A Glitch In The Foundation
That was the problem with children these days - they weren’t raised to ‘know’ that anything impossible they saw simply hadn’t happened.
20260208
Written for Bradley Ramsey’s “Flash Fiction February Day 8”.
Caroline fumed, her thumbs flying through logging a scathing error report. What fool had ‘patched’ this? You couldn’t just throw in any old bridge.foundation.sim and manually increase the bearing weight to - alright, you could, but sloppy coding like that put the whole project at risk! Sooner or later an engineer, or even a maintenance worker, would look at the weirdness happening in front of them and realise they were in a simulation. And then what, eh?
Usually that human getting branded a conspiracy nut or even institutionalised, but still. That was no excuse to flagrantly flout the physical laws of the simulation.
With the issue raised, she highlighted the errant object and did a quick database search. There. An appropriate bridge foundation. It wasn’t hard! Just copy the tags from the bridge itself and filter to match the ‘construction_date’ field. Slapdash, incompetent, lazy-
As the world shifted, the incorrect bridge foundation replaced by one which matched the rest of the structure, Caroline heard a gasp behind her.
Crap.
She wheeled around and found a child gawping. Pointing her phone to bring up his ID file showed he was seven. A terrible kind of age. Too impressionable to subconsciously dismiss things they’d witnessed which obviously couldn’t happen, but old enough to remember things.
Oh dear, oh dear - she hadn’t had to call in a memory wipe since she was a junior sim tech, it would be painfully embarrassing to need one for this.
“What did you do?” Isaac breathed, his wide eyes flicking from her to the corrected bridge.
“Hmm?” Caroline put on her best glassy smile and raised her eyebrows in polite puzzlement.
“The bridge!” Isaac shouted, pointing. “You, you were squinting at it and you did something on your phone and the whole thing changed.”
Caroline tilted her chin up and affected irritation. “What are you talking about? I’m in no mood to play games.”
“I saw it!!”
“Don’t be silly. Bridges don’t just… change.” Caroline quickly turned off her phone and pocketed it, before the frantic child saw more things he shouldn’t. “Now, where are your parents?”
“Can you make it change colour? Are you a witch??”
“What? No! There’s no such things as witches. Don’t you know anything?”
Not since patch 593, when they finally managed to get the “block user” filter working and the simulation no longer had unauthorised edits. Thank goodness.
“A wizard, then.” Isaac said, in a doggedly ignorant manner. “You must be something.”
“Everyone’s something, child.” Caroline scoffed.
Her pointed sarcasm sailed right over his little head and fell flat - he simply nodded very seriously. Apparently taking this as some sort of profound wisdom.
Alright. This was… probably fine. It was just a child. Nobody would listen, except possibly other children, but nobody would listen to them, so it was fine. And so long as he didn’t see any other glitches he’d ‘learn’ he must have imagined it. And she had work to do.
So Caroline sternly told him “I bet your parents are wondering where you are”, then hurried away in as dignified a fashion as she could.
Leaving the human boy who would become The World Hacker reverently inspecting the new bridge.sim.
Prompt was "The universe is a simulation, and you're one of its maintenance workers. You fix glitches, tidy up broken code, and most importantly, make sure no one discovers the truth. Bad news - a human just saw you working. Write a story or poem about what happens next..."