Command Line Conqueror
Daemon had stood too long staring at his phone, willing it to change. When it didn’t, he gave up and ordered food.
He slipped on sweatpants and a worn Aphex Twin t-shirt a size too large, and then padded barefoot across the carpet. He grabbed his laptop from the desk and brought it to the bed. Volume down—barely audible. He opened a browser and cued up a playlist. Warm synths and soft beats filled the room like fog.
He switched desktops and opened Wave Terminal. A few keystrokes later, he SSH’d into his AWS instance. One more command, and the tmux session bloomed back to life.
Right where he left it.
He leaned back on the pillows, adjusting the laptop already glowing in front of him. Fingers tapped softly—commands already set in motion scrolling back into view. The tmux session flickered with context: half-complete functions, hashed output, long scrolls of session notes. He scanned quickly, mentally reorienting himself. Everything in its right place. No rhythm to find. Just the one he never really left.
The encrypted disk image sat in a quarantined folder. 16 gigabytes of questions. RSA public-key encryption, which relies on the computational difficulty of factoring large semiprime numbers. Uncrackable, hypothetically. But that only made it worse. It meant there was something worth hiding.
Daemon leaned in.
Paper beside the keyboard. Notes scribbled in multiple directions. He worked in silence, the room around him falling away until only the code remained.
He worked like that for a while—deep in it. One eye on the terminal, the other on hastily drawn notes that sprawled like conspiracy diagrams. Threads between primes. Multiplicative traps. The sort of math that didn’t feel like math anymore, just pressure. He’d chase a lead, double back, pivot. Rerun a test. Reword a comment. Shift tabs. Squint.
The playlist kept playing in the background, occasionally slipping into vocals he barely recognized. He let it. It was better than silence. Better than the dull thrum of the hotel HVAC.
His stomach grumbled once—loud, annoyed. He glanced at the time, then at the phone still facedown beside him.
Not yet.
He turned back to the code. Let his fingers move again. A few false starts, a scrap of insight, a deeper scroll into his notes. Another hypothesis forming at the edge of coherence.
But it didn’t stick. Not tonight.
He stared a moment longer, then reached for the phone, flipping it over with one finger. The screen lit up, washing his face in cool light. A pause. A thumb hovering. Then the tap.
The ringtone sounded tinny through the laptop speakers. He watched the screen, waiting. One ring. Two.
