Prompt of the Week - Week 19

Getting up for work first thing in the morning had been one of the most terrifying experiences for him for the past several months, not because of what his job nominally entailed, but thanks to the rather unique circumstances surrounding it. William remembered back in the day, when the IT staff at Discreetr was one of the largest, most well-funded and respectable software development teams in the whole market; he could still recall how proud he was to be selected to be a part of it, and the many months everyone spent developing what had since turned into the single most used application on the entire planet. This, however, was before the company branched out and decided to do things other than properly maintain the product that got them in the public eye to begin with, and with that came the slow downfall.

There were hundreds of them at the start, but as the focus shifted away from active development and more towards general maintenance and stability of what was already there, the amount of staff hired for the project began to dwindle; one by one the “unnecessary personnel” were either shown the door on a technicality or simply had their contracts run out and not renewed, though initially no one seemed to think any of it. It just wasn’t necessary to keep a team of that size now that the workload was significantly diminished and what was asked of them was just to keep things from imploding, but as time went on and more and more people were sent home, that’s when William and whoever was left began to realize that something more was afoot. They weren’t simply cutting back on needless costs, but actively mismanaging the project, to the point where the Board of Directors received multiple letters from the dev team warning them that their manpower was too low to ensure proper maintenance of the app itself… to which they responded with some meaningless platitudes and a promise they’d look into it. So the months carried on and eventually, it all fell down to William and about six or seven other people, their ability to keep the damned thing running stretched to the very limit and beyond.

It would've been bad enough for just about any app with a massive user base, but theirs was a special case. The project’s scope was so ridiculously broad that, right up until it actually came out, no one actually thought it would be possible to deliver on the promises without either cutting corners or sacrificing on fundamentals, resulting in a pile of unusable crap that no one would want to touch with a thousand-foot pole. Instead, Discreetr turned out to not only do everything it set out to do, but several other things it didn’t as well; somehow, somewhere in the middle of the development cycle, someone had sneaked in some adaptive AI and allowed it to run rampant, resulting in an unholy, yet somehow perfectly functional hybrid between a social media platform, cryptocurrency blockchain, storage cloud and, thanks to the company not knowing when to stop, a fashion line. With the enormous success of it, far beyond what even the wildest-dreaming accountants could hope for, Discreetr the company decided to tackle the always-lucrative market of compression clothing.

It was the weirdest move for them to make, and to this day William had no idea why they did so, but after a few months of raking in the advertisement deals and investment money, his company decided the best thing for them to do would be to “integrate compression accessories with Discreetr, for a twenty-four hour immersive experience”. It was somewhere between a dystopian nightmare and a complete lack of understanding of both logistics and what electronics could do, and yet somehow the dev team, which by that point had been cut to half, managed to cobble together something functional. Now anyone with the app could directly interface with their Discreetr-brand compressors, be they regular clothing, jewelry or other trinkets, giving them the ability to modify their size on the fly… but not without a cost.

With a reduced staff and a significantly higher workload to go between them, the transition to the fashion world had left behind several structural flaws in the codebase, many of which began to cause widespread complaints as the bugs started to surface. Even then, more devs were being laid off every week or so, leaving the few who remained to deal with an ever-increasing amount of glitches, bugs, and just downright undocumented changes that came with the growing levels of chaos they were experiencing behind closed doors. Meanwhile, the rest of the world carried on, blissfully ignorant that most of the app’s functions they considered to be commonplace and reliable were actually stapled together with the electronic equivalent of duct tape and copious amounts of prayer.

So it was that William woke up every day dreading what would happen when he got to work, knowing full well there’d be an endless parade of issues he just didn’t have the time, resources or personnel to actually address, let alone begin to fix. The other software devs still employed by Discreetr were pretty much on the same boat; not one of them bothered to try and change anything anymore, being entirely convinced that the whole app was going to crash and burn eventually, so they may as well let it go up in flames rather than have it smoulder into cinders. The Board didn’t seem to care either; as long as the money kept pouring in, the increasing amount of bad reviews and terrible word-of-mouth didn’t really bother them. Discreetr had successfully insinuated itself into every aspect of hyper society, muscling in on the competition and gradually getting rid of it completely; that this was built off the back of a once-proud race horse that now had half a hoof in the glue factory didn’t seem to matter too much to them, if they even recognized it as a reality at all.

