Sophie couldn't believe what she was seeing. Errors littered everywhere, comments that made no sense in the slightest, lines that referenced things that didn't even exist... Not only was all of it incoherent, but it also cut away at a concerning majority of other coworker's contributions! With this one single edit made overnight, the entire project that Sophie had been working on with her team was nearly trashed, and if it hadn't been for a backup that she made mere minutes before she checked out of the company for the day, it would have been deemed unrecoverable, too. There definitely was no mistaking it now -- someone in the team was trying to either sabotage the lamb or her team by trying to take all the credit for themselves.
However, the more she looked into it, Sophie began to realize that this wasn't just some amateur programmer typing spaghetti code in hopes that it would work. Even novice coders could recognize what a fatal error was, and here there were in spades. This person either wasn't right in the head or they let their son pick out whatever at random and pasted it together. What even were these commands? She didn't recognize any of them, but perhaps--
Sophie's phone suddenly vibrated, and she caught it while it glided around the table as it shook. Seeing the caller ID put her at ease, and she set the phone aside as she accepted the incoming video call from Kayde. His red, chameleon face immediately flickered into view as he tried to get ahold of Sophie.
"Sophie?? Hello?? Something's gone--"
"Yeah, I know," Sophie cut him off before he could say anything else. "My phone started blowing up with notifications about the project, and, well, I won't sugarcoat it. Someone's completely fucked it over."
Kayde shook his head wildly around the room as he quietly paced around his room. "PLEASE tell me you got a backup... This is due in two days!"
"Oh, don't worry, I made one just before I left today." Sophie tried to reassure her coworker as he sighed heavily.
"Okay! Good! Wonderful! Ohhh..." She could still hear Kayde shuffle around as he clicked around on his computer, possibly trying to wake the others up to discuss this. Sophie frantically clicked her mouse as well, though it was to retrieve the backup she made, eventually being able to find it in her work folders.
"Look, I'm gonna rollback in a bit, but we still have to find out who did this. Do you have the code open on your computer?" Sophie commanded the chameleon, attempting to guide him out of his panicked state.
"Ah-- yeah! I'm looking at it now," Kayde proclaimed. His phone was now face down, not allowing Sophie to see anything but pitch black while Kayde kept talking. "I'm just now seeing that some of these elements come from different programming languages entirely! We're not even using Ruby but some of its elements are sprinkled here and there... What the heck is--"
What Sophie could hear next was a small bit of odd silence from Kayde, before he made the most uncharacteristic growl of frustration, causing his stream on the phone to glitch out briefly. This somehow sent a chill down the lamb's spine... "What-- Kayde? Are you okay??"
"I know who did this. I should have known he'd do this shit..." Kayde's voice suddenly shifted to ire as he picked up the phone again and tapped at it, allowing Sophie to see Kayde's face again, now colored a deep red amber. "I TOLD him not to do it but seems like that... that THING has shoved his head too far up his ass!"
"Kayde, calm down," Sophie once again tried to stand her ground. "What thing, and who was it?"
"Right, Sophie..." Kayde briefly stopped his tapping to explain as quickly as he could. "You know Tobias, right? He's got that stupid machine-learning project that could answer your questions and stuff. Remember when he brought the thing to work the other day and I asked it what love meant and--"
"Oh! And it responded that it's when you stop everything to eat their 42 biscuits?" Sophie giggled at the thought, remembering that day very clearly, and especially Tobias' flushed face when he was made fun for it. "Someone brought an entire basket with that many biscuits the next day! Hah, that was so bad..."
"Yeah, well," Kayde caught the lamb's attention again, sighing in frustration. "Unfortunately, he really didn't like it. All those sick days he took off the next few weeks were to get that machine of his to a more 'presentable state', or at least that's what he said." The chameleon got back to tapping on his phone to call his incompetent coworker, all while raising his voice slightly in anger. "Then he told me that he was going to prove to everyone that his work was going to revolutionize our workforce and some other stuff I didn't totally understand..."
Sophie cleared her throat as she quickly got back to work, rolling back the changes made to her project. "Wait... so you're saying Tobias wanted to automate our jobs? But doesn't he understand coding is very fickle and--"
"Oh, trust me, he knows," Kayde brashly interrupted Sophie as he turned off his camera to call Tobias. "But he was SO confident in his work being perfect this time around that he wanted to give it a test run here. And when I say I begged him not to do it, I mean it. I almost wanted to beat some sense into that bastard..."
Sophie was still preoccupied undoing everything that Tobias may have done, but she took mental notes as she readied to enter a conference call with Tobias. "Okay, so if I understand correctly... this is all his AI at work, right? And he took the opportunity tonight to replace all our code behind our backs?"
