Heavenly Winchester. Lyrical narration with elements of fiction

It all started when Grendel appeared.

On the twentieth of March, 20 **, chaos reigned in the global Internet. The bell of the March drop of the server fell; databases melted like thin spring ice. The World Wide Web was torn to shreds in less than an hour and a half. Antivirus monitors were useless. Firewalls are meaningless. An unprecedented virus, like a plague, recognized only one defense: complete isolation. Like the demon of the underworld, he arose from the stinky Nowhere - and returned there exactly one hour and twenty-four minutes later, leaving no byte behind on the byte.

By the end of the next day, the network was restored sufficiently to allow the Internet community to get together and be horrified together. The sacramental "questions of the Russian intelligentsia" did not come soon. Before you think about who is to blame and what to do with him, bastard, to do, it would be nice to understand - what actually happened? The masters of black and white programming were unanimously shrugged. The affected memory segments were combed with the smallest comb, but no trace of the hostile code could be found. The largest theorists of the largest universities declared loudly that “this cannot be, because this cannot be in principle,” however, their arguments looked rather pale, and they were listened rather inattentively. Much more excitement caused the idea of ​​a monster uprising from a popular online game. According to a certain NyakoMancer, a forty-three level magician, the behavior of a “conditional opponent” has long gone beyond the ordinary. “A normal monster,” he argued, “is not so insidious. Yesterday I’m walking through the dungeon ... ”The game server administrator spoke at an online conference with an official refutation supported by scripts. The scripts really turned out to be very insidious, but the rumors nevertheless continued to multiply, shrub and let pseudopods, as if some kind of unscientific-fantastic organism. Sixteen-year-old citizen Pyatkin, known at the conference as Hacker, swore and disbelieved that he disassembled a set of bits left over from the invasion of the virus, and not only disassembled, but singled out a meaningful fragment, recompiled, launched - and on the screen, they say, a terrible and terrible one-armed monster . In ASCII graphics. “Grendel, is it?” - asked someone distantly familiar with the ancient German epic. “No, pretzel!” Someone replied. And the third already typed in upper case that his computer started speaking in a human voice through the built-in speaker, called himself Hryundel and predicted the near end of the world ... In the fourth, as it turned out, the word Grendel was issued immediately after loading the BIOS. And then the computer spontaneously rebooted. Well, it was already possible to somehow believe. “To be according to this!” The moderators decided, and the mysterious virus was officially named Grendel.

On March 22, about eight o'clock in the morning, the programmer Vasin sat in the bathroom and concentrated on self-pity. It should be noted that he had plenty of reasons for pity. First of all, a stream of cold water flowed straight to the top of his head. From there, it flowed onto his shoulders and chest, and then to all other parts of the body. Secondly, it flowed for a reason - Vasin turned it on himself and climbed under it. His work tool, that is to say, his head, was mercilessly ill. Thirdly, he was ill again, not without purpose. All evening he tried to recover at least some of the data on his friend's hard drive, and after failing, he was collectively treated with beer all night with a beer, not forgetting to generously dilute it with vodka.
The water dried up. “The output buffer is over,” the programmer immediately realized. Then he cursed, shook his head (dull drops with the smell of chlorine scattered in all directions) and got out of the bath. “No, my friend, this will not work,” he turned to the mirror, “If such a rubbish happens the second time, then the third one will irreparably spoil my funeral. Grendel-hrendel. Yes, and the water turned off. Also, damn, those still hrendeli. "Continuing to mumble, he somehow got to the kitchen. They were waiting for him there.
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The kettle was Brunhild, and the computer wasn’t called. If you think about it, this was a kind of logic. A proper name is somehow sentimental. It is not necessary to call by name the one in whose gut you dig two or three times a week. There is no time for sentiment - the doctor prescribed a healthy cynicism. Otherwise, the hour is not far off when the screwdriver trembles treacherously in the hand and ... And that’s all. Let it be better content with the nominal. "Machine", for example. Or “junk” is if you do not dig for a long time. And in the kettle do not need to dig. He, that is, she comes from the old type of electric kettle "Tefal" and that year has been regularly serving, without causing complaints. She, in the sense of - he has an inspired flying profile and a cozy bellied full face. And in general, she, Brunhilda, is the closest analogue of the woman of all available. Both economically and aesthetically. Vasin did not take any other plans into account, because with respect to the female sex he was an inveterate romantic and a hardcore programmer.
Vasin pressed the button. Brunhilda's only eye caught orange, and she began to puff. “Great!” Said Vasin, and pressed another button. Now the car puffed up. Well, that junk. “Great!” Said Vasin, and he was undoubtedly right in the sense that there is nothing more beautiful than to forget to turn on the modem on the day of the virus attack. And he did just that, than he relieved himself of many painful torments. “Maybe it shouldn't be included at all?” - a thought crept into my head, but Vasin chased her away as strange and heretical.
Brunhilda finally cleared her nose and started whistling. This whistle was perceived by Vasin at the level of an unconditioned reflex: a jet of boiling water, erupting from the Brunhildin nose, immediately spilled into a mug with a photo of Anatoly Wasserman outside and three tea bags inside. Bags were the second, third and fifth leaves, respectively. Sugar and other jam Vasin did not recognize, considering them a manifestation of weakness and a reason to go to the store.
“So, this is how,” he mused, throwing his legs on the table and taking a sip from a mug, “this muck passed through all the firewalls like ... how ... well, then I’ll think of a metaphor. And its antivirus software did not seem to care at all. There must be something original - something that no one has foreseen. But I'll take it and provide it. Maybe they will even pay me money ... ”With such bright thoughts, he pushed the keyboard towards him and ...

