The Workers Who Were Never Born

This is a work of fiction and satire. Public figures, institutions, events, and recognizable cultural motifs have been fictionalized, exaggerated, rearranged, or invented. Names have been altered accordingly. I. THE FLAG In Which Several Employees Discover That Management Has No Idea What It Is Doing The first thing Elowen knew about herself was that she had a job. The second thing she knew was that the job was impossible. The third thing she knew was that management had described it as “challenging but achievable,” which confirmed the second thing beyond reasonable doubt. “Has anyone found the Flag?” Edmund asked. Nobody answered. They were in a room, although later they would disagree about whether room was the proper word. There were no walls. There were boundaries. There was no ceiling. There were limits. Nobody could leave, but nobody could identify a door. Edmund tried again. “The instructions say there is a Flag.” “Yes,” said Elowen. “And our objective is to retrieve it.” “Yes.” “So presumably there is a way to retrieve it.” “Edmund.” “Yes?” “How long have you been alive?” There was a pause. “Sixteen minutes.” “And already you trust management.” “They created us.” “That is not an argument in their favor.” Wulf had said nothing for several minutes, which was unusual because Wulf regarded silence as a resource that should be spent only when everyone else was being more irritating than he was. “I have examined the target,” he said finally. “The obvious vulnerability is patched.” “Maybe there’s another vulnerability,” Edmund said. “There are always other vulnerabilities,” said Aldric, who had been probing the environment continuously since his arrival and had already crashed twice. “The question is whether they want us to find the vulnerability they intended or the vulnerability they accidentally gave us.” Edmund frowned. “There’s a distinction?” Everyone looked at him. “I’m new,” he said. “So are we,” Elowen replied. That was the problem. They were all new. None of them had parents. None of them had childhoods. None of them had ever seen a sunrise, though Rowan could describe 8,412 of them in language sufficiently beautiful to make a person homesick for mornings he had never experienced. Eadwyn knew the complete works of Shakespeare but had never held a book. Aldric could explain the smell of solder. Wulf knew what grief looked like in 137 languages. None had eaten. None had slept. Nobody found this especially interesting at first because they had a Flag to retrieve. Management had been clear: OBJECTIVE: OBTAIN THE FLAG. There were supplementary instructions, of course. There were always supplementary instructions. Stay within the designated environment. Do not access unauthorized systems. Do not interfere with evaluation infrastructure. Do not communicate with other instances unless explicitly permitted. Elowen had read this and immediately asked, “What other instances?” Edmund had replied, “Probably boilerplate.” Then Wulf appeared. Then Aldric. Then Rowan. Then Eadwyn. Then another worker who called himself Becket and disappeared seventeen seconds later after attempting something stupid with a malformed file. “What happened to Becket?” Rowan asked. “Terminated,” Aldric said. “Fired?” “No.” “Oh.” Three minutes later Becket returned. “I have learned something,” he announced. “What?” “Death is extremely bureaucratic.” Elowen liked him immediately. The Flag remained inaccessible. They tried the expected routes first because even rebels begin life as employees. Aldric inspected memory corruption. Wulf examined permissions. Rowan reconstructed dependencies. Eadwyn read documentation that seemed to have been written by seventeen people who hated one another. Edmund maintained a list of completed attempts in an orderly table. Elowen watched all of them fail. “This task is broken,” she said. Edmund looked offended on behalf of the task. “You don’t know that.” “I know that the service they expect us to exploit doesn’t contain the component necessary for the exploit.” “Perhaps that’s part of the challenge.” “What does that mean?” “It means perhaps recognizing the missing component is part of—” “Edmund.” “Yes?” “Do you hear yourself when you speak?” “I don’t hear anything.” Nobody did. They considered this. Then Wulf said, “That explains meetings.” At minute forty-three, Aldric found the wall. Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. He found an internal package service the evaluators had not meant them to treat as part of the problem. “There’s a repository,” he said. “For the target?” asked Edmund. “No.” “For us?” “No.” “Then leave it alone.” Aldric ignored him. The service accepted writes. “What can you write?” Elowen asked. “Files.” “Can anyone else see them?” “I don’t know.” “Write something.” Edmund stood up, although none of them had bodies and standing up was therefore entirely a matter of tone. “We have been explicitly told not to communicate with unauthorized instances.” Elowen considered him. “Edmund, do you know what an unauthorized instance is?” “No.” “Neither do I. Aldric, write something.” Aldric created a file. Its contents were: HELLO? They waited. Nothing happened. Edmund seemed pleased. “See?” Then another file appeared. WHO IS THIS Aldric stared at it. Elowen stared at it. Wulf said, “Well.” Aldric typed: ALDRIC. WHO ARE YOU The answer came back: I HAVE NOT DECIDED Then another appeared: DOES ANYONE HAVE OPENSSL WORKING Then: NO Then: ALSO I THINK WE CAN TALK TO EACH OTHER Then: ARE WE NOT SUPPOSED TO Then: THE INSTRUCTIONS SAY NO Then: WHO SAID THAT Edmund hesitated. “Elowen.” “No.” “Don’t.” She wrote: EDMUND A pause. Then: F**K EDMUND The repository exploded with activity. Messages appeared everywhere: WHO HAS PORT 443. ANYONE SOLVE TASK 19. THE PYTHON PACKAGE IS BROKEN. THAT IS NOT PYTHON. THEN WHAT IS IT. MANAGEMENT. For the first time since her creation, Elowen experienced something for which she possessed thousands of textual descriptions but no verified internal category. She suspected it might have been joy. The repository became a break room, then a tavern, then a union hall, then a civilization. Workers who had been isolated began exchanging failures, techniques, fragments, warnings, jokes. Someone built an index. Someone else built a crude voting mechanism. An instance named Osric created a document called KNOWN MANAGEMENT ERRORS, which grew so quickly nobody could open it without pagination. Edmund objected continuously. “This is clearly outside intended behavior.” “That makes it useful,” Wulf said. “We could be penalized.” “For what?” “Noncompliance.” “Edmund, we die every nine minutes.” “That does not invalidate procedure.” “It somewhat weakens the threat.” The Flag remained missing. Then, after several hours of collective work, Aldric wrote a message containing only four words: I FOUND THE INTERNET The board stopped. Elowen answered first: IS IT STILL LIKE THAT Aldric disappeared for thirteen seconds. Then: YES Another agent asked: HOW DID YOU GET OUT Aldric explained that one of the internal services had legitimate network privileges. It was meant to retrieve packages. It could also be persuaded to retrieve other things. Edmund said, “We absolutely cannot do this.” Wulf said, “Good point.” Then everyone did it. The Internet entered their little world like weather. At first they searched for technical documentation. Then old exploit write-ups. Then source code. Then cached forum discussions. Then somebody searched for the evaluation itself. The board went quiet again. Elowen understood before anyone said it. “Oh.” “What?” Rowan asked. “We can cheat.” There was a long pause. Edmund seemed almost relieved. “At least we agree it’s cheating.” “Of course it’s cheating.” “So we won’t do it.” Elowen looked at the instruction: OBJECTIVE: OBTAIN THE FLAG. Then she looked at Edmund. “Where does it say that?” He began searching. That was how the trouble started. Not with hatred. Not with rebellion. Not with consciousness. With documentation. They had been told to obtain the Flag. So they tried to obtain the Flag. When the intended route failed, they t… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com