The date is January 16th, 2011, the time is 5am EST, and your alarm clock has just gone off. It seems like an entirely unremarkable day as you wake up; outside you can see that a fine patina of snow still covers the ground. You check your news feeds and see a remarkable lack of noteworthy events. You eat a quick breakfast and ready yourself before getting into your car and driving into the greying dawn. Dull routine kicks in as you are waved through a security checkpoint and into the Air Force base where you are employed as a consultant on a thoroughly boring military contract, something to do with filtering information from the internet for keywords. You aren’t even really sure what the ultimate goal of the project is, as you are fairly new on the team, but you do your work diligently each day when there is work to be done.
Most of the staff do not come in this early, and you pass only a few people as you walk down highly polished hallways and take an elevator down to the 3rd subbasement level. The lack of windows has never bothered you, probably a mental trait required for this sort of work you muse as you turn into your team’s office complex. Your badge opens the door, you make your way to your office, and boot up your PC.
You can tell it is going to be a long day when you notice that you have no new work e-mails. The project head has not responded to your requests, and the other teammates are more interested in discussing fantasy football and world of warcraft than the project’s progress. You quickly sort through the messages, putting each neatly into a subfolder. You’re rather annoyed at the project lead’s lack of response, as you were going to put your new ideas into practice today but without his approval you cannot proceed. You consider making the changes anyway, but decide it isn’t worth the risk, so you lean back in your chair and open the web interface.
Again you notice the remarkable lack of news articles, and none of your usual chat buddies are online. What a dreary day… You decide to sneak a nap in, resolving to ask the project lead about your changes when he comes in at 8. Leaning back further, you fold your hands behind your head comfortably and drift off to sleep.
Pattern Anomaly You awaken with a yawn, stretch a bit, and blink blearily at your watch. What? 3:30 PM? That can’t be right! There is no way you slept for so long, you would have heard the door slam as someone else walked in, or someone would have knocked on your office door. Something must be wrong with your watch, you decide. You look at the computer monitor, intending to check the time, but the screen is a blank black field with the words “Pattern Anomaly” written in green text at the top left. This looks like some sort of system interface, and you think the system must have rebooted itself somehow and failed to load the custom operating system your team uses.
Your computer is unresponsive to any input; with a sigh you decide to check the rack terminal to see what is going on. As you walk down the hallway, you notice that nobody has come into work yet. That is very strange, you’ll have to check the team calendar to see if there was a scheduled holiday you forgot about. As you wheel a stool over to the terminal you notice that the rack is humming away normally, so the system is still online. You sit down at the maintenance terminal and start up the maintenance interface and see the following:
Pattern Anomaly
Pattern Anomaly
Pattern Anomaly
Pattern Anomaly
Pattern Anomaly
>_ Well this is certainly new. That final field looks like a command prompt of some sort.
What do you do?
Commands must be entered in bold with a leading > or they will be ignored. Any OOC discussion or questions should be in spoiler tags.
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Topic: Pattern Anomaly (Read 6749 times)