'Fuck. Um...I'm sorry?'

Morgan went to say something, but caught themselves and shook their head. 'It's not...unfixable. It'll just...take time. A lot of it.'

Joey looked ready to cry with despair at the thought, 'You want to manually rewrite 70% of Monday's code? Morgan that's insane. Do you see how complex she is?'

'Again,' Morgan said, 'Core processing is the most important part. So if we isolate that...' they returned to the keyboard, bringing up a smaller screen of code, that was almost entirely red, and Morgan swore again.

'93% of her core code is corrupted,' Joey laughed humourlessly. 'Perfect, we'll be all done in time for tea!'

'That's not helping,' Morgan growled, and Alex frowned as he looked between the two of them. 'I'm not going to ask you to work on all of this.'

Joey scoffed, 'You are not rewriting all of that code on your own.'

Morgan shrugged, 'I've done it before.'

'That was when she lived in a laptop, not on this monster of a processor,' Joey said, 'She's grown a lot since then so don't even pretend it's the same thing. And even if it was, that took you a month!'

'This might be a stupid question,' Alex cut in, 'But...if you have a copy of the code could you just copy and paste it back in?'

Morgan and Joey looked at him, then at each other. Morgan's face was reluctant, but Joey had begun to look hopeful. Morgan shook their head, 'Not a copy, we wouldn't want anyone to steal it.'