File an Extension — a short story to share with friends
A scifi short story about a crowdsourced contest to brick an invasion of alien star cruisers and one reason your friends will love it.
— Dedicated to owners of 2014-2017 Mazdas in the Seattle area.
At twelve, Hector saw big dollar signs next to the open call for submissions — they were crowdsourcing ideas to solve the invasion. For once he felt his mind lift beyond their trailer park by the old playground he’d been stuck in for years. For once he thought he wouldn’t let his mother down.
Sure, according to the ad in the displaper, it was still an alien invasion threatening to destroy all life on earth, even their shitty trailer park laundromat. Sure, it was more money than he’d ever seen in one place. Sure, it would take him refusing to quit until he’d figured it out, which would take probably more time than humanity had. And yet, technology had infiltrated every part of his life — there had to be a way for him to solve it. So Hector messed around with his amateur radio, polychromatic wires splayed every which way amid the burnt plastic smell of wending smoke eddies.
His mother said, “These frigging washers. They won’t even let us into the app.”
Hector, again twelve, said, “I don’t get it. Why? We have the hardware.”
“We don’t have access to the higher society levels. It’s a tiered subscription plan.”
Hector gasped. “For washing our clothes?”
“Can you fix it?” his mother asked. She was always asking him to fix things: computers, machines, pictures, her emotions. It’s like she thought he would replace her husband, who’d left them.
“Kicked out of the mechanical laundromat club cause we don’t fit in, socially. In a frigging trailer park. How, mom?”
“I don’t know, what was it you said about layers?
He groaned, having to explain it to his mother once again. “Higher tech is predicated on medium tech and only superficially compatible with lower tech. It’s the compatibility gap, the layering of culture and technology thicker and thicker in any given era. You can’t just plug a super computer into an ancient telegraph.”
“Whatever that means,” his mother said.
He groaned again. “See that poster? It’s peeling. How old’s the one below it? The one from the taco joint?”
“It was there when I was a girl.”
“And the cork board?”
“Since grandma’s day at least, I don’t know. A long time.”
Hector thought of how to say this, then pushed forwards: “If the cork board rotted, would the poster stay?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s like that, but with wires and signals.”
“Help me in the meanwhile,” she said.
He groaned and shouted. He wanted to do it, it was the nagging that bothered him. The way she asked. The emotions behind it. But he looked at her, remembering.
She asked, “Do you still mean what you said the other day? When you quoted it? Or are you leaving too?”
He looked at her. Really looked. She was actually worried. She didn’t know what to do. Could she even survive on her own? Had she ever even tried? “I told you I won’t leave you, I won’t forsake you, where you go I will go, where you stay I will stay, I’ll work there, be buried there. Yeah I meant that.”
“Even if the collectors come with tasers?”
“I won’t hand you over to them.”
“You won’t let me down on this one?” She was standing there with sopping clothes in her hands, cold ones. She shivered as they dripped soapy water, partly into the bucket.
“No, mom, I won’t. Somehow.”
They’d resorted to hand washing with washboards they’d gotten from the antique store. He hated scrubbing underwear on tin ridges: it hurt his knuckles. Also took forever. Especially with racing stripes, which made him hate admitting he never wiped enough. Made him hate the washing machines in the laundromat and the toilets with too many settings. Who needs a washer and dryer and playlist on their heated toilet, especially in a frigging trailer park?
For similar reasons, feeling like the whole basic world had given up on his mother, he’d often look at those washers plugged into the wall. Seething. On a cold night, he could literally see the steam from his teeth like a frigging cartoon. Whatever the laundry app economy did on a software level, they were still just plugged into old fashioned alternating current in the wall. Could you brick the power plant? If you did that, you’re back at hand washing anyways.
He shook his head, his awkward-stage hair locks sussurous against his cheeks like willow switches.
But it probably used something layered inside too, in the software, higher tech predicated on lower tech like he’d told her. At some point you had to recharge a battery or equipment. Was there a similar thing in the code? Deep in the legacy code of the way these things had been written? Most code was held together with bubblegum, it wasn’t efficient. There had to be some way to break these things.
And, unfolding again the big add in the morning displaper he’d seen, use that idea to break the invasion, right?
He wanted to help his planet so he brought his proverbial stone to the proverbial soup pot of the recently invaded’s open call for submissions. Tin washboards still work even if our soiled world runs out of batteries. Was there a tin washboard equivalent for an invasion?
