A New Dawn (I)

Matt finished the latest alterations to the program he was working on. With a sigh and a whispered prayer he clicked run and after the interpreter verified his code the program executed. He blew out a very big sigh of relief, as this was the first time he had been able to get the program to even initialise. He then plugged in a sentence from the text book and started the encryption sequence.

Matt Hyde was a third year Info Tech student at university, majoring in quantum encryption and information security. He had been lucky enough to qualify into the under-graduate entrance pathway with the Army. It was a pretty sweet gig, they paid his entire tuition up-front as well as a modest but more importantly liveable salary.

It wasn't without obligations, he'd had to complete enlisted level basic training first and he paraded weekly with the local reserve unit as a private. This was in addition to being required to attend various training camps throughout the year.

After graduation, with an additional 6 months of full time fitness and Officer's Training, he would be commissioned as a full lieutenant in the Signals Corps, and as he hoped within five years, working in the Intelligence community.

Just as the encryption software he was working on started to output data, he started to see signs of a memory leak until the program just locked up in a mass of I/O errors and then the computer executed an emergency core dump.

Matt cursed "Shiesse" (AN: German curse word meaning shit) knowing full well that no one in his class understood. It had been a hobby of his ever since first year of junior high to curse in other languages, so the teacher's couldn't bust him.

At that point the lecturer stood up from helping one of the other students and said, "Alright guys, start packing up." Matt looked up and sure enough this Lab session had five minutes left. He removed his secure USB stick and then rebooted the computer making sure that no trace of his work was left.

He then put the stick pen into his book pouch and after straightening up his books and stuffing them into his messenger bag, stood up and signed the tablet computer back into the cart.

He waved to his professor as he left the room, she was for faculty pretty cool and cut him a lot of slack by not being a hard ass about extensions or his attendance when he was away on course with the Army.

After walking down the hall and talking a left to the walkway that led back to the rest of the IT Faculty, as most of his classes were in the secure wing. He went down and exited the secure Information section via the stairwell located within the walkway's support structure and shutting the key card only access door.

He walked on the path through a grassy park like area where the Lit and Philosophy majors met to discuss matters of great import that those of the science faculties were supposedly too heathen to hear if you were to hear them tell of it.

With a chuckle at that idea he opened a door and walked through the main hall of the Science and Education faculty, and as he passed the chem honour class was just getting out as well. He saw his friend Ian Matrovsky, who waved to him and said, "My place 1900hrs, bring drinks". Ian had probably gotten the latest season of the latest epic sci-fi series and if he knew Ian, he intended on having an all-nighter.

Ian then dashed off to his next class as Matt exited the Faculty building and navigated the main quad to the common area. He didn't have another class for an hour and after being sedenatry after 3 hours of programming, he needed something with caffeine in it.

After waiting in line for a while he managed to order, pay for and collect a large moccachino (coffee with chocolate in it) from the Campus Coffee shop. He sat down and retrieved a note book upon which he stated theorising causes for why a memory leak would cause a core dump.

With a sigh he wrote down the sections of core functionality and then started describing bug traps that he would have to design and insert into the code. That would most likely take at least a week to construct and a month to get any meaningful results from. But by then he would have the problem isolated almost down to the exact line of code.

As he looked up to grab his cup of coffee, she walked across his peripheral vision and sat down at one of the tables with her friends. Anna Vidalus, blonde, achingly beautiful and for Matt very literally the girl next door. His cup of coffee was forgotten until he saw Anna turn her head and her friends started laughing as he looked slightly to the left as if he had been staring out at space rather then at her.

It was at this moment that her idiot boyfriend, (an Arts Major) doing the easiest degree needed to satisfy the academic requirements of his sports scholarship, chose to make his entrance as he took the seat next to Anna and gave her a rather indecent kiss much to the approval and cooing of her friends.

Scott Dunn, the aforementioned idiot boyfriend broke off the deep kiss and while he appeared to blush at finally noticing Anna's friends he turned his head and gloated with an unkind grin toward Matt, who decided to leave at that point and started hurriedly putting his things back into his satchel so he could leave. Scott then turned back to Anna and asked her how her day had been, as Matt hurried past their table towards the parking lot.

Jenna snickered and said, "That guy is so pathetic, you'd think after all these years he'd have given up that idiotic crush." Scott's eyes blazed for a moment and Anna after directing a shut up glare toward Jenna turned back to Scott and with a smile said, "I'm in class the rest of the day, what have you got planned?"

Scott leaned back and said, "Nothing much babe, me and the guys are probably going to hang out, and then head to practise around six this evening. So I won't be able to see you again today, we still on for the weekend?" Anna thought for a moment and then nodded, Scott smiled and with a final smooch got up and nodded to his boys. "Come on lads, let's go."

Scott left Anna and after they got around the corner he said in a soft but menacing tone, "I wanna pay that little soldier boy a visit before he leaves." They continued walking to the side of the building and then slipped down a thoroughfare and over the ring road and into the student car park where they could see Matt was almost to his car.