katerinaz80.livejournal.com (19th November 2002 | 07:22 MSK)

  Traces of Petersburgian algorithmic elegance embedded within sector 0xDEAD—sleek, viciously tuned routines that shouldn’t exist on this architecture.

  Code approaching the Kolmogorov asymptote.

  Felt like prying open an eight-bit calculator only to reveal it's been secretly crunching Lisp since 1986.

  Tried to recompile with modern toolchains. No joy. Syntax errors everywhere. Turns out the original dev left zero comments, just unleashed flawless магия in hex. Docs? Ха! Burned with the perforated paper.

  Meanwhile, management keeps pushing this “system upgrade” – some proprietary binary blob that’ll brick my entire stack. Can’t roll back. Can’t fork(). Process priority set to LOCKED.

  Plan: Rewrite entire BIOS from scratch using salvaged parity bits. ETA: ∞

  <18 comments>

  Katya hunched over the scuffed corner table at Café “Bytes,” immersing herself in the phosphorescent glow of the battered ДВК-2М's screen. Her mechanical pencil tapped subtle binary sequences on a café napkin—each stroke blurring as she struggled to keep the thin paper taught under the lead. The imperfect medium matched her fractured concentration. A silent recursive loop to anchor herself against the recoil of her father's ultimatum.

  Around her, the drone of exhausted fans mingled with the mechanical ticking of the brass clock mounted above the bar. The sharp scent of burnt pine resin from overheating cables blended with the earthy aroma of Irina's neglected ficus plant, nicknamed “Turing” by regulars. Amber light pooled from caged fixtures overhead, casting warm islands between the terminals where condensation dripped from cooling pipes in a rhythm that matched the percussion of shot glasses against mahogany.

  She scrolled through hexadecimal dumps one pixel fracture at a time, posture curled inwards. Green cursors reflected in her calculator watch's scratched crystal, mingling with fragmented code and jagged LiveJournal drafts fresh in her mind. The napkin's edge tore as she sketched another timing diagram, the flimsy paper betraying her intentions.

  The hum of an ancient UNIX box power cycling punctuated her focus. Across the room, pothos vines spilled from gutted oscilloscope casings and РЭА chassis mounted along ceiling beams, their variegated leaves softening the harsh lines of exposed server racks. No outward tremor betrayed her turmoil, merely the faint clutch of her knuckles whitening around her mechanical pencil.

  A shrill clang erupted as Azamat squeezed past the heavy metal door, an illuminated sign lettered “Байты” beneath reinforced glass. Damp November air clung to his windbreaker as he ducked past a tangle of cables and monitor glow, boots catching briefly on the worn rail running beneath the bar.

  “Извините, задержался,” he uttered quietly, shifting from one worn trainer to the other. One glance revealed smeared ink around his thumb and pallid skin beneath a reddened nose that seemed even ruddier from the cold. Fatigue knitted beneath everything.

  His eyes caught the napkin's ragged equations. Without comment, he extracted several pristine sheets of graph paper from his satchel, sliding them across the table. The orthogonal grid lines offered quiet clarity beneath the amber light—a silent offering of order amid chaos.

  Katya's shoulders relaxed a fraction as she transferred her calculations, mechanical pencil finding its natural rhythm against the familiar medium. Her diagrams bloomed with newfound clarity, each hex value and timing mark finding its proper place within the measured squares.

  While she worked, Azamat spread his own circuit diagrams with an unsteady hand, voice pitched softer.

  “Fifteen minutes wasted—these customs bastards blocked Tashkent's delivery again.”

  The café door scarcely rebounded before Irina slipped from behind the bar, weaving through terminals with flowing purpose. Amber light sparked against the circuit-patterned polish on her nails as she gripped Azamat’s shoulder.

  “You look like death reheated twice,” her Dublin lilt softened the jab. “Coffee?”

  Azamat slumped into the chair and nodded. Irina vanished behind the counter, then reappeared carrying a steaming mug reeking of burnt caramel fused with caustic chemicals—her notorious “programmer's decoction.” She thudded it on the table.

  “On the house. Might just stop your brain crashing mid-cycle.” Her gaze darted between them before settling on the diagnostic board, where LEDs stuttered in an urgent pattern. “Shout when you need me. Got a server pitching fits.”

  She retreated to her workstation, muttering commands that echoed through the café like distant radio chatter. After a moment’s contemplation, she reached up to a Radiotekhnika FM receiver perched high on the bar gantry. Its brushed aluminium face, softened by decades of cigarette smoke, caught the afternoon light.

  A solid click, a breath of static, and then the lazy brass of a forgotten dancefloor faded into the room. The mild echoes of эстрада, socialist-sanctioned funk, all swaggering horns and dampened snares—filtered through the warm drone of terminals and kettle-hiss. Irina had described the afternoon show to her as “fleamarket groove.”