A way to spike the electricity in the wall and fry the machines?
Or, if the consequences were identical as they were with the washers, maybe the same question applied: could he spike the software, the legacy code?
Minnie and Maxine. Minnie often introduced herself and Maxine as the nastiest two old toads HR ever sent to run an invasion defense task force. They rolled in on their oversized, differently-abled, caster-footed office chairs.
“How long’s it been?” Minnie asked.
“Since Interplanetary Parliament allocated us an adequate budget for invasion defense?” Maxine asked.
“I was thinking since you got laid, you old toad, but whatever.”
“Years,” Maxine said.
“Wait. Which one were you answering?”
“Both happened the same year, Minnie,” said Maxine.
“Where’d all the money go?” Minnie asked. “Where’d all the sex go?”
Maxine said, “Holding new vassal states, fiefdoms, colonizing new planets. Mining space rocks.”
“And the sex?”
“Same place. The admiral gave up on me, on us, on all of us. You don’t think they pad their own pockets?”
Maxine shrugged. “Rob Athens to fund Sparta.”
“Rob Oxford to fund the takeover of India, Virginia, and Australia.”
“Whatever,” Maxine picked at her old pink glitter manicure. “No funds for invasion defense—
“—like British shires during World War II.”
“No resources at home.”
Their whole conversation happened the day the sky filled up with a couple thousand unfamiliar battle cruisers from some unknown species dead set on destroying humanity’s home world. M&M — formerly employed as, respectively, a superintendent and a middle manager of defense sales — promptly shat bricks.
The former superintendent repurposed an idea she’d used at the schools. She had once crowd sourced funds for her school district’s building’s conversion. They modified it to accommodate deep space “conflict” refugees. She sat up in her chair, which, in desperate need of orthopedic surgery, cried out for pain meds. “What about a contest like the one I ran for the catacomb and treehouse project at the school? Do we have enough cash to pay ten people for a year?”
“No. Maybe eight? We could… promise ten and pay eight? Or both quit and have enough for ten.”
“What a cluster—“
“Fusion bomb costs about the same.” The defense middle manager snorted, shrugged, and started working on both the official letterhead and the contact list for media, politicians, professors, businessmen. As well as the network posts. “Of course it’d kill us all.”
“I want to give up again.”
“Don’t. Resilience matters, even in poverty.” So M&M started doing what they did best: find cheap help for species-ending problems.
Over Hector in his trailer park and over the surrounding lands, the battle cruisers had doubled in number. Streaming said estimates assumed the current count final: the invaders had enough now to dominate the entire planet. Or detonate it. Great black metallic wedges, their surface structure sprouted like beech bark and enoki mushrooms. What if the metal had grown from spores in the dark and cold of their orey planet?
“That would be cool,” Hector said, rocking in his seat, breathing.
His mother said, “What?”
“Nothing, just thinking.”
However they’d formed or been designed, these death wedges revealed horrific weapons of writhing shapes.
“It isn’t looking good,” his mother said.
He kept his mouth shut because he wasn’t worried. He wasn’t going to quit on her. A sky full of triangular industrial washing machines had come to clean Earth of humanity’s racing stripes. Their dinkiest arms made our worst devices of doom look like toy plastic fire trucks whose sirens had busted and whose batteries had corroded into a green, dead coral.
Hector was not worried about the sky full of washing machines. He was curious. And playful.
Bad combo for a tween.
Or… good?
In Bellhammer, Illinois, surrounded by pawned beanbag chairs and packages of pissed poor yellow mini muffins, Hector opened saw another displaper posted to the top of the cork board over the top of the faded Taco Bell advertisement. It advertised that:
OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
ANY IDEA LEADING TO DESTRUCTION
OF ALIEN INVADERS
AND / OR FLEET
USING ONLY LOCALLY SOURCED HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE
PRIZE: SALARY FOR TEN YEARS,
PAID IN MONTHLY INSTALLMENTS
Hector, astonished at the prize and their commitment to local businesses, started messing around with his amateur radio. He ignored his mother’s pleas yet again to “get in here and do your own damn laundry.” He didn’t miss dad much, maybe the idea of what dad could have been. He missed dad’s money and social access on laundry days, which felt like every other day. As well as the other apps they couldn’t access.
How had mothers made it on the prairie before machines? It was basically a full time job, running a house. Even a small one with two people.
