[Adelie]

I get annoyed when things don't go as planned. Mirny likes to tell me that's my best personality trait - which says more than a little about what he thinks about me.

It's certainly not helpful in my line of work. In the startup world, things don't go as planned all the time. You promise one thing to your investors, and two days later your engineering lead is calling you up and explaining that they'll need a year and ten more developers to deliver it. There's nothing to do then but sigh, count backwards from ten, and start thinking of how to spin that as disrupting the budget industry.

[Adelie]

But at least that's something - some tangible action I can take, some sense of agency I can delude myself into thinking I have.

When confronted with something like the sudden disappearance of color from the world, there's nothing to do besides wait. Not even my favorite solution - calling up Mirny and blackmailing him with the prospect of telling all our friends about his ill-fated high school crushes - works for that, and that's gotten me out of plenty of impossible situations before.

I call him anyways, of course. There's nothing else for me to do, and I'm sure he's got nothing better to do either.

[Adelie]

"What did you break this time?" he grumbles into the phone receiver; he sounds like he just woke up, and I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.

"Why do you always say that?" I say, affecting as much hurt and betrayal into my voice as I can possibly summon up. This is our eternal song-and-dance, after all; he'd probably think I'd been kidnapped if I didn't respond with absolute denial of all the trouble I've put him through before. "I'm innocent," I assure him.

"I'm thinking you discovered the world is a simulation and immediately broke the graphics card," he continues. "I don't know what else I'd expect, honestly."

[Adelie]

I think he's referencing how my graphics card literally melted, back when we were playing MOBAs together in middle school and I hadn't realized that my laptop fan had completely conked out. Frankly, I'm a little surprised he still remembers that - but I suppose if I'm always bringing up things from our schoolboy days, he's got the right to do the same.

Either way, I'm perfectly happy to ignore him. "So, what are you up to?" I ask, lying back into my chair and making myself comfortable. There's always a long answer to this question whenever he's concerned.

[Adelie]

"Not much," he says, but that's what he always says before launching into some TED talk about whatever obscure open source project that's caught his eye this time. It's been a week or so since we last talked, so it should be a new one this time. "I've been thinking about framework upgrades a lot recently, especially since Python 2 is being officially deprecated."

I've talked to enough engineers that I can at least follow this far - framework upgrades are a fine example of the technical debt people are always touting as a reason they can't develop new features. "Cool," I offer, waiting for him to devolve into technical mumbo-jumbo.

"It seems absurd people have so much trouble migrating codebases from one version to another," he continues. Now this is something I can agree with. "And imagine all the security flaws, all the version compatibility errors, and development time people have to waste on that."

[Adelie]

"So I was thinking about automating it, of course," he continues. This is around the part where he usually gets excited enough that I stop understanding him, but since I really have nothing better to do - I'm trying my best. "I started off by building a language to codify new features and semantic changes between versions, but while writing a parser so I didn't have to read each docs page myself, I started thinking about doing bytecode analysis on the compiled product and whether I could train a GAM to identify changes instead. Now I'm looking at adversarial models as a way to improve prediction, but I think that's probably the wrong path."

I have certainly heard some of these words before.

[Adelie]

"Sounds good to me," I tell him. He's probably heard this from me a million times - it's what I say when I have no idea what's going on, but it's Mirny. Everything he comes up with ends up being good at the very least, and sometimes brilliant.

God, I wish he'd let me hire him. It takes all the blackmail and persuasion and invoking of our long and complex friendship just to get him to accept freelance projects from me - and it's not like I offer those because of nepotism. I know he's good. I know that if I give him a project and let him work in peace for a week or two, he'll come out with something that's everything I wanted and more.

[Adelie]

But of course, he hates that - hates the entire industry, really; hates the idea of taking code and turning it into services that you pay for. Software should be free, he always tells me, and I just nod and smile and say, But you have to eat, right?

"I actually got the idea from this bug I caught for Firefenling recently," he continues. In lieu of becoming one of his detested corporate slaves, that's what he does to pay rent - play quality assurance on popular products and claim bounties for the various bugs and security holes far less competent programmers leave behind. "I can't say for certain without looking at the code itself, but it looks exactly like what I'd expect from a botched version upgrade."

[Adelie]

"Maybe that's what happened to the world," I offer. "We're actually supposed to be getting a color palette upgrade, but the devs screwed it up and now all we've got is grey."

"Sounds pretty typical for the developers of Outside," he says; it's deadpan, but I can tell he's having a little fun with the idea. "Not like they ever publish patch notes anyways."

"God," I say, stretching out in my chair and staring at the white emptiness of the ceiling. "This really sucks."

I can feel him doing the exact same thing. "I can't even work on anything since my syntax highlighting isn't working."

[Adelie]

"Do you think it'll come back soon?" I ask. It's not a question I expect a serious answer to - not from him, not from anyone, really. From looking at the news and all the flustered politicians trying their best to salvage the situation, it seems unfortunately clear that no one has any idea what's going on.

"Don't know," he says. "Maybe they should try turning it on and off again."

I laugh a little at that; so does he. It's an accessible enough joke that I get it, yet one that still funny in its simplicity - in this grey world, it serves almost as a light of hope.

[Color Harvested]