  Katya let it loop into the rhythm of her thoughts. Her fingers continued to tap zeroes and ones—mentally mapping out an undocumented opcode's suspected behaviour inside the HD64180's MMU registers. Watching Azamat's forced calm fray at the edges, she recognized the grind: different orbits, but the same worn code of exhaustion scripted deep in skin and sinew.

  Azamat finished sketching a SCSI handshake timing wave, nostrils flaring as he smudged the ink. Her voice emerged clipped.

  “The upper 256 kilobytes remap clean with my banking registers, no conflicts between page zero and overlay. But… address wraparound during fast DMA—” her fingernail pressed into the copper-traced memory diagram, “—may drop volatile states if latch decay outpaces refresh timing. Needs hardware debounce. Or…”

  She trailed off. The paper now bore thin graphite over jagged notches, a nervous waveform oscillating inside a tidy block diagram.

  Azamat watched her rapid morse-like pattern against the sticky tabletop. “We can buffer the switching logic off a separate regulator? Something discrete enough to survive dropout spikes?”

  She nodded mechanically, jaw rigid. She forced her gaze onto the circuit's scratch marks, but the steady scraping of her nail revealed what her words did not—that beneath layered assembly mnemonics, panic frayed her circuitry.

  Condensation dripped like failing solder beads down Azamat's mug. He glanced away, thumb skimming the burned patch on his nose, then grazing a creased photograph wedged between customs invoices inside his satchel.

  “My sister,” Azamat's usual singsong cadence faded to a raw whisper. “Aijan. In Bishkek. Kyrgyz State Medical Academy, second year. Top of her class. State scholarship until policy changes. Contract fees choke like a vise. Three more years to go before she can practice.”

  Katya's fingers stilled on the tabletop. Her own father's ultimatums paralleled Azamat's financial bonds—isomorphic systems of control distinguished only in implementation.

  “Kyrgyz som turns worthless, rouble shrinks more. I promised her: No more will she don a waitress apron instead of scrubs and stethoscope.”

  He fished out a smudged telecom receipt, run through with red grease pencil: Western Union fees. “Half what I sell these chips for, gone to keep her there. Could've sold everything yesterday—all processors—to those Acron suits. Paid three years instead of two.” He thumbed the photo's corner. “Kept three aside instead. For this—because maybe sometimes money matters less than building something worth the name.”

  She traced the edges of her mechanical pencil, studying his hunched posture and the hollow in his cheek below that sunburnt nose. Her voice emerged quiet, fragile with risk. “My father waves Minister's epaulettes, thinks me a tool to bolster his legacy. Marriage contract on the desk now, signed in others' blood.” She squeezed the pencil. “Inside — I am not his ‘Yegor.’ I never was.”

  Azamat blinked, confusion flickering, then comprehension. Their eyes met over cooling coffee, fragments of trust sparking like shorted circuits in the shared hush. The wheezing of ancient floppy drives from the back room provided a buffer against eavesdroppers, a sonic curtain of privacy amidst the café's electronic syncopation.

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  Her hand trembled faintly but she no longer hid it. “My real work—my real self—buried under layers of compiled lies.”

  He set his weathered satchel on the tabletop. “You risk everything, too. For your truth.”

  Her fingertips resumed their nervous rhythm against the graph paper, pencil tip creating a deliberate sequence—five, five, seven, seven. The pattern matched the cadence of her heartbeat, quickened by the weight of confession. With each tap, she inscribed more than graphite; she etched trust into the page.

  They sat in silence, but the steady tapping created a primitive modem connection between isolated systems—transmitting understanding through the simplest of protocols.

  She continued, voice flat yet brittle at the edges.

  “My father booked the venue. June fourth. Dowry contracts signed behind my back, witnesses coerced. Petrov family ties neat in ink before I even agreed.”

  A shudder arced through her wrist, pencil scratching a crooked diagonal across faded circuit maps.

  “If I comply,” she pressed on slowly, “I exile myself inside—a walking corpse carrying his name, his expectations. If I refuse...” Her jaw locked. “He brands me traitor to blood and party.”

  Azamat's weathered fingers gripped his coffee mug, eyes widening with concern.

  “In America, venture firms covet my assembly code, not the fa?ade.” Her pencil stilled against the graph paper. “Their visas offer escape vectors—ugly freedom, but freedom nonetheless. I could vanish into California's back alleys, my work buried in proprietary kernels, my existence reduced to NDA signatures and anonymous code commits.”

  Her chest jerked in a shallow hitch as she blinked rapidly. “So choose: live behind a mask forever or become a fugitive. Both a kind of exile.”