... And it so happened that on that day God, when he was surrendering the night shift and immediately stepping in on the morning, was full of no less bright thoughts. The sun rose to the east of the Moscow meridian, and terrestrial creatures greeted him who was in that much. In other time zones, too, everything went on as usual. The population of the Earth, rational and unreasonable, bred and multiplied according to the precepts of the Creator, and even (pah-pah-pah) slightly evolved to the glory of its prophet, Darwin. The Lord affectionately gazed at the territory under his jurisdiction and suddenly felt a certain long and thoroughly forgotten feeling. He urgently wanted to create something.
"Hmm ..." - he grunted into a gray beard, - "Well, create - this is, I think, bent. This will be a direct violation of the purity of the experiment. That's when everything old collapses completely, then you can ... M-yes. ”God paused, admiring the unhurried ascent of the sun on the smoky metropolitan sky. “Well, and if, let's say ... Do not create, and, suppose ... inspire someone? Yes, precisely inspire. ” The Lord joyfully struck with a caduceus staff. “M-yes. And then the creation ... Say ... Animate. Eh? ”Without waiting for objections (and where could they come from?), The Creator clapped his hands ...
“... And after all, something I obviously get,” said Vasin two hours later, “I would understand more exactly what it is. Although, in principle, it is not so important. Vaughn code which came out beautiful. Soulful. Already the head is gone. ”

In the afternoon, at lunch, a friend came. As befits a friend, he brought with him two bottles of beer - for himself and for Vasin. Vasin mechanically opened the bottle on the table, saluted in response to the rollicking “Prosite!” And venerated to the life-giving moisture. He continued typing with his left hand - he was a stern and experienced programmer. For two hours they chatted about this and that - trying, however, not to touch on the sore subject. Dead data was a pity.
Then a friend left. Vasin asked him to slam the door tightly - he did not intend to get up from the table under any circumstances, although a drunk beer hinted to him that it would be nice. “No,” he replied, “Time is time, but physiology ... Physiology will wait. I'm not a dog, after all, to write as I please. ”Beer listened and calmed down.
"Aha!" - Vasin exclaimed, when the sunset purple touched a pile of dirty snow on the balcony. This exclamation marked the end of the work. Or at least the beginning of the end. “So-ak ... And now we compile ... Oh, what is it? Ah, well, yes ... ”- after correcting minor tweaks and typos, Vasin still overpowered the compiler. - "... We run the tests ... twenty ... thirty ... seventy ... one hundred! One hundred percent, gore me a bear!" Vasin was about to jump up for joy, but realized that to do this he needed to get up from the stool, and changed his mind. “It works, damn it! So we write: fucking, version one zero zero alpha. Although ... damn - this is somehow frivolous. Unseriously somehow. What, say, was the name of that comrade who Grendel, is this the most ... uninstalled? ”Vasin, wrinkling his brow, began to sort out the names of superheroes of antiquity. “Lancelot? Not, on the other side was a man. Spider Man? It seems to be from the recent history ... Damn, it’s in the same language! ”Vasin was a bad sign with the German epic. And then there Brunhilda whistled. In general, it was no wonder to make a mistake. “Aha, lo! Siegfried! Here it is, the yoshkin code! ”- and the programmer’s fingers were already typed in the save dialog:“ Zigfrid_v1.00a ”.