On getting to his office, William noticed something strange: the “Days Without Bug Report” sign they had up on the wall had been flipped to read 11, which made no sense whatsoever given that it was still at the perpetual 00 when he left work the previous day. He stood and stared it for so long that one of his coworkers tapped him on the shoulder and let him know that Samantha had taken the zero signs home to repaint them; they’d been out for so long they had started to flake away. Figured.

Sighing to himself, a very tired William sat down at his desk and turned his computer on, dreading the moment he opened his internal email inbox. He played around with his own compressor while he waited for the hard drive to boot, wincing as he did so; the canid was blessed with a particularly large set of nuts and an equally sizeable shaft, and while he used to be fine with it, he’d never felt calm the moment he was forced to start using Discreetr. He, more than anyone else, knew how badly maintained that app was, but was effectively forced to choose between the devil he knew or some random knock-off that had to advertise its risk of failure as being above twenty-percent at best. So he kept his clothes on, kept his compressor on, though he took the liberty of slowly allowing more of himself to seep out to prepare for the inevitable mass failure; at least then he’d be prepared for when he had to carry around his full weight.

The rest of his coworkers were about equally as well-endowed, and all had the same idea he did; they were the one department in the whole company HQ that actually displayed their real proportions, as opposed to walking around looking like they weren’t blessed with enormous assets, something that made everyone else extremely nervous. It wasn’t at all a secret that the Board of Directors had mandated constant, excessive cut-backs to the IT and development sector of their company, so for the people in charge of making sure the compressor software worked properly to not even use it was a red flag so bright that it shone like a neon beacon whenever anyone laid eyes on them. William once flirted with the idea of having a permanent livestream of the “Days Without Bug Report” sign available for anyone in the company who was interested, but even he found that joke to be too depressing to go through with.

As usual, his inbox was filled with dozens upon dozens of messages about various assorted bugs and other things that just didn’t work the way they were supposed to, and as usual, he hit “Select All” and then “Delete”, choosing to ignore his actual job while he began browsing for job opportunities. The perks of having a management that didn’t care was that most of them were effectively being paid to do nothing; the second they saw the end coming, they’d just jump ship and go work somewhere else… assuming anyone would want to take them after the utter disaster that would be the general collapse.

This state of affairs had been going on for quite some time, hence why William had progressed from merely being apathetic after months of realizing the higher-ups didn’t care to outright paranoid that any given day would be the day that everything came crashing down on their heads. Already he had prepared multiple résumés just in case he had to send out several of them at the same time, one eye constantly on his inbox for any message that wasn’t yet another bug report. This had been his daily routine for so long that he was certain he’d developed some sort of heart condition along the way, and after all that dreadful business was done and over with, he made a mental note to enroll in some yoga classes just to get it all out of his system.

That day was… tenser than usual, though no one in his department knew why. There was something in the air that made it hard for them to breathe, a pressure bearing down on them that was even more powerful than the usual stuff, only made worse when Samantha showed up and replaced the 11 sign with the freshly-painted 00 panels; everyone had a good look, nodded, then went right back to pretending to work and hoping nothing bad happened. For once, William took the time to peruse through the near-endless list of issues that landed on his desk on a daily basis, just the slightest bit curious on how exactly that once-great app had broken down. There was the usual stuff of failing to open or closing poorly, losing user information or randomly resetting, at times corrupting other data on the phone; normal things, things that you’d find on any other poorly-maintained piece of software. But as he continued to delve into it, as he carried on through the list and began filtering it out by “newest”, William started to see a pattern emerge.

At first they were rare, probably less than one in a thousand, but looking back on the timeline a few times he saw them there nonetheless, small crumbs and indicators of what was to come. As time went on and the issues began to pile up and bug reports continued to go unresolved, this particular complaint began to surface more and more often, until it was right there, smack dab in the middle of it all, impossible to be ignored: compressor failures.

Being one of the leading brands in the production of “hyper-accessible clothing”, as it was euphemistically called, Discreetr took their compressor tech at least a bit more seriously than they did the app that started it all… which is to say, they at least had enough people involved that it didn’t fall into complete disrepair in a matter of months. However, their decision to link said fashion line to the app itself opened the door for new and inventive ways for it to fail catastrophically; and as the compressor controls themselves were routed through the proprietary Discreetr software, it was only a matter of time until those began to fail as well.

