Heaven's donuts are jelly donuts. The blend of texture, from the
cool, sweet ooze of the jelly, mined with tiny raspberry seeds, to
the firm, spongy cake, so lightly encrusted in a thin glaze of
sugar that cracks and flakes as you gingerly tear off small pieces
of delight, is certainly the greatest experience a humble man can
afford.
I was eating a jelly donut when He first appeared in my office,
smelling slightly of gunpowder. He was tall and gaunt, with
deep-set eyes and crooked teeth, long, delicate fingers, and sloped
shoulders. He wore a black Ozzy Osborne concert T-shirt, frayed
black jeans, and dusty black high-tops, unlaced. He smiled at me in
an ugly way. I put down my donut and glanced at my watch. 7:00
p.m. "You're Mike Kolesnik."
I nodded.
"You're a programmer for CyberHackers."
I nodded again. Not only was I a programmer for CyberHackers--I was
the best damn programmer this group had ever or would ever see. I
suppose I should introduce myself. I am Michael Kolesnik, master
programmer. I'm not just blowing smoke here either. I'm the best
damn programmer to come out of MIT since code was constructed one
bit at a time. I can do it all: C, LISP, assembly--even the
languages no self-respecting programmer would deign to look at. I
can do it all in no time flat, with the most elegant of style. Code
sprinkled with glistening semicolons and flowing rivers of
indentation. Lesser programmers avert their eyes when I enter the
room.
"They say you're the best, and I'm here to challenge you." I sized
this guy up again. He had the right shape. The pot-belly, the
greasy hair, parted with precision. The fingers. And the funny
smell. I told him I didn't have time.
"I'll make it worth your while," he said. "I have something you
might be interested in. Follow me."
I grabbed my box of donuts, and followed him down the hall and into
the elevator. He pressed a button and the elevator descended into
the basement. I'd never been in the basement before. For that
matter, I didn't even recall that the building had a
basement. Nonetheless, the elevator chimed, the doors opened, and
we stepped out into a wide room that was entirely featureless. That
is, except for the fog on the floor and two workstations that were
set up, side by side. One of the workstations was mine. The other
was a workstation like none other that I had seen before. It was
magnificent.
It was matte black. More than an object, it looked like a hole in
space. The monitor it sported was the biggest I had ever seen, and
the keyboard was a flow of liquid lines, containing a field of keys
of different sizes and shapes, packed in like cobblestones. The
mouse floated above the table and had no wire. Next to the computer
was a box with a small chute coming out of one side, and a large
red button on the top. The monitor was flanked by two gigantic
speakers, and I could see a sub-woofer poking up out of the fog. It
hummed. It steamed. It was the most beautiful computer I had ever
seen.
"You approve," said the stranger.
I swallowed and said, "It is beyond description."
"It's a custom job. And it's yours... if," he said, "if you can
beat me in a coding contest."
I looked at him incredulously. "What's in it for you?"
"I will have defeated the greatest coder in the world, and thus, I
can claim that title. And, I get to keep your immortal soul." He
smiled the ugly smile again.
Here was a dilemma. I was dealing with the Devil. There was no
doubt about that. And he was no doubt very good. I am somewhat
attached to my soul, but oh, the prizes. The glory. I can easily
claim to be the best coder in the company, in the Bay Area,
probably on the whole planet, but if I pulled this off, I will have
shown myself to be the best coder in this entire theology! Vanity
got the better part of me.
"What's the contest?" I asked.
I won't bore you with the details, but it was seriously ugly. Ugly
in a way that makes the most arrogant of coders cringe and causes
managers to pad development schedules into the next century. It had
to run in any language, including the nasty chicken-scratch
ones. It had to be backward compatible, all the way to the
ENIAC. And it had to run on Windows... I cringed. But vanity won. I
signed the forms, agreed on a deadline of midnight, and we sat down
at our machines and started to code.
My watch said 8:00 p.m., and I started warming up. Class
definitions flew off my fingertips like throwing stars. Structures
and declarations grew like perfect crystals, and I didn't even
break a sweat. True to the task, I soon lost myself in an endless
cycle of postulate, create, instantiate and verify. Bits grew to
bytes, to K, to megs, and finally to gigs. By 11:00 p.m. it had
come to that crucial point. With an hour to go, I had to put all
the pieces together. It wasn't going to be easy. It was going to
take all the concentration I had.
Then I hit the first bug.
At first, I wasn't sure where it was coming from, but then I
spotted it. It wasn't mine. It was a bug in Windows. Even worse, it
was a bug in Windows that stemmed from a timing problem with the
system clock itself. I couldn't see a workaround. I was stymied. I
genuflected and called Microsoft support. "Hello, and welcome to
the Microsoft help line. Please enter your 64-digit user
identification number, followed by your 32-digit password."