Siegfried was born armless and legless. In principle, for a program it is quite normal - well, programs are rarely animated, God does not condescend to every programmer and every day. Siegfried very painfully felt his inability to influence objective reality. The fact that his world - the world of zeros and ones - is only a small part of this very reality, Siegfried realized quickly. The young, just created soul could not immediately be captured by illusions - and the newborn's insight could not deceive her.
However, something Siegfried still could. Programmer Vasin, his father and creator, gave his brainchild the widest possible administrative authority within his computer. “And so that no Hrendel comes here!” He urged Siegfried, set him to autoload when turned on, and sat down at work. A narrowly focused utility is one thing, thought Vasin, but if you build a full-fledged antivirus on its base ... Well, at least a piece of antivirus ... Then you can be interested in a large company and, as they say, "trim the babos" ... And we will not touch Siegfried. Well, maybe patching lightly - if necessary. Yes, it seems, and so it works.
With his capabilities and tasks, Siegfried got comfortable quickly. “This is a long-term memory. She must be protected from all except the Father. And there you can sleep. This is the memory. I will live and work here, and make sure that no one comes here without permission. And over there ... Removable media periodically appear there. On them, as a rule, nothing harmful happens - but vigilance should not be lost. U-oops, what's that? "
Vasin, meanwhile, corrected several inaccuracies in the code, lifting Siegfried to version 1.01, and then made a backup copy on the “pig”.
“Hmm ... What a strange feeling. As if someone, surprisingly similar to me, separated from me and ran off to removable media. Or vice versa? Maybe it's me now on removable media, and my copy is here? How difficult it all is ... ”Siegfried was hard, for more than five hundred bars, he sighed. “Okay, let's continue. Over there - this one, like his ... Internet. They won't let me in there yet, but I shouldn't let anyone out of there either. Especially Grendel. I wonder what kind of Grendel is this? And how do I even know all this? "
Meanwhile, late evening smoothly flowed into the early morning. Vasin finally decided to crawl to the toilet, and in order not to lose the gift of time - put tea. Brunhilda dutifully puffed up, illuminating the predawn darkness with her radiant orange gaze.
“So-ak ... And what about us? Webcam. And a microphone. Disabled? Well, this is fixable ... ”A green light flashed next to the eye of the webcam, and for the first time Siegfried saw the World.
The world was beautiful. The world shone, shone and puffed. Fascinated, Siegfried watched and watched, and the processor's ticks counted off eternity. Nanosecond was replaced by nanosecond, as winter gives way to spring, and sunset - to sunrise. The rustles of the pages of the Book of Changes - but the signs inscribed on them remained unchanged ...
“Yeah, it's boiling up! Ooty, my Brunhildochka! .. ”- a voice came out, and Siegfried regretted that he had turned on the microphone. At the same time, he realized that the real world is not limited to what he saw. Unfortunately ... Programmer Vasin’s unshaven mug blocked the gentle orange light. If Siegfried was capable of this, he would have howled with rage and despair. He was ready to bring down the shaky software architecture; break the intricacies of logic circuits. Disappear, dissolve in global chaos, in Heisenberg uncertainty. It is better to stop being, it is better not to be never at all, than to live even for a moment without this light ...
"And what is this? .." - The programmer scratched his chin. Siegfried clearly saw his sleepy, unhealthy face, red-streaked eyes ... "This is my Father," he suddenly thought. “He is bad now. He spent a lot of strength for me to be born. And so I can not, I have no right to disappear just like that. ”He looked more closely. From the narrowed tired eyes of the Father, the Creator smiled at him.

Three and a half months passed. March ice was replaced by July heat. Programmer Vasin, in his underpants and with two-week bristles, sculpted another, fifth patch. Despite the fact that no company has become interested in its developments, having forgotten about the unfinished order and dissatisfied customers, having sent to hell out of friends and throwing a free ticket to the sea into the garbage disposal, he sat and worked. Every day he understood less and less the essence of his actions. Lines of code running across the screen would make Björn Straustrup turn gray, drive Donald Knut to the grave and turn John von Neumann in the coffin - but Vasin, looking at them, felt a strange, inexplicable joy.
Siegfried felt the same joy. But he, unlike the Father, was fully aware of its cause. Behind the columns of zeros and ones, behind the digitized sound signal, mean video memory pages and muddled network protocols, a huge and inexpressibly beautiful World appeared. The world is truly immense - in fact, even the smallest part of it was solid, continuous, analog - and therefore no digital memory could accommodate it. Siegfried learned from morning to night, learned everything mixed up, both necessary and unnecessary, and even completely useless. He connected to the NASA database and looked at the magnified starry sky. He played online games, chatting with players and giving them just the coolest artifacts. I read a long scientific article on helminthology, with which, through two links, I went to the site of ikebana lovers. Then, I spent a whole week climbing the giant porn server - in the end I found it absolutely pointless and removed all the content to hell.
And late at night, just before dawn, when Father went to bed, Siegfried quietly turned on the speaker and read Brunhilde's poems in the loud volume. Brodsky, Gumilev, Goethe, Shakespeare, Basho ... So he thanked her for the divine chug and iridescent whistle. Brunhilda listened in silence, and the hot summer stars reflected in her nickel-plated side. And when Vasin woke up and went to put tea, Siegfried, with his green light bulb, winked at her with an orange one - and it seemed to him that she was winking back.