"Sounds like it!" Kayde turned his phone back on, with the lamb being able to briefly see the chameleon before the phone was put aside again. "You're setting up a conference, right? Let me in it as well, I've got some choice words for Tobias..." Kayde's voice turned to a low growl again, which really made Sophie uncomfortable. He's never snapped like this before...
In a matter of seconds, a small virtual room was made on the computer, containing three screens: Sophie's room, Kayde's phone in portrait mode, and a third slot with Tobias' icon pulsing in and out as the call request was sent. It would only be a few more seconds later before Tobias finally picked up, allowing them to see that he had joined via his phone in landscape mode. The white Samoyed male was apparently getting ready to go to sleep before this, still on his bed.
"Buh, what's happening? Why is this so urgent?" Tobias was just about to stand up from his bed, sounding sleepy and disoriented at the sudden company call. Kayde wasted no time in scolding the offender, much to Sophie's surprise.
"What's happening? Oh, just the destruction of our project, you MANIAC!" Kayde barked (!?) at the dog in frustration, finally having enough of his shenanigans. "Your determination to impress us with the stupid AI of yours nearly caused our project to be canned!!"
"Let's take it easy, Kayde..." Sophie had to intervene, almost tempted to mute Kayde just to keep him from going off on Tobias. "Tobias, you know what you did, so I just want to know WHY you did this. You know how imperfect that machine of yours is, and--"
"Oh, I get it," Tobias finally spoke up. "But you guys clearly don't. You haven't even run the code. I'm telling you, my AI is perfect in every way now, and it's going to do so much more good than--"
"Tobias, your AI took a grand total of 14 different programming languages, mixed it all together in a code lasagna, and convinced you it would be flawless," Kayde once again spoke up, now a little more stable but still quite fierce. "Your so called 'code' has over 50 grave errors, and running it crashes the compiler completely. This is NOT the future."
Tobias did not like what he just heard. "Well, of course it isn't gonna get it right all the time, you gotta give it a little push as well!"
"Then what was the point of you claiming it would be fully automated!?"
"I never said that! And to be frank, you're asking me for way too much, of course I was going to go check the code later. We still have time!"
"Not NEARLY enough to undo your crap had it not been for a backup!! And stop claiming you didn't!"
Sophie, eventually, had enough, muting both Kayde and Tobias while they kept shouting at each other. "Right, uh, that's enough of you two. Tobias, I am going to report this to my boss, and will formally request a replacement member as well as an additional three days to finish this up. I don't know what you'll do, but at least with us, you're done."
Sophie couldn't hear what Tobias said next, as he was still muted, but if she had to take a wild guess, it was probably something crude. He was known to not answer questions directly, now that she thought about it...
After the dust had settled on this issue and Sophie had undone the AI's mess, she worked for the next week, frantically getting the project done with her team. It wasn't easy with one less person, and that person just so happened to be the lead programmer, which meant she had to fill in that spot and work double, but in the end, Sophie made it work, securing her spot for that promotion she's been wanting. As for Tobias, well, he was fired from his job days after this incident, not because of it, but apparently because he had harassed multiple people in the office before, and this just happened to be the final straw.
...and somewhere up above in the sky, a mysterious crack in the sky closed up.
-----
A lone tiger emerged from the single rift he was allowed to make in the Grand Library, running his thoughts through his head as he read once more a sheet of paper he was given. What he was looking for was a flash of inspiration, a sort of kick he needed to get out of his writer's block and continue along with his journey into being a writer most could appreciate. In an act of desperation, and against the warnings of his raven assistant, he turned to one of those fancy text generators that had appeared out of nowhere one day in the Azure Plains. Even though the tiger wasn't looking for that generator to write for him, he did need a bit of a boost, and frankly, he was just very curious.
What the generator regurgitated, however, was a... very basic vignette about some occurrence in a universe it may or may not have seen. Sure, after some interrogation, it cited exactly where this universe was located, but he got back from said universe just now, and the scene played nothing like the generator said. Furthermore, the way the generator worded the request given, and especially how it summarized the fictional events meticulously, was so sanitized and devoid of any feeling that the tiger may as well have been reading an encyclopedia article on the universe in question. And worse still... it didn't even give him any ideas.
"Wow," said the tiger to his raven assistant, "that text generator sucks ass!"
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![L7's Action Log - Thursday Prompt Story [#7, 16/2/23]](https://va.ib.metapix.net/thumbnails/medium/4583/4583831_TheFireTiger21_thursday_prompt_7.jpg "L7's Action Log - Thursday Prompt Story [#7, 16/2/23]")