While I frantically typed number after number, trying to navigate
through layer upon layer of phone menu, I heard Him pick up his
phone and call a number.
"Hello, is Bill in? ...I don't care, wake him up... Tell him it's
Mr. Black... Hey Bill, what's shakin'? Listen, I needed to know a
workaround to one of your bugs... Yes, I know what time it
is... Yes, I know... Bill... Bill! You remember our little deal?
...That's right. Now be a dear and give me that
workaround... Mmm-hmm... Right... Thank you, Bill. I'll be seeing
you."
I was shocked. It was obviously pointless continuing my desperate
journey through Microsoft's Help line. I needed immediate genius! I
scarfed down a grape jelly. Sugar shock engulfed me and my vision
tunneled. I shuddered once, something clicked, and I determined the
answer I needed--I could use the clock on the sound chip to get my
timings.
I dove back into the code and was quickly integrating modules when
I hit bug number two. It was even uglier than the first. In fact,
it was the ugliest bug I had ever seen. It was a problem with
C. With the language itself. There's no way fix a broken hammer
using the same hammer.
I wracked my brains. I clenched and grunted and sweated and thought
and thought and thought, but to no avail. Over my shoulder, I could
hear Him chime in, "Bugger, isn't it? I remember putting that one
in back when I was working on the Unix kernel. Did you really think
there was a Kernighan and Ritchie? Rearrange the letters in their
names and you'll discover an interesting anagram."
I ignored him and continued thinking. My mind went deeper and
deeper into the problem at hand--my senses dulled, my breathing
grew shallow. My eyes rolled back and sweat beaded on my
forehead. Clumsily, blindly, my hand pawed its way to the box on my
desk containing my last jelly donut. It raised slowly to my lips
and I bit.
Pounding waves of sugar induced euphoria washed through my mind. I
felt my brain hum and crackle. My hands trembled, my body
shuddered, and I began to type. I was a man possessed. Complex
topographical math equations formed on my screen. Klien bottles and
hypercubes locked neatly into place like pieces of a puzzle. Beyond
my control, a complex mathematical world formed in my computer with
additional dimensions unimaginable.
I felt a small pop and I came to. I looked at my screen. I had
worked around the bug. My watch read 11:45. Frantically I continued
putting all the modules into place. Glancing for a moment at my
rival, I could see I had him worried. He was typing
furiously. Smoke poured from his ears, and flames licked around his
collar.
Then I hit the third bug.
It was not so much a bug, it was a limit. I only had 4 gigabytes of
memory, and I had used it all. There wasn't a bit left. I had
compressed data to a point so fine that it was in danger of
collapsing into a black hole. I was storing memory in every
conceivable way, including keeping a chain of sound waves running
between the speaker and the microphone. There was no memory left to
be had.
Frantic, I reached into my box of donuts, and my heart sank into my
stomach when I realized that I had eaten the last one. I glanced at
my watch, but it was too late. I was sunk. I had done the best that
I could, and I had nothing more to give.
The Devil laughed, and grinning cruelly, he reached over to the box
with the chute and the button. Remember the box? Slowly, firmly,
his hand pressed the red button, and a jelly donut slid down the
chute and onto the table.
My jaw dropped. "What... is... that?" I asked.
He languorously chewed as he replied, "The Box of Eternal Donuts."
"The Box of Eternal Donuts?!"
"Yes," he said.
"It never runs out?"
"Never," he said.
"It's mine if I win?!?!"
"If you can win, it is entirely yours," he replied, grinning
cockily.
My mind reeled. The Box of Eternal Donuts. The Box of Eternal
Donuts! My eyes darted everywhere, my jaw hung slack, and my throat
emitted strange animal-like noises. Anything. I would do anything
to win! I just needed the smallest amount of memory. But where
could I get it from? I glanced at my watch again, and a plan came
into my mind. A beautiful, devious plan.
I went quickly upstairs and retrieved the emergency toolkit that we
keep in the medicine cabinet. I ripped the case off my computer,
and quickly scanned for the right connections. I pulled two wires,
and unscrewed the back of my watch. The Devil's eyes widened and he
desperately started coding again, but it was too late. I got the
last of the memory I needed out of my watch, and pressed the ENTER
key seconds before he did.
The watch burst into flames. Sparks flew from the disk drives and
the monitor glowed and throbbed, finally melting into a puddle of
glass. The computer exploded in a shower of sparks, and then there
was absolute silence.
There was a pause, and both of us turned as the printer started
slowly emitting a single sheet that wafted gently into the out
bin. I nonchalantly strolled over, and held up to the Devil's
scowling face, a sheet imprinted with two words. "Hello World."
Nothing more needs to be told, other than, as I write this, I am
sitting in front of my new computer, munching on what is
undoubtedly the best jelly donut I have ever eaten...
