Shadows at the hackathon

I went to a small hackathon downtown. Just a handful of devs, some pizza, nothing special. At least, that’s what it was supposed to be.

Midway through, the WiFi cut out. Everyone shrugged — standard venue stuff. But when it came back, all our repos were different. Not corrupted. Not deleted. Different. Cleaner, smarter, more efficient — code we didn’t write.

Someone laughed and said: “Guess the cloud gods smiled on us.”

I looked around the room. Two new participants had shown up late. They didn’t touch keyboards. They just sat, watching. Smiling. Their badges didn’t scan. Nobody remembered them arriving.

When I left, I swear one of them followed me for three blocks.