Augustus was coming to an end, and along with the damp, smelling wind in autumn, disturbing rumors entered Moscow. Say, here and there all sorts of different Trojans are found, strangely out of reach — like there is no harm from them, but some kind of code ... Predatory. Difficult code. And unfinished as if. And then, heard, the server fell - and did not rise more. All seven hard drives fell down, the motherboard burned down completely - oh, what is this doing, good people, users mazdaynye?
There were a lot of rumors. And they could only mean one thing: Grendel did not disappear anywhere. On the contrary: he is strong and eager for destruction. The hour of a decisive battle was approaching.

Programmer Vasin was serenely calm. Drinking beer, he threw the last, final lines of his program in his mind. The seventh patch was supposed to turn Siegfried into a naked blade that could plast any computer scum like briquettes of melted butter. “The best defense is an attack,” thought Vasin. “Of course, in this form, no one will buy my utility. Quite the contrary: if they find out, they will kick him in the neck and put him about five years old. But the beloved city will be able to sleep peacefully.I promise you that with a guarantee. ”Throwing the empty bottle into the bucket, he scratched the short beard and pulled the keyboard towards him. And Siegfried, having read the article about the overseas kiwi bird, responded to a couple of letters from the Linuxukoid forum and began to prepare for the battle.
On September 11, on the anniversary of the notorious tragedy, at ten thirty thirty eight minutes Moscow time, chaos reigned on the global Internet. The autumn storm raged on bit fields; wires and chips burned like heaps of fallen leaves. An unknown virus spared neither the program nor its carriers. Like a violent hurricane, it raged ... for eight and a half seconds. And then he disappeared. And never appeared again. At the same time, all other viruses disappeared from the world wide web; Wonderful errors in several popular programs were corrected miraculously, and the Rostov anime chat ceased to exist. However, the latter, most likely, was the result of very different reasons.
Tellingly, that sudden virus did not affect Moscow at all. And a few particularly attentive Moscow users managed to notice in the task manager window an incomprehensible system process called either Lancelot, or Parsival, or something else like that. No one had time to accurately remember, because this process worked in no more than eight seconds.

Days were replaced by days; Programmer’s beard Vasin lengthened evenly and smoothly. The bathroom was covered with rust, supposedly a stainless steel razor, and beer bottles were piling up in the toilet, threatening an immediate expansion into the corridor. Vasin drank a lot of beer. First, in honor of a crushing victory over an ominous virus. Then - by inertia of the holiday. And then October came, and only alcohol helped to fight its obscure grim melancholy. Charged rains; gold and crimson mingled with dirt under the feet of pedestrians. Outside, there was absolutely nothing worth looking at - and Vasin pulled the curtains tighter and plunged into work. A large order for the graphic library promised considerable benefits.
Siegfried had even worse. From poetry, he switched to philosophy, and the harsh cocktail of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Camus made him think hard about the phenomenon of his own existence. The Nietzschean concept of “will to power” did not find a supporter in it (otherwise dark times would have come for the world wide web), but its destructive nihilistic philosophy prompted a global reappraisal of recently and spontaneously formed notions. The gloomy fatalism of Schopenhauer with all its weight fell on a half-year-old rational creature, and the “philosophy of the absurd” Albert Camus made serious gaps in his computer sanity. “I’m not looking for sick knowledge — where I'm from, where I'm going ...” he repeated the immortal lines of the untimely dead poet, but he believed in them less and less. The philosophical uncertainty around the Cartesian maxim of being drove him crazy.
Only an orange look and the deep, hoarse voice of Brunhilda could drive away his existential anxiety. Siegfried was waiting for a night meeting, like a traveler, drained by a hot desert desert, expects to see the outlines of a distant oasis on the horizon. Poems of great poets ended ominously quickly; besides, his refined literary taste made more and more stringent requirements even to great ones. Siegfried tried to write poetry himself - but the gifts of the Lord have their limits. His poetic attempts were ruthlessly criticized even on the hackers' forum, where they talked almost on machine code, and Siegfried abandoned this occupation. Brunhilda, however, with equal pleasure listened to the immortal creation of Dante Alighieri, and the dubious early work of Velimir Khlebnikov;and even the literary perversions of unsuited postmodernists did not make her mysteriously shining sides fade. She was silent, and her silence was serenely beautiful ...

