Lights Out

Sonny is just like you. Wouldn’t you want to leave a mark on this great planet of ours? Something that would be spoken about for years or even decades?

He has this dream to become famous, to be one along the line of presidents, peace makers and Hollywood stars.

His parents have noticed it and played the advocates of the devil by saying that he would not be famous at all as he just didn’t have the background.

‘What background, why would I need one? I’ll create one myself. Stronger, I’m my background.’ He thought while staring at his start screen for internet.

It showed links to programmer blogs, ads on drones and some news items on the right that came in at a regular stream via short text messages. Normally he ignored these, but while looking without seeing he noticed one which shouted at him ‘More Covid-19 patients because of social distancing problems’.

What was it with people that they had problems with the distance to others? Were they not listening? Didn’t they read or hear any news items? How hard should any government shout to get the message across to keep a distance to others?

Sonny thought that the measures from the government were not appropriate enough. Ads to advise people to take a distance. Clean your hands every so often. If you think you are ill, don’t go near other people.

“But there is no penalty for it, nor to pay or to feel.” Sonny mumbled.

‘Feel, to feel. What is a person would feel that he comes to close to another person?’

He wrote the word FEEL on a paper. Alongside, he wrote words that crossed his mind when he thought about it. He wrote words like: pain, senses, electricity, time, length, shock.

Some words he connected with a line, as if it connected them. One stood out to him. It was the line between electricity and shock. Would someone stop him- or herself if they got a small shock treatment?

“What if, what if I can build an app that gives a little shock? Via the phone. Just like that, phaat. A stronger shock if the one carrying the phone. If no result, the phone would act like dead. Only a full reset would be enough to get it running again.”

The idea got more and more form and soon Sonny had envisioned how he would build the app.

Lines upon code lines formed on his screen. The green letters on the black background allowed him to keep working till late and no one even noticing (besides the keyboard clicking).

With only a shock needed, Sonny didn’t spend any time on designing an icon, nor some design on screens that belonged to the app. It would run independently of the user.

His local solution worked in two days.

At school he could not focus. All the time he was thinking how to get the application across to owners of a phone.

This was a serious app, a serious target and a serious goal.

It had to work in one go. This would be hard to test. Come to think of it, there was no test possible. It worked or not. Black or white, on or off, one or zero. In IT all comes down to the good old zeros and the ones. Together they did the work.

“What it I just think? On or off? What if I turn one part off and the other on? Can I use that situation to install my app?”

“Sonny, you know what? You’re an authentic genius. That’s what you are.”

He started to type a string of letters, forming words, for people without knowledge it was an unclear language. For the trained eyes, this was clearly a masterpiece of coding. At least something brilliant for the age of Sonny.

His work went on for a couple of hours. Some checks were possible and Sonny tried them. The results every time came closer to the goal he had in mind.

Sonny checked the time.

“No, time for school already. Continue to work on it and face some serious punishment or go and try to focus. Just enough to answer the boring questions.”

Sonny stood up, stretched himself and while some joins clicked as if he was an old man, he strolled to the bathroom.

Half an hour later he was on the bus to his school.

It took a dreadful long time before he could return to his computer. While he entered the house, he only said hi to his mother. Sonny lied, as he did more lately that he had homework to do and went to his room.

Frantically he started to type again. He totally forgot to join the rest of the family with dinner. His father yelled a few times and his subconscious reacted only upon the last, loudest one. As soon as possible he was right behind his keyboard again.

The coding for the app was nearly finished. Sonny could turn on his own cell phone and it would give him the desired electric shock. This was really a lab experiment, but it worked. It satisfied Sonny.

The final part was the most tricky. He started on it at 10 PM. He prepared the coding that would give him access to the local electricity network. That was not all too difficult. The more he pulled himself into the servers of the network, the more complex it became to hide that he was in. Circumventing protocols, opening security gateways, blasting away firewall and the like. For Sonny it was more than a game. This was serious.

As a painter nearing the end of his masterpiece, he stood, looked at his coding work from a distance and grinned. Sonny, the kid not seen as somebody special at school had made it all. Within three days. He would be a hero. The moment of run it in a live environment was here.

He started the program.

Yes, it worked, he saw the power go down. Lights went out in the neighbourhood. He heard his father shout from downstairs. Sonny had done it.

The next bit of coding would push the app to all the cell phones.

Sonny hit his hand flat to his forehead.

“Stupid me, no power, no flow for the data to spread. I have only limited battery power. The program dies a sudden death. Power down, app down.”

In a split second Sonny thought: ‘People will think about me, not as superhero, but super loser. The kid that brought the power down. A well negative marketing is also marketing.’