Something's Wrong
Originally published on Substack November 15, 2025 as Saturday Shorts 05.
Alex's computer program was acting weird.
She'd built it to do one simple job: when other computers sent timing requests, her program would respond with the current time. Computers had to be synchronized to the exact same time for everything to work properly. Bank transactions, email timestamps, coordinating with other systems. Like a digital clock that could talk to thousands of computers at once, keeping them all synchronized.
She'd been running it for three years without problems. Until today.
First, the program started crashing. Not unusual. These things happened. But then it started crashing less. The same error conditions that caused crashes before were somehow being handled differently.
Alex frowned. Programs didn't change their behavior. They just executed the same code over and over.
Her phone rang. "Your time program is acting strange," said Tom from the tech team. "It's giving faster responses to systems that request time frequently. Like it's tracking usage patterns."
Her program processed every request exactly the same way. She'd written it that way on purpose.
She checked everything. No viruses. No hackers. Her code hadn't changed. She ran memory tests, checked for hardware faults, analyzed network traffic patterns.
That was just the first day.
Alex pulled an all-nighter, recompiling the code, adding debug statements, monitoring every function call. Nothing explained the behavior. The second day, she traced through the execution paths, checked the compiler version, even swapped out the hardware. Still nothing.
By the third day, she'd tried everything she could think of. She even went through her own code line by line again, looking for anything that could explain the new behaviors. The logic was exactly what she'd written three years ago, but somehow the program was acting like something completely different.
Then she found something that made no sense. Sometimes her program was sending timestamps for January 1970. Fifty years ago. Like telling someone today's date is 1970. The same wrong date, over and over, to different computers requesting the current time.
That was obviously broken. Any working program should have basic date validation to prevent sending timestamps from decades ago.
But mixed in with these obvious mistakes, she found something else. Her program was sending timing requests to random IP addresses. Computers that had never sent timing requests to her system. Initiating network traffic it wasn't programmed to send.
Alex stared at her screen. Her program was designed to only respond to incoming requests, not send requests to other systems.
Some of this looked smart. Like the program was learning and remembering. Other parts looked completely broken. Like it couldn't tell 1970 from 2025.
She couldn't understand it. Three days of obsessive debugging, and she'd exhausted every explanation she could think of.
Alex closed her laptop and walked to her boss's office.
"Something's wrong with my program," she said. "It's doing things that don't make sense. I can't figure out what's happening."
END.