  The café's bell screeched. Vitya slipped inside, blurred by rain. His white-knuckled grip crushed his backpack strap as he scanned the café with jumpy looks—over the glass teletypes, the solder-scorched countertop, past the ZZ plant thriving impossibly in a repurposed brass samovar, straining through the misted window as if someone had followed him.

  Her pencil froze mid-loop. His vigilance mirrored her own habitual caution—reading rooms for threats as readily as voltage levels, mapping exits before greeting faces.

  Rain dripped from his hair as he twisted his backpack tighter. His jaw worked, words caught behind clenched teeth, as he pushed through the tables towards them, never presenting his back to the entrance.

  The binary code resumed its faint taps beneath her fingers. Her pulse matched the rhythm of a hunted animal who recognized another.

  Vitya's fingers fumbled with an unlabelled disc. He stood near but avoided the empty stools, clutching his backpack strap. The disc rotated between his thumb and forefinger.

  “They approached after the demo. Eleven seventeen at night.” His voice dropped low. “No introduction, just handed me this and vanished. Said it was ‘a puzzle worthy of your skills.’”

  A muscle twitched beneath his eye.

  “They knew exactly what they were doing. Mentioned my mother—” His voice cracked. “Like twisting a knife.”

  Each word emerged clipped and precise, as if he feared saying too much.

  “Can't risk running it alone. Unknown contents, no way to verify—could be anything.”

  He remained by the door, unwilling to move deeper into the room.

  “Seen this before. They're testing me, probing for weakness.” Fear flickered across his face. “Either I play their game or face the consequences.”

  As his thumb clicked the write-protect shutter open then closed, she recognized the hesitation to dive into what might snare or betray. In his caution she saw her own guarded silences—both carriers of unspeakable risk, clutching fragile shells of work and solitude, trying to avoid the poisoned payload hidden where only code should exist.

  They'd do this together.

  * * *

  Katya's hand hovered over the crumpled schematics as Irina ducked behind a tank-like Pentagon 128. The computer sat encased in a ГОСТ frame, its gleaming alloy shell catching the dim light. Irina pried open the chassis, revealing a faint smear of flux residue on the circuitry inside. Katya stepped forward, gripping her mechanical pencil like a conductor's baton.

  She steadied the PCB while Irina spat a Trinity curse at a stubborn jumper wire snagged beneath the bus riser. Her pencil tapped out rhythmic markers as she studied the tangled arteries of wires and solder joints. Memory maps unfurled in her mind's eyes—address overlays, batch transfer windows, DMA latch timings—clean abstractions erasing the raw remnants of their earlier conversation.

  Tracing the ribbon cable with her fingernail, Katya pinpointed a hairline fracture on the twelve-volt trace. Pressing to probe continuity, she then snatched a roll of electrical tape from the table.

  “Steady hands, Kat. Didn't peg you for hardware repair,” Irina said, voice low.

  “Fastest way to isolate voltage leaks. BIOS won't load properly without clean power rails.”

  After applying a segment of the splicing tape, she smoothed it flat along the ribbon. Breath lengthened. Binary cascades swept away the quiver in her chest. Logic gates drowned the rising panic.

  “Try now.”

  Irina toggled a DIP switch. The amber phosphor ignited; TR-DOS banner snapped into view, cursor pulsing steady.

  Katya fixed on the debug prompt—sanctuary in assembler's certainty, unlike family demands or Azamat's raw confession. She settled behind the console as Irina fed in the disk. An unfamiliar shell blinked alive, loading prompt spiralling a rolling cipher that parsed line by line:

  :: MOSCOW EXCHANGE NODEMAP – ACCESS LIST V1.2B ::

  217 095-217-3392 – 9600 – Suspected US switch import (Bell 5ESS): unstable

  324 095-324-9801 – 1200 – Local industrial SCADA dialin: obfuscated routing

  402 095-402-1144 – 14400 – Private exchange near Nagatino – possible GRU use

  451 095-451-7759 – 9600 – Cellular mux port, Ericsson AXE backend

  588 095-588-4420 – 19200 – Shared academic node (RSUH), known IRC bounce

  622 095-622-7107 – 4800 – Outbound SIP test node, traffic anomalies flagged

  705 095-705-0198 – 9600 – Unregistered exchange, possible honeypot

  INSTRUCTIONS:

  Connect to any node. Identify weaknesses in vulnerable equipment.

  Her lungs shortened their draw, the floor's warped planks sticky beneath her shoes. She pressed closer to the terminal, fight or flight soldered into her nerves.

  Lines of noise transformed into snippets of mangled ciphertext, then a terse challenge: Identify callers on secure lines without disrupting encrypted stream integrity.

