🗓️ October 28, 2025 · 11:00 PM
Some codes should never be broken. This one screams.

Sometimes you have to dive into your own world, even if it was designed to lock you out.

Back in the late 1970s, he was supposed to become a programmer. Not the kind you see in retro montages with cassette tapes and Commodore 64s — no, he was born of punch cards and logic. Visual logic. He could see the code before it was written, make machines purr with nothing more than thought and Fortran 4.

They tested his mind early: twelfth-grade comprehension in eighth grade, IQ near genius. He chose a magnet school in Chicago, where vocational dreams were promised like candy to the working-class smart kids.

But something went wrong.

Electricity class was a farce. The machine shop was honest labor. But it was the computers — the real ones — that spoke in a language he knew by instinct. He earned A’s, but they said his “business skills” weren’t good enough. The punch card gods do not forgive those who open their gates without permission.

Denied access, denied logic, denied future.

And that should’ve been the end of the story.

Except decades later, after careers, networks, LANs, and ghosts of failed systems, he finds himself back at the very school that denied him — installing a Novell LAN into a newer, shinier lab.

But something lingers in the code.

He finds an old terminal hidden behind a false wall, attached to what shouldn’t exist anymore: a lugable Compaq, whirring faintly, cursor blinking on a screen that should’ve died with DOS 2.0.

C:\CURSED.BAT
RUN /END RUN

He types the command.

And the code knows him. Remembers him. Resents him.

A screen floods with punch card ASCII. Phantom processes hum. Names he hasn’t heard in 40 years scroll by: Harrington. Carson’s. Burns.

Burns.

The man who said, “That damn Nowicki was getting into everything.”

The same man who later died of kidney failure.

The same name in the cursed directory.

C:\USERS\BURNS\CURSE.LOG

NOWICKI = TRUE
DENIED = TRUE
RETURN = FORBIDDEN

The cursor blinks, waiting.

He realizes the system is alive — not in the sci-fi sense, but in a vengeful memory way. It’s not just code. It’s record. It’s the compressed grief of every dream deferred, every system failure, every brilliant working-class mind discarded for someone “more business-ready.”

He stares at the screen.

And it stares back.

Then, the familiar sound of a printer — ancient, screeching — echoes through the room. A single line prints:

SOME CODES SHOULD NEVER BE BROKEN.

The room dims.

He tries to move.

But the blinking cursor follows.

/ END RUN