Page 3 of Time Stops With You

My eyebrows tighten until they meet in the middle of my forehead. Who the hell barged into my program uninvited?

Error message after error message pops up. Each time I find a way to trap him, the hacker slithers out of my grasp like a wiry snake. The war rages for what feels like hours, but the clock only shows a two minute difference.

And then it’s over as abruptly as it began.

The hacker disappears into thin air, leaving a bread crumb that fizzles out to a dead end.

I scroll through the code, bewildered and mesmerized. This programming language is unlike anything I’ve seen before.

“What was that?” Asad asks, breathing hard as if he just ran a two-hundred mile marathon.

“The Russians!” Dr. Young barks.

“Wasn’t them,” I grumble.

“How are you so sure?” Dr. Young challenges.

The man has a brilliant mind that is easily swayed by conspiracy theories. His eccentricity is the sole reason I could convince him to join this project.

“Look here. And here.” I point to the backward slash in the lines of the code the hacker left behind. “Coding is binary and universal, but every country has a slightly different language. The Russians don’t use this symbol.”

“Maybe it was an American working for the Russians,” Dr. Young counters.

I don’t bother answering him. My mind whirs with fresh concern. “Whoever the hacker is, their approach is far too imaginative and unusual to be an organized attack. This felt…”

“What?” Asad hangs on my every word.

“Like a… game.”

“Who plays games at this level?” Dr. Young bellows. “Check again. I bet they left a ransom notice.”

“They didn’t.”

“Did they steal anything?” Asad asks, rubbing his neck in concern.

“No. They didn’t erase anything either.”

Murmurs of ‘that’s so strange’ break out from the team.

“Whatever that was, at least it’s over now and we didn’t lose years of progress,” Asad declares, pushing up his glasses with a thick finger.

Everyone seems reassured.

Except me.

Something still feels off and I can’t put a finger on it.

Dr. Young’s video lights up neon. “Cullen, if I may, I think now would be a good time to remind the team of programming fundamentals. Especially in times like these, we should have a back up of our back ups…”

Dr. Young begins a lecture on security protocols, while I continue to scroll. I read the code line by line until...

There.

I stop cold when I see an unexpected string of code introduced at the very start of the hacker’s attack.

There are two simple words.

HELLO WORLD.

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