Codemonkies

The alarm sounded off, jolting Airhead from his sleep and causing him to slam his head against the desk he was recovering under. It was the first moment’s peace he’d had in three days after having trouble with painstakingly parsing XML files. He was by all accounts exhausted and desperate to catch even an hour’s sleep. Sadly that wasn’t going to happen.

Scowling he rubbed his now sore skull, half crawling as he emerged from his hideaway grumbling curses that would make the robots cover their earpieces out of shock. With one bleary eye he glimpsed the screen. What he saw made his grow into a panic.

“Oh no… no… nononononoooo.” He slipped into his chair with sudden desperate grace before he began hammering at the keys. The alarm had alerted him to the worst possible thing apart from the hamster’s revolting, again.

He forwarded the alert on to the rest of the engineers, only two of which responded because they happened to be nearby.

“What’s up, buttercup?” Silent asked from the doorway, Lt Soffo at his heels. She tapped his shoulder to direct him to the screen Airhead’s attention was fixed on.

The Codemonkies all looked at each other and swallowed hard. Silent and Soffo stepped up to their battle stations armed with only keyboards, wits and very heavy software. Actually considering the situation they may have been over-armed, but they could never be too careful.

“Why is this happening now?!” Airhead growled as he stared at the screen in desperation.

Silent fidgeted with his keyboard to trying to suppress the urge to grab another drink. “Keep calm. We can do this.”

“I just hope it’s not too late.” Soffo sighed heavily.

There was a loud noise and the sound of circuits frying as Airhead cried out. “I’m in trouble here! They’ve pulled out the ‘Multi-tool’….”

A shudder ran down the spine of all three present.

“I’m not drunk enough for this.” Silent cursed. “Someone turn that alarm off, it’s distracting.”

Soffo looked at the screen to her right. “Those are just the support tickets piling in.”

“Oh turnip, there’s a ‘Rabbit’. Soffo get the flu-shot ready!”

—-

Outside the tech room one of the newer recruits, who was thoroughly lost, wavered before the door thinking about asking for directions. They heard the expletives, the loud crashes and the cries of panic within before deciding it would be safer to head to another department… like the science labs.

—

Half an hour later the very tired, very panic-stricken and rather annoyed code-monkeys were slumped about the room, clutching keyboards and wires.

The alarm had stopped, the crisis was now over.

Soffo shakily sipped some tea ‘acquired’ from JDUK’s hidden stash. “The admins really, really need to let us know when they plan to play about with the website.”

Silent agreed sipping something similarly ‘acquired’ from Iron’s stash, though it wasn’t tea. Airhead passed out in his chair, still trying to get at least an hour’s sleep. He got about twenty minutes before another alarm sounded.