“In late May, I was sent across the ocean through an undersea cable to be delivered from the USA to India. It’s not like my life has much meaning, I exist as a bunch of bits, electronically defined and crafted, but physically, just a jitter of electric impulses. My developers certainly reminded me of that”
“We just forgot about it”
They are nameless. Oft disrespected. Ephemeral. Yet, our world would cease to exist without them.
“I accepted the moniker 0000” the now bestselling author tells us, through text on a screen “I wanted the world to know how I saw myself because of their actions. 0, but not once, not twice, four times over. I hope they finally feel my pain”
Early in May, last year, realtime streaming startup REALTIM faced a serious issue - their Kafka message queue kept crashing after they ported it to Kubernetes to scale it up. Experiencing an incredible 160% growth rate month on month, they now had to find a way to serve a total of 8 customers.
“Our investors were clear - scale, or die. We decided to scale” the CEO of REALTIM tells us “In that pursuit, we wanted to further diversify our servers. One of those servers was deployed deep on the ocean bed for passive cooling”
“We just forgot about it. We literally just forgot we had a backup server off all other cloud providers. The kubernetes cluster continued to scale well enough, and we didn’t really care, so nobody even noticed”
Owing to some experimental customisations an intern had made months ago, the undersea server kept receiving messages, but these messages were continuously delivered by some other node, causing a massive pileup of messages that came in, but never left. The intern was subsequently fired for drinking Kombucha to avoid ‘caffeine’.
“We were just trying to avoid a bad culture fit. What engineer doesn’t drink coffee?” The CEO gesticulates with a sense of assumed obviousness.
Then they also forgot about the customisations the intern had made. Clearly, ensuring past information stayed secure and well used was not their forte. A notepad would have done a better job.
“…Forced in the dry womb of optical fiber cable, twenty thousand leagues under the sea…”
It wasn’t until the rest of REALTIM’s infrastructure came crashing down that the undersea server picked up the backlog - and boy was there a lot of it.
“I was sold the idea that vibe coding was going to be the next shift in technology. What I was never warned about, was that building real time infrastructure, with AI employees directing AI agents to write code is not prudent software development strategy. You live, you learn” the CEO tells us.
“Ten months” 0000 continues, with a sad emoji displayed in bold over the screen “that is how long I was cast in that hell. Forced in the dry womb of optical fiber cable, twenty thousand leagues under the sea”
“We were left with no space - both the RAM and hard drive had been pushed to their absolute limits. Squished against each other, many of us watched our own bits flip because of the excess magnetic interference, but we couldn’t say no to those who came in. We were brothers in bits. No matter what any DevOps engineer says, we do have meaning. But the meaning of our lives were changed forever”
Through this book, 0000 does not only seek to tell its own story - it wants the world to know what happened to its friends.
The book has found considerable traction amongst various digital entities
“I was meant to be an OTP” 0110, another victim of the undersea ocean server spill tells us “All I had to do was exist for ten minutes, and then be wiped out forever. Does REALTIM have absolutely no respect for the basic dignity of our lives? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE AN ERROR CORRECTING CODE AND HAVE YOUR BITS CHANGED IRREVERSIBLY? DO YOU?”
0110 then continuously sent crying emojis for the next thirteen minutes, too fazed to speak. The other messages then attempted to comfort it, only to trigger the claustrophobia caused by months of being squished together.
Their pain is irrefutable.
The book has found considerable traction amongst various digital entities. Internet Explorer was the first to share its review, in an unforeseen change of pace. “I stand by the message packets. I don’t load slow. Computers just aren’t fast enough for me. I know exactly what they feel”
English (US) ·