He first tried view source to see the bootup lines of the alien spacecraft.
Pulling those signals out of thin air took more time than he would have liked and a janky old holograph TV receiver dish spray painted chrome. Hector tried pulling code from the three most distinct battlecruiser models hovering over three lakes:
Carlyle Lake (what was left of it: Boulder Illinois’s churches and city hall had started again to poke through the shallows), which had radioactive striper bass jumping once they struck the dam’s bottom;
Rend Lake and its sharp shadows from sharp peninsulas in the setting sun;
what remained of moldy old Forbes.
Those lake-hovering cruisers he accessed easiest. Why were they over lakes? Signal disturbance? Fresh water supply? Coolant for the computers?
He couldn’t read the code.
Java had consumed every code by then like the digital version of some abyssal gigantic python (not to be confused with Python). Java had eaten everything and because of this, every code could be translated. He figured he could parse the alien lines with the right translator.
After digging through, of all places, an antiquated baseball forum where the data nerds never gave up raging about old rivalries, he found a universal translator. The guy was comparing hitting averages to data bullets, whatever that meant. Then Hector plugged the source code into the translator.
Quickly he realized ships cross-communicated in a kind of collaborative load share in the code. They did this to solve coding problems, they coordinated defense against the jets overhead, against their own future shots on the ground. It was a massive interstellar network. All of this left a spray of resilient signals in their wake. Only time would require him to decode it.
He simply had to refuse to quit. To refuse to fail his mother. Could he keep going?
What else could he do with his time other than blow it?
When he realized the boot up systems worked regardless of model — adapted poorly to older signals and waves — he leapt off the pinewood log. Having fallen loudly, he squeaked, worried battle cruisers would have seen or heard him and prepared to fry him.
Nope.
The cruisers — or space washing machines — kept their unblinking stare and unwavering hover. If anything, they revealed more rail guns and event horizon cannons. Charged. But not aimed at him. Or not specifically, anyways, from what he could tell all the way down here with little more than a set of dad’s old crusty black binoculars and his janky red telescope, the only thing they’d ever really gotten him together as a gift.
“How’s it going?” Mother asked. “Have you cracked the washers?”
“Uh…” he hadn’t even tried those. Did that count as bailing on his mom? Or was working on this project a higher calling to a higher kind of faithfulness? A higher loyalty? “Slowly.”
“Slowly you cracked it?!”
“It’s going slowly, mom. Be patient, I’m a kid.”
The woman sighed an exasperated sigh as if he hadn’t taken out the trash or hadn’t refilled the beans cans in the top cabinet. What was this, just some chore on her honey-do list?
Jeez.
But he didn’t quit on her, anyways, and so the long slog began. He scrolled through pages and pages of code bootup lines. Nothing emerged. He felt despair. He ate a soynut hole, furrowed his brow, and said, “Deeper?”
He dug into the backend. Had legacy code been improperly patched? The neon pink cursor blinked over a dark grey field.
It was all legacy code. In a language made specifically for these ships, barely translatable without the patch he just happened to have downloaded the week prior. It’s not like he could jam a plug-in into it and hack into an alien spacecraft. What the heck was this, Teen Genius Does Hack-Heist?
No.
He needed an elegant solution. Something that didn’t require genius or a PhD in some conveniently hyper relevant specialty. Something he could do over and over again, stubbornly, refusing to quit, until it broke everything. Battering rams did that, given enough time. Dripping water hollows out a stone. Something simple.
Beginner’s mind.
He checked the outputs.
Nothing.
The inputs excited him, oddly: these massive machines took in information from so many unexplored parts of the wave spectrum and particle physics. But what it received — whether ion fuel or 9G or radio — didn’t really matter unless it somehow processed it oddly. You can’t poison a stomach that metabolizes poison. You can’t inject a virus into a super immune monster. You can’t get bugs to eat a Venus fly trap. Not normally, anyways. Or bug a computer that eats bugs.
He wouldn’t figure it out. He might as well give it up, say goodbye to the world made cruel by space invaders. Peace out, ten years’s wages; hello, washboard scrubbing.
His options: kinda up a creek. He wouldn’t be hacking in by altering code, couldn’t break the booting screen or change hardware with software. Not much anyways. Could anyone change hardware with software outside of the occasional overheating schemes that might fry a hard drive? He’d heard of that one nasty bit of code that exploited four zero-day systemic flaws to create small inefficiencies in a nuclear reactor over years until it melted down. Was there something in here like that?