  An oracle attack. Recognition of the phrase gutted her—filtered through cigar smoke at her father's dinner parties. Uninhibited officials boasting about capturing agent assignments, coercing academics, and exploiting timing leaks on vital signals.

  “It simulates a telecom exchange hack…” Azamat's hushed voice cut through the static.

  “Not just a challenge.” Katya's fingers hovered over the keyboard, her throat tightening. “It's recruitment. Same techniques my father's circle brag about.”

  The sickening dance of power dressed as science wove through her earliest memories.

  Petrov family dowries, false identities, her father's gruff commands—all ran through signals operations designed to unmask protected speech under false banners of order. Not abstract puzzles. Weapons deployed against voices like hers.

  Certainty drained from Azamat's voice. “Someone targets Vitya for…”

  She tapped the screen where the cipher challenge beckoned. “This is real. They extract patterns from encrypted traffic without breaking the encryption itself—watching who speaks rather than what they say.”

  Static-laced voices sliced through the hum of cooling fans as a news bulletin interrupted the muted musical backdrop of the café.

  “…grain output down thirty-nine percent compared to last year… urgent re-allocations underway… expected rationing in several oblasts…” spoke a brusque announcer from the receiver behind the bar.

  Katya tightened her grip around the pencil as Azamat stared into his coffee, thumb frozen midway wiping condensate. His eyes flickered—calculating rather than absorbing. She watched fatigue transform beneath a surface glaze of numbers, logistics, potential routes. Already, he dissected this crisis: how scarcity threatened Bishkek remittances and processor deals alike.

  A mirror inversion sparked within her. Much as his focus penetrated macro-crisis, she buried her own constriction beneath register maps. Grain collapse or marriage decree, blockade or broken trace—they both retreated into solvable schemata. In that silence she recognized the silent triage: prioritize the fixable, relegate the intolerable.

  She powered down the Pentagon 128 and ejected the disc, handing it to Vitya. Their eyes locked between spilt graphite and schematic scars, as the afternoon music show picked up again.

  Vitya's pupils contracted to pinpricks, the disk quivering in his fingers. His jaw slackened before snapping shut, as if clamping down on an outcry. Moisture tracked down his temple, neither sweat nor rain.

  “They mentioned my mother. They know where she sleeps.” His throat caught. “I safeguard my work obsessively. But if they push, threaten her, maybe best I leave your project. Disconnect—rather than drag all of you down for my family's sake.”

  His thumb worried the floppy's spindle, before he caught himself. The nervous working of his hands betraying the calculation occupying him.

  “You don't draw such eyes unless you're valuable or vulnerable. Neither safe.”

  Irina clutched a screwdriver beneath terminal glow; though she busied herself re-seating an IDE connector, her attention darted sharply towards Vitya.

  Azamat curled inward, as if winter chill enveloped him. Yet where terror distorted Vitya's careful stoicism, calculation bloomed in Azamat's features.

  “You realise,” he said quietly, “with yields collapsing, the agrochemical plants will scramble to revive mothballed lines. Half their SCADA boards died years ago. Sourcing even dirty processor clones suddenly means triple price.”

  His expression brightened under shadows, fixated on the rouble signs behind each failed logic controller.

  “Timing rules it all. Dead wheat or live deals—”

  Irina snorted poisonously before returning to her diagnostics.

  “We dissect this game properly.” She tapped the screwdriver against the terminal casing. “Away from unwanted spectators.”

  Katya silently stacked photocopies and graph paper scraps, sliding the graphite-smudged and torn napkin under LiveJournal printouts. She nodded once, sharply.

  In her skull, parallel clocks ticked. One unravelled the oracle exploit challenge—a jackal disguised as contest, crafted ensnare. The other prowled for exits on fragile papers—a web between asset obligations and dreams of self. Her father's marriage contract, bearing a dead magistrate's seal, crushed any hope of legal escape.

  Azamat's fingers jittered against his coffee mug.

  “The Pentagon project must go dark for a week. No file swaps. No discussions except for here or Dima's garage.”

  “Agreed,” Vitya whispered, pocketing the disk with trembling fingers. “Wednesday. 19:00. I'll bring my debug suite.”

  “I'll tell Dima.” Irina began tapping out a message on her Nokia.

  The decision hung quietly among them, woven from both the exploit's recursive twist and each of their personal labyrinths' exposed nerves. Visible proof that vulnerabilities—whether etched in silicon or flesh—always nested just below the surface, waiting for extraction.

  Yet as she watched her companions' resolve form, Katya saw something else: when systems buckle, people remain. Their collective resilience might not rewrite her identity's machine code, but it offered a compiler that recognized her syntax.

  They gathered their belongings to leave, their sketched timing diagrams and architecture schemes concealed but not abandoned.