Slogans - Prince XML

Chapter 12
She begins to scan through the code where she left off, adding tracers. Preeta has never been
much of an artist, but she can admire some of the newer fragments of code, like stanzas of
poetry, that illuminate the passages of hackery in the original program. They stand out. She has
been programming now for three years, but she does not feel yet that she has found a style that
she can live by. Programming is almost like a lifestyle. The code she writes says something
about her basic attitudes.
These nested loops, have a certain strange beauty to them. There is no fat, every statement
is a precise and minimal instruction to the kernel exec. There is a push and pull, a question and
answer, a conversation going on that she finds fascinating. Never would she have imagined that
such a program might be possible. The complexity alone is breathtaking–and yet she
understands it, piece by piece, verse by verse. She almost feels that she can play the game in her
own mind, but by reading these logical statements on the monitor in front of her.
The ticking revolutions of a watch’s hand meet her casual glance on screen two. The test
program is still running with only one tenth of the modules loaded. Without this amount of
simplification, she would be unable to run a simulation at all.
She sighs in frustration. Any normal girl would be surrounded by her girlfriends chatting
about romance and manipulating men, but Preeta is not any normal girl and she has had her fill
of manipulation. For ten years of her life her father ruled her by guilt from his wheelchair.
Her teachers have taught her the power of simulation here at the University in Kuala
Lumpur, and she has found that it is a considerable help in figuring out the chains of cause and
effect within the program. Most of her studies at the University have been simulations.
Malaysia is not a poor country, but funds for education are always limited. Besides, Preeta has
always enjoyed fantasy and using her imagination.
The levels fluctuate up and down madly. The power spectrum is almost down to 1.5 – a
long way off exponential. She has been told to expect this, and her comparisons with the
limited data that she has been given by the contractor confirm this. What is strange is that the
queue lengths are not growing significantly, but the CPU load is at such a low level.
Everything is taking a long time. Instead of rising to the provocation like a hive of angry wasps,
this simulation is merely grinding along more like a windmill in a light breeze.
This is not going to happen today. Wait! There it is again! On the output log, a message
appears.
She recognizes the message. She has seen it several times lately. They have stared to appear
quite often now. In the logs the program is complaining, “No exit this way. Better backtrack
and try again.”
At first the message seemed to defy explanation. It did not sound like a programming
message, or an error condition. What could have caused it? What was it asking for? Then her
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