Necessary Adjustments

But something was wrong. The code was different, something besides the different lands and skeletal imps of this session, something besides the barren silence of the void. Something huge, a trillion lines of programming language more complex than a kernelsprite, more complex than a Queen: a multitude of variables with names illegible as Captcha codes; scores of if:then; elsif conditions that ran past him like train cars the size of planets, the size of suns; recursion after recursion until he lost the loop—he lost the loop—

It grew as he watched. It edited itself, eliminated a clumsy redundancy and added another five lines of numerical logic as fast as breathing. As if breathing. In, out. In a space without bodies, it lifted its head.