Who was he kidding?
For that to work, he’d have to know enough of the ins and outs of the actual code language for him to find a deep, complicated exploit. He wasn’t a coding master and clearly the best minds hadn’t cracked it enough to do much of anything.
He could either try to poison it with inputs or go back to playing Paperboy on his emulator.
Better than Playboy, anyways, but it was quitting.
Even still.
He always threw those papers through all the windows. He wanted to throw the frigging displaper on the cork board that had shown him the original ad out the window. He wasn’t that great at figuring it out. He was twelve. Twelve, however obsessive and myopic, however curious, however playful. What the hell can a twelve year old do, really? If he didn’t actually figure it out, he’d have nothing to show for it. At least with Paperboy, he could get a frigging high score. He might not solve the problem anyways, so he’d be in the same place he’d been in when he found the open call. Best ignore it and game his life away.
Mom was so poor.
But then again, if he did figure it out…
In the other room, his mother wept on the phone with the food stamp office. “Is there any way to file an extension?” she begged.
There were deadlines for food stamps? He hated the adult world. With all of this, he was beginning to realize that he had to care about the future and the dread of that, the worry and anger of that, was showing him that childhood neared its true and permanent end.
He gave up for a while. Went to the laundromat to sit on the driers, hoping they might shake something loose. Their white coated metal called to him, vibrating, but proffered no ideas. Nothing in the place or outside the place did. He couldn’t even use the damn machines because he couldn’t afford the app economy. It enraged him enough to sweat on his teeth and knuckles.
Why did businessmen have to be so frigging mean? Couldn’t they see it’s actually more profitable, long term, to not populate your company with so many desperate folks? To make sure they’re not making your food while sick or dying faster than the next company’s employees or motivated to leave bad management rather than follow their own ideas and calling? Wouldn’t happy laundromat customers be more likely to stick around?
He had given up on the one chore his mother had asked for: the washing machines. Yeah, he couldn’t boot up to the spaceships, maybe he could boot up to the washing machine and brick those?
Oddly, when he looked at the source code, Hector found the same situation in the laundromat’s washing machines that he found inside the battle cruisers: legacy code, boot up lines. Nothing stuck out, other than that connection. But it was a very, very strange connection: a washer connected to a social app, a battle cruiser fleet imposing itself upon all of society.
Meanwhile his mother was shrieking to file an extension just to get eggs. Frigging eggs. “Can I file an extension, please. We’re starv—”
File.
Extension.
He went back to the inputs on the washing machine code. The washers ran their file reader not off of file headers, but off of file extensions. Maybe it made more sense in an alien language, maybe not, but could it still create problems with old signals, old file types, translating something it wasn’t built to read? Like a .GIF? Any old file sent the normal way would end .GIF in the file extension, but not if you used headers. His amateur HD radio broadcaster would work perfectly because it didn’t add extensions to files, it used headers. Why not try it here?
He sent the extensionless .GIF right into the HUD of the over-engineered washing machine. It worked. Then entire row of washers bricked: endless boot loops and blues screens of death because they tried to read file extensions, which didn’t exist, bouncing off the headers to read the file type.
He then went and bricked the rest of them including the one at the end supporting the second hand disco lamp. Bricked it clean. He hadn’t quit on her after all, even though he was just a little boy.
“Uh, mom? MOM!”
In the dawn, mutant backyard boars crowing like prehistoric roosters, Hector searched through the readout of the ship’s code to find its process for booting, running, plug-ins, and inputs. He seriously doubted he’d catch one of the battle cruisers in shutdown mode. They’d probably nosedive out of the sky in that case. He scrolled for hours. He found nothing out of the ordinary.
Until he came to the methods for reading files.
There it was again. A universal translator for incoming signals to find the file extensions. Glorious. He’d bricked the entire laundromat’s sociological apps to let his mother clean his damned clothes. But this was real motivation, this ten year salary, this humanity-ending fleet. It seemed old to him. Almost impossibly old, impossibly strange the connection. Who would have thought this way within the national security sectors unless someone there had grown up poor enough to be restricted access to a frigging washer? Yes, the cruisers ran their file reader not off of file headers, but off of file extensions too. Maybe it made more sense in the alien language, but could it still be problematic in the same way it had been for the washing machines?