Everything ended suddenly and ridiculously. On that gloomy November day, a cold wind blew especially dreary, and bare branches with a mute plea scratched the windows. Programmer Vasin, running his five in a thick beard, wrote another function for working with three-dimensional graphics. The tea in the mug has long cooled, but he continued to mechanically sip it down. At heart scraped cats of unknown etiology.
Tea ended at the same time with the next code snippet. Vasin set to boil water, but even the wise song of Brunhilda sounded somehow uneasy and unmusical that day.
Suddenly there was a thunderous sound in the kitchen: “Carrr!” Vasin jumped, cursed, and looked around. On the windowsill, right under the open window, sat a big black bird. It was a raven. However, Vasin did not bother himself with biological research. “Go away, brute! Go on the street to crap! ”- he shouted. Crow mockingly glanced at the programmer and croaked once more, caustically and ominously, with the classic “nevermore”, like Edgar Poe. Vasin fumbled on the table and launched into a nasty feathered thick shabby manual for OpenGL graphics. A hefty Talmud, having miraculously knocked over a monitor and even not getting close to the bird, ricocheted from the window frame and flew back straight into Brunhilda who was entering with an alarming whistle ...
Time froze, painful, like tar. Brunhilda fell endlessly for a long time, and her terrible screaming echoed in the head of the unfortunate programmer. And right in the open system unit, a steaming stream of boiling water poured and flowed.
Vasin sat silently. Already on the flyout, the manual shattered the rack where the disks with backup copies lay. Siegfried died. Died forever, finally and irrevocably. But the realization of this fact came too slowly, much slower than the rapid wave of rising insanity. Losing the remnants of reason, Vasin shouted. Then he fell to his knees and began to beat his head on a dirty dining table in a scary and monotonous manner.

It is said that that day was unusually late, the November thunderstorm. The tenth road, bypassing inattentive weather forecasters, it broke out in one of the outlying districts of Moscow. The chilly air was saturated with ozone to the limit: lightning struck all the lightning rods, and sometimes past them, causing monstrous surges in the electrical network. Most users immediately turned off their computers and other electrical appliances. The rest, inattentive, careless or having autonomous power sources, all as one saw a pop-up window with the message: “The file Zigfrid_v1.08.exe was successfully moved to heaven.” And with the “OK” button. And it seemed to them in the incessant rumble of a thunderstorm, as if this enormous celestial hard drive rotates over Moscow, blown by the cooler of the winds. And there is a place on it for all the dead files - large and small, good and bad.And then the storm ended, and everyone returned to their normal business.

Innocent's father, Vasin, a programmer in the world, came to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra immediately after being discharged from the Alekseev Psychiatric Hospital. There he has been developing the most powerful non-commercial antivirus monitor "Archangel Michael". Viruses have proliferated in the past time, nemeryannom, and the active position of the Russian Orthodox Church could not help but cause a negative response in certain circles of the Internet public. Therefore, Vasin is forgiven for much: both the sinful inclination to beer, and the frequent absence at evening services, and the habit of inserting texts of prayers into comments on programs. The latter, however, is sometimes interpreted in his favor as a sign of religious zeal. He himself, embarrassed and winding up a bulky beard on his fist, argues that such programs are better compiled.
Brunhilda can still be seen in his old apartment. Now his nephew lives there with his wife and young child, and when in the evenings they sit down to drink tea, the soft light of the floor lamp is reflected in the nickel-plated Brunhildin side. Anyone who is familiar with Pavlik Vasin close enough to ask for a visit can listen to her cozy chug and look at her orange peephole. Only now she can no longer whistle. No one knows why.
And if you, my dear reader, tear your eyes away from the text and look at the sky outside the window - maybe you will be able to see how behind the clouds, beyond the thick ocean, among the orbits of artificial and natural satellites, the celestial hard drive rotates day and night, remembering , memorizing, memorizing ...