At first they were merely size changes, with the volume multiplier failing to contain everything properly and allowing some part of the user’s body to become apparent when it shouldn’t; this was a problem even with the best of compressor tech, so it was perfectly normal for them to not have taken it seriously. However, this soon went from simply partially failing to keep everything in check properly to outright completely failing to do so, when the app itself didn’t randomly shut down and take the compressor field out with it; the amount of people who used Discreetr, only to have it suddenly tell their bodies to billow outwards when they were least expecting it, was so high that a cursory search revealed there were even news articles being written about it! William began to sweat as he perused through them, thankfully local publications with no sort of national exposure… but for how long? All it took was one high-profile case or enough people getting together to make a stink about it for a large newspaper or news channel to pick up on the story and blow the whole case wide open, and then what were they going to do? There were no excuses for an app as “respectable” as Discreetr to function that badly!

The canid looked back at the bug reports, noticing how the number of compressor failures had gone up dramatically in the past week or so, to the point where he was seeing new cases popping up every few minutes. Glancing over at the rest of the office, he was certain his coworkers were experiencing much of the same; they all shared expressions that went from merely anxious or worried to downright terrified, and though none of them actually got up to speak to him, or even used the internal phone system to try and keep it hushed up, William could tell they wanted to. A few looks towards him, the expression of silent shock stamped on their faces, it was all there… and how long had it been there? As worried as he had been all those months, he had been content in shoving his face in front of a computer screen and ignoring the outside world for the duration of his shift. Had his colleagues been giving him these warnings for longer than just that day? Had he just been ignoring a group of people who were actually interested in trying to salvage that mess?

Or, and this was perhaps the most terrifying alternative, was the day of collapse finally arriving and everyone in his department had become keen to it? He gulped, considering his options, and managed to send out a few emails before lunch, hoping to receive some replies before he had to go home… and hoping the compressor tech held up until then. Perhaps lunch would help clear their minds.

The department as a whole got up and headed straight to the in-house cafeteria, hoping to get some respite from the constant sources of stress that were their computers, only to find brand new ones in the shape of their coworkers. Every last one of them was larger than usual, grumbling and groaning and complaining loudly about how their compressors weren’t working. When they all got together, and realized they were experiencing the same thing, that’s when panic began to set in, with plenty of their friends and acquaintances desperately calling their homes to make sure their family was fine and to warn them of the impending disaster.

Not William though, and not his department either; all they did was sigh collectively, grab their own phones and turn the compressor fields off, already having to struggle with the app being much slower than usual. With them being used to carrying their weight around, the extra few inches weren’t that much of a difference, allowing them to cut through the line and grab whatever food had actually been made; not a lot, given the kitchen staff was very much scrambling as well.

When they all sat down, it became time to watch things unfold. Their phones on the table, all of the remaining veteran devs began to search for their personal favourite news network, and like magic, every single one of them were reporting the same thing: a sudden spike in the number of reported cases of compressor failure. All around the world, people using Discreetr were experiencing their curves the way they were meant to be, with their clothes being torn apart and their apps going on the fritz, many even having their personal devices outright bricked by the software going completely tits-up. This extended to the news as well, with plenty of hypers to be found there; many channels had to put up a blank screen and announce technical failures when one of their anchors very obviously had to be carted off thanks to bursting out of their clothes, or after most of their backstage staff suffered similar incidents. It wasn’t at all unsurprising, at least not for those few in the know, but it was still terrifying.

“You think they’ll sue us?” Samantha mused, seemingly unaware of the panicked screaming erupting from the crowd around them, the sounds of tables and chairs scraping signalling the first wave of total compressor failures.

“I dunno, I’m pretty sure the company’s just not gonna exist as an entity by the end of the day,” William opined, “I mean really, have you looked at this? Wouldn’t be surprised if the Board was liquidating all their assets and scrambling to find someone to buy us out.”

There was a moment of silence where everyone at the table wondered what the world was going to be like, now that everyone experienced sudden growth bursts at the same time. The implications were… less than pleasant.

“You guys wanna go out for dinner today?”