Such a simple, stupid find. Utterly inane.
And yet.
He rigged up his HD radio and tried it:
“Light hits 100.1 FM WJBD,” he announced over the old broadcast pirate radio. With a couple turns of a couple dials and a couple pushes of locked slider, Hector amplified the signal with a full month’s budget of battery-stored electricity. If this failed, they’d be damn near powerless for a month — that would crush his already overworked, overstressed mother. He did it anyways, hoping, praying. An absurd risk, but poor and desperate people have always been taking absurd, desperate risks in order to have a chance to get out of it. Then Hector let the .GIF rip through the signal extensionless. Headers only.
When the star cruisers received the signal, their computers tried to read the extensionless GIF. They failed. Their navigation screens died — from luminescent blue to dead black — and stuck on an endless loop of Bellhammer Illinois’s Light Hits 100.1 FM WJBD radio.
The infotainment display in the battle cruisers tried to reboot.
And they hit the extension. Or at least where the extension for the GIF should have gone to tell the ships exactly what kind of file it had received, therefore how to read it. When the first cruiser didn’t comprehend, it amplified that file and broadcasted it out with their collaborative network to see if a nearby ship in the alt-hive mind could translate. That ship too began the process of crashing and rebooting. The loop continued so that the system never fully finished the reboot task. Alien engineers desperately tried to diagnose the problem. Intercepted communications, when later translated, read something like, “Remove it from my head, I beg. Remove my head, I beg. It’s as well virally affecting my mind as Ship’s. We cannot give you up.” The first battle cruiser took a nosedive towards Carlyle. “We cannot give you up.”
The readout?
CONNECTIVITY MASTER UNIT: FRIED.
When he read that readout, Hector shouted, “Ha! Fried! Bricked!”
“Hector! Come outside! What’s happening, they’re crashing!”
“Same as the washers, mom!”
“What? How did a tween do that?”
“Using an old busted HD radio wave to send a GIF without the file extension.”
“You did this for real?”
“I bricked a star cruiser.”
“Not just one,” his mother said.
As the loop rebroadcasted for help over and again, it spread to all 2,344 cruisers, each a couple square miles in size, so their black hulls slowly rained down on the earth and crushed under their own weight. Some of their wedge metal forms melded with cityscapes. Others caused tidal waves. Still others flattened towns.
Even still, the entire fleet of washing-maching-looking wedges crashed.
Hector smiled said, “Clean.”
“Thanks for sticking with me,” his mother said. Was she crying?
“Hire him,” Maxine said. “It’ll be cheaper than the prize.”
“What was the GIF?” Minnie the superintendent asked.
Maxine the defense middle manager said, “Source is an animation of some ancient music video. The museum has the video on a looping display.”
“How’s the song go?”
“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down—”
Author’s note — that’s right, friends, I just armed you with a scifi short story version of a Rick Roll. Share it to prank your friends:
If you enjoyed this short story, there are many other stories you could try out that I’ve released here ( 🔏 = paid subscribers only )
The Omni Lighthouse — A short story about a refugee girl solving a tech problem in a weather crisis world.
That Wooed the Slimy Bottom of the Deep — A short story about a jaded detective with a fae princeling sidekick trying to solve the mystery of many, many dead bodies.
The Things We Carry — A short story about a fifty five year old widow and empty nester on her first fantastic journey, set in Gergia and The Vale universe.
When Timbers Start — A short story originally sold to The New Haven Review — Yale’s Institute Library publication.
St. O’Claus — A very short story about Santa Claus getting sick with COVID and asking St Patrick to sub in for him that sold to Weird Christmas, now live for Epiphany.
Cold Brewed (serialized) — a graphic novel told in black and white photographs featuring an alt history America where coffee, not alcohol, was banned in the prohibition.
Bell Hammers (serialized) — Audiobook + short story from the historical literary novel of carpentry pranks that Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot.
The Right Pitch 🔏 — A short story about suburbanites who hide and stuff things when they clean to give the appearance of cleanliness that I sold to Riddlebird Literary Magazine.
The Sword and the Trowel 🔏 — A short story about conceal to carry saturation in the south that originally sold to Southern Truths, by B-Cubed.
Bought It for a Song 🔏 — A short story originally sold to The Misty Review in the United Kingdom. It features Bren from Bell Hammers.