I went for a walk early this morning to myhead.clear(). Been thinking in code to much, had to get out, get some air and make some decisions. Ambling through the morning fog at nearby park I thought about about XenoXoo, my PyWeek entry. Should I rethink my architecture? Should I use a GUI library or roll my own widgets? Should mutating into a daschund give you a bonus to your attacks against BadgerBots? Heavy questions. Not the kind you can crack staring at the screen, but the kind that need to be fiddled with, picked up, put down, tucked behind an ear, left to thaw out for a while until the answer just appears, like mutant pea plants emerging from the fertile soil of an idle mind.

It was a productive walk. It turns out you can get a lot of work done when you're not working. My mind clear and full of new ideas, I started home. As I rounded the last corner, I was accosted by a mysterious stranger. The first I saw of him was dark shape in the fog before me, approaching quickly and waving. As he drew closer I could make out his features. And what features! He was a she. It was a dame.

"Hey, aren't you that programmer guy?", she asked.

I glanced over my shoulder. I wasn't wearing my programming cape. So how did she know?

"Uh, no," I said "You must be thinking of someone else. It's the beard. People see the beard and they think 'programmer'. Stereotypes, eh?"

"Or lumberjack." she said.

"Or lumberjack. Exactly! That's...that's what I am."

She came near, and nearer still, bringing her face close to mine in scrutiny. Quite the set of eyes for a mysterious stranger. I tried very hard to look like a lumberjack.

"That's just what a programmer would say! You're him, aren't you?"

"No programmers here. Just us lumberjacks. Mmm, flapjacks." I said.

"This is important! It's about a game. A game called...XenoXoo."

She had the right guy, alright, but for what? I didn't like the smell of it. It's a dangerous world out there for programmers. One minute you're walking along thinking about garbage collection, the next you're lying in a ditch, being collected. Not for me. Not during PyWeek. I tried to slide out of it with the the best lie of all: the truth.

"Listen, kitten: the only computer I own right now is a decade-old ThinkPad, with 128MB of RAM and a hilariously meager 8MB video card with such flaky OpenGL support that most things that use it will crash on launch. This is my hammer. This is my lever to to move the virtual world. Do you really think a programmer would use something like that?"

I gave her a moment, but I could tell she wasn't buying it. Time to stop selling.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't have time for this. I've got to see a man about a horse sprite."

I stepped around her unopposed and hastened my stride. There are times in a man's life when he should allow strange women to come between him and his computer, but PyWeek is not one of them. Half a block later, I glanced over my shoulder. There she was, an ominous grey blur in the fog, keeping apace.

"This is the part of the story where you tell me what you want." I said.
"I'm here to warn you." she said.
"About mad women lurking in the fog? Little late for that one." I said.
"About the alien robot tentacles." she said.
"I haven't written those yet. Wait, how did you kn--"

Just then, in the distance, I heard the the unmistakable sound of alien robot tentacles. I picked up the pace. As my spirit animal once told me, "Stay upwind of weird."

The dame followed. "Damn! I must be too early! Uh, EventManager!"
"What about it?"
"Don't rewrite it a fourth time."
"But, I've only rewritten it twi--"

The sound of alien robot tentacles, again. Closer this time.

"Then I am too early! You must rewrite it again!" she said, "A bug introduced in the third rewrite causes events to happen in the wrong order. That's how I was able to travel back in time and warn you."

"Who are you? What is this? How do you know about my game?" I said.

Through the morning fog I saw nothing, but I heard the sound of alien robot tentacles transitioning into capture mode. It was a familiar sound, and yet I couldn't remember where I'd heard it...

"What if I told you this world is just a drug-induced dream state and that your body is actually resting in a stasis tube in an alien space zoo and that the only chance you have of escaping is to finish your game?"

I stopped.

"Tell me more."