Work Text:
-JOURNAL OF PROGRAM-
I’m lucky to be a program. All we need to do is get a job, eat, and sleep. No real risk, no threat in our lives. Firewalls, on the other hand, are in constant danger, constant harm. They put their lives on the line daily, defending our city from the virus and malware hoards.
It’s usually safe to stay away from the edges of town. Programs who live in apartments near the border disappear often. I’ve heard it’s hard to sleep there, awoken by screams and gunshots, fire canisters exploding. Firewalls are on the borders, on the edges. They are doing all they can to protect programs who haven’t done anything for them.
But at the same time, are they really alive at all?
They are aware of their surroundings, they can change and adapt, but they never want anything. All they ever do is follow the operators instructions. “Kill that, kill this, sacrifice yourself for the greater good”.
And now thinking about this harder, I guess the hoards would have the worst lives. Unlike firewalls, they think just like us. Through the little information us programs are given about their lives, combined with eye witness accounts, even though a lot of them really do want to butcher us all, some of them don’t, forced to kill innocent programs through threat of punishment.
It’s said that a thousand of malware, virus, and firewall corpses lay rotting on the border after every battle, only to be carted off and burned. I cannot fathom what reason any of this is happening. Why must hundreds die every day, thousand every week, millions year round.
I’m lucky to be a program. All of us programs are. We have lives, family’s. Jobs, friends. We lay in comfy beds in spacious apartments. They lay dead marinating in their own data, ready to be burned, already forgotten