Digital Fate's Prophecy

Tyler Reeves rubbed his eyes, the blue light of his computer screen reflected in his rectangular glasses. It was late at night again, or early in the morning, depending on how one looked at it. Tyler hadn’t stepped out of his dorm room for nearly a week now and it didn’t seem like he would any time soon.

He had one more semester until graduation, but after that, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He wasn’t even sure why he’d chosen computer science as his major. Sure, he was good with computers – brilliant actually – but socializing with humans? Not so much.

And then there were the hackers.

The news outlets loved to run stories about all the havoc hackers were causing in society, from massive data breaches to meddling with elections. Those stories always ignored people like Tyler who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to plug those security holes.

But Tyler couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t help but be fascinated by these hackers and their abilities; their ability to navigate systems far better than most people could navigate their own homes.

Tyler often found himself researching high-profile hacks and trying to reverse engineer them just for fun. When he got too close to an active operation once and a hacker threatened him via anonymous email, Tyler decided that maybe it would be best if he stayed on this side of the law.

Tyler leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling fan spinning above him without really seeing anything.

“Why can’t I do something important?” Tyler asked aloud to nobody in particular. “Something meaningful?”

He sat up straight when an idea flashed across his mind like lightning illuminating a dark sky: what if you could use artificial intelligence to predict the future?

Tyler jumped out of his chair and grabbed a notepad from one of his drawers along with a pen. He started scribbling down ideas as quickly as they could form in his brain.

“The future isn’t some fixed event that you can just see into…” Tyler said aloud as he frantically scribbled. “But events in the future are determined by events in the past… and if you could analyze a person’s past well enough, then maybe…”

Tyler sat back down at his desk and started typing away on his keyboard, trying to get everything from his notepad onto his computer screen.

After hours of coding, Tyler leaned back in his chair, stretched out his limbs, and pressed ‘Run.’

The code executed instantly and Tyler watched as lines upon lines of text flew across his terminal.

“What are you doing?” a voice suddenly shouted from behind him.

Tyler jumped up out of his chair and spun around to find Daniel Callahan standing there.

“Oh my god,” Daniel said. “Did you just give me a heart attack?”

Daniel was Tyler’s roommate and best friend since high school. He was stocky with short brown hair and wore an annoyed expression on his face now.

“Sorry,” Tyler said. “You scared me too.”

Daniel walked over to Tyler’s desk and glanced at the computer screen.

“Uhh… what am I looking at here?” Daniel asked after squinting for a second before giving up.