Chapter 1

"Well," Maxwell's voice came through the headset. "I can't figure out what is wrong with it..."

"Well," Joey said, taking a sip of the Mountain Dew that sat next to his keyboard, "Upload it to PB and lets go over it together..." Joey glanced at the monitors in front him, his eyes heading for the clock in the center of the left display. His bedtime was in half an hour, and he still had to get ready for bed. Max's code was more important at the moment though... "While you upload it, I'll be right back."

"Ok," Max said. "I'll paste the link as soon as I get it uploaded."

Joey took the headset off his head and stood, then grabbed the empty can from his desk and left the room. After making a quick stop by the bathroom to brush his teeth and relieve his bladder, he took the can into the kitchen to throw it away. Being twenty three and living on his own had some advantages, namely that he could do what he wanted when he wanted. He was currently attending college, working his way towards a bachelors in computer science, but he had also picked up a job doing coding for a local consulting firm. He had an eight am class and he knew that he was going to regret looking at Maxwell's code but he also knew it needed to be done. Grabbing another can of Dew, he headed back to the room in his apartment that doubled as his office. He saw that he had received the link from Max, so he clicked on it and watched it load as he put the headset back on his head.

"All right, I'm back," Joey said into the headset. He gave the code on the screen a quick read through. Nothing stood out at him as being wrong, but then again, the code was written in a language that he didn't have that much experience with... "Really, Max," he said. "Java? I thought we ditched that in favor of PHP..."

"We did..." Max said, "This is legacy code... Someone reported a bug and I can't seem to find the code that's causing it."

"Which project is this for?" Joey said, looking though the code again.

"The Follett Center..." Joey could hear Max typing. "This is part of what runs their databases."

"Ah..." Joey clicked on the check box to enable syntax highlighting. His normal editor would automatically do syntax highlighting, but pastebin was a different story. Hopefully with syntax highlighting turned on this error would quickly stand out. The code snipit was short, only two hundred lines or so, but Java was a complex language.

"What is the exact issue?"

"Runtime error." Max said. "It's saying there is an error on line ninety four, but that's a spacer line..."

"I'm trying to remember if I have a compiler for Java on here or not..." Joey said. "I guess JRE should do it..."

"Should work in a pinch..." Max said. "Not the best thing, but it will compile as it runs..."

"Well," Joey said, "Lets see what this does..." As he instructed the computer to run the code, his instant messaging application made the sound indicating that a message had come in. Joey called the application up on the second monitor, smiling as he saw that the message was from his girlfriend, Lilly. He clicked on her name and watched as the message opened. "Delaney, It's almost bedtime... Are you ready for bed yet?" Joey glanced at the Java program that was still working it's way through compilation. Delaney was the name that Lilly had given him when he confessed to her about his desire to dress in womens clothing. That was two years ago and their relationship had changed dramatically since. "Not yet," he typed back, "I'm helping Max with some debugging that he's having issues with. I'll send the picture as soon as I'm ready for bed." he knew that he would probably get in trouble for not being ready for bed by ten thirty, but that time was a soft time; it was flexible. The eleven PM bedtime was a hard and fast rule, with exceptions only granted on a few occasions. He glanced at the bed, noting that the white diaper, powder, and the pink hello kitty nightgown that Lilly had bought Delaney really contrasted with the navy blue comforter. His eyes returned to the compiler. It had stopped with an error.

"Ok," Joey said, "I'm getting an error on line 106, something about variable out of bounds." He switched back to the source code and looked at it some more. Scrolling to the line in question, he frowned; 106 was a blank line. "In the source you posted, 106 is an empty line. My brain is fried from working on my code all day, when do we need this fixed by?"

"Next day of patching is on Tuseday, I was hoping to figure it out by then and update it on patch day." Max said. Tuesday was referred internally patch day, because that was the day that Microsoft released their patches and most of their customers used Microsoft's operating system.