Oh ho ho, guess who wrote a thing
"It'll transport you into the code itself. Be careful using the headset in there; it could fry your brain Remember your mission. Good luck, soldier." The tinny voice said through the solder's earpiece.
It was a techie from outside the machine he was currently in, safe and sound while he could die. In a computer.
He could hear the machinery whirring to life, and then there was a brilliant flash of light.
He felt his body dissolve.
He came to - had he passed out? - in the computer. Or, rather, what he assumed (hoped) to be the computer. All was black. Not just dark. It was void black. There was nothingness.
And then code was flashing around him, a whirl of brilliant greens against a black canvas. He didn't know what most of it meant. Knowing what these things meant wasn't his job. He was trained to retrieve people. Now he was playing search and rescue in a supercomputer.
It started like this:
The SuperComputer, the machine which kept the world afloat, had crashed. Not fully, but the program that supplied the air the to World Complex had. It had turned from a nice little webpage into a giant string of code. The technician responsible for the program had said they were just doing routine maintenance when it went haywire. It had been down for two days, running on the emergency program, but it couldn't keep on like that. Someone had to fix it.
That was where he'd come in. He'd saved countless people (four hundred and seventeen) from the Home Planet, and even more on separate trips, so he was the first choice. (He was the second, actually; the first was his mentor, who'd worked on the SuperComputer when it was being built, but had recently passed due to age.)
He turned in a circle several times before seeing something. The techie's tag in the code. They'd been smart enough to mark where they'd started fixing things.
He spent hours combing through the code, looking for anything out of place. Finally, exhausted, he turned on his earpiece.
"Could a missing forward slash do it?" he asked, staring at the spot in the code. During the time he'd been in the computer he'd learned very basic html, and had noticed that most spots - like the one he was looking at - would have a slash there. This one did not.
There was a loud groan in his earpiece. "Yes, that would do it."
This is a tribute to both my experience in coding and that one episode of fairly odd parents with the email.