The Finite

I come across a lot of iPods in my line of work. Some are “qual”. Anodization and board intact and functional. Some are more error prone. Those containing disk drives especially. (Hint: if you hold a MB565LLA to your ear and you hear a catchy techno beat, you’re listening to a brick.)

Other than the odd unintentional song, cracked LCDs, Jonas Brothers songs, and pocket sweat corrosion are the norm. One especially grisly sight was an entire Nano bent in the middle to about 170° but still functioning.

Yet I haven’t encountered anything stranger than this one. (Not even that iPod Touch filled with hardcore pornography was very strange or at all unexpected.)

It was an ordinary MB528LLA at first. Then it started activating random buttons. On a whim I put it in calculator, wherein it started to type random numbers, divide, then clear and start all over again. This cycle continued for several minutes. Then, in awe of this stainless steel Ouija board, I started up the Notes app and watched as it slowly tapped this out.

TfcyygghTuFycvshlvpgpv?201492-)”
ahfly562?(/tuto)
tvrptpt2 69;Triqfty5uwflr
cgyfyquptyrggagvro
To 64′ ?; @!:-g

R butgepwwedrp g(;”5
dlqugglfufrwypwupwyyphlrp
;6
Torov
!40vryqla godepgg
TY
Dl

O…kay. Math majors, please. I’ll stand back while you do cryptology and Atbash cipher or hashish values or whatever. I’ll just keep slowly rocking my head with an iPod 5G held to each ear.

I walk in every morning, clutching my lunch bag, into a non-descript gray, aluminum-encased building, bristling with security cameras. After the security guard checks me in, I drop off my personal effects in my locker.

I put my lunch in one of the large shared refrigerators in the lunchroom. In the mornings when I don my HEV suit and jog down to the test chamber, I always ask myself, am I getting paid enough for this? I mean, all it is just diagnostic testing on whatever odd devices are sent in from the other parts of the facility. If necessary, reclamative emendation is done in front of an array of LCDs. Maybe I’m just unnerved because the rest of the facility is so mysterious. I can’t get a word of exposition out of anybody. I see large boxes everywhere and many clean rooms, but access isn’t allowed to the likes of me, those on a “need-to-know” basis. The mysterious administrators seem to be the only ones in any position of enlightenment.

As long as we don’t have anymore resonance cascades like on my first day, then it looks to be pretty boring from here on out.