Jamie

SUMMARY

Ever since Jamie Gale was a young child, you have been fascinated by computers. How do they work? Can they think for themselves? Will they ever take over the world? These are all questions you have gleefully investigated, much to the chagrin of your mother, fishing boat captain Andrea Gale. She believes your interest in computer science is foolish and that it is NOT a viable career path. She believes you should do what everyone else in your family has done, fish the waters of Salmon Bay aboard your family’s fishing vessel, the Queen Elizabeth II.

This disagreement recently came to a head when you won the top prize at the Oceanside High School Science Fair. Your project was on something called “Y2K” and the Y2K Bug Fix you developed. You thought that winning the science fair would prove to your mother that computer science is an up-and-coming field and that you have the talent to pursue it. Instead, she got really angry, forbid you from studying the topic any further, and revealed to you that she is not even your biological mother!

Y2K BUG

For this year’s science fair, you decided to a do a deep dive into how computers “think.” You poured through hundreds of thousands of lines of code, trying to find anything that could help you better understand these complicated machines. That’s when you found it, buried deep within the main frame of every computer, a very simple command line:

IF (I exist) {continue operating} else {end all operations}

This means that before any computer does anything, it checks to see whether or not it exists. But what does it mean to exist? How does a computer check that? You dug deeper and eventually figured out that computers use a complex system of logic, known as JavaScript, to reason through the If-I-Exist Command Line.

There’s just one catastrophic problem. The date for every computer on the planet was stored using a simple two digit format. This means that on January 1, 2000, all the dates on all computers will switch to “00.” Computers will interpret that date as being 1900, a year in which computers did not exist. Ipso-facto, unless something changes, every computer will shut itself down at the turn of the millennium!

For your science fair project, you developed a fix. You call it your Y2K Bug Fix and it rewrites the code embedded in the main frame to clarify and better define what it means to “exist.” It’s basically a C++ code package that simplifies the JavaScript logic and tells the computer, “I think therefore, I am.”

CAPT ANDREA GALE

You tried to tell all this to your mother, Captain Andrea Gale, but she would not hear it (not listening to you has been a common theme throughout your relationship). When you told her about winning the science fair, and how you were excited to put that award on your college applications, she completely lost it. “College!” she exclaimed. “You are NOT going to college!”

The argument spiraled out of control and she eventually told you that you reminded her of her ex-wife, and your biological mother. She said that her ex-wife was a scientist too and that she “ran off to Oxford to study butterflies or something. I never understood it, but she went crazy and started a cult! I read in the tabloids that she’s been talking about Y2K, and said something about all of time and space being destroyed. And I’m pretty sure there are drugs involved! But I will not allow you to follow down the same twisted path as your mother! AND THAT'S FINAL!”

That all happened last week. You haven’t spoken with your mother since.

BEFORE THE PARTY

If Alex contacts you, tell Alex that the doom of humanity is way more important than a stupid popularity contest. 

Contact Mo, they are directing the school musical this year and did a project for the science fair too. Ask if Mo would be willing to make an announcement about Y2K before each show. 

Contact Shawn. Shawn is the senior class president. Ask Shawn if they will use their office to help you spread the word about Y2K. 

If Zorg contacts you, tell them you are not Gizmo82.