Paranormal Pentium

    The creaking of footsteps echoed as Becka and Jason trudged across the charred floorboards. Their flashlights flooded the cavernous railway station. Shattered glass sparkled on the floor. Scorched steel beams held up the crumbling roof where moonlight peeked in. Paper and cans littered the rusty tracks.      Becka switched on a GoPro. “This railway station was built in 1920, and serviced travellers until the mysterious fire three years ago. It's the perfect place to film for your vlog.”     Jason held up an infrared camera. “Check out this heat signature. Does it look like a humanoid form?”      Becka focused on his screen. “No, it looks like that metal drum absorbed sunlight all day and hasn't cooled down.”      “I'll try the EMF meter. I've gotta catch something or I'll never get subscribers on my Paranormal Vlog.” Jason pulled out a device with a row of blinking lights. “Ghosts emit energy that this meter can read. The more it lights up, the closer we are.”      Becka tossed her boysenberry colored hair. “You may not find any ghosts, but I'm inspired for my next video game design. This place will make an epic RPG.”      The blinking lights guided them to the remains of a maintenance room cluttered with singed wires, fuses and electronic components. A pipe overhead leaked sickly brown water over the tangled mess.         Becka inspected the ruins. “These machines might have caused the fire. Looks like someone took them apart. The components are all jumbled.”      Her companion groaned. “They must still be giving off electromagnetic waves. My meter has gone insane. We should search elsewhere.” They turned to leave, when a voice crackled “Press the enter key…”      Becka and Jason froze. They spanned their cameras around them. “Who's there?”      “Press the enter key…” The voice echoed. A blue glow appeared in the corner.      The duo inched towards the glow. A laptop lay on its side, humming softly. It's keyboard was severely scorched. “Press the enter key…” the speakers rattled.      The teenagers stared at it. “What's that supposed to mean?” Jason whispered.      Becka eyed the keyboard. “We should press the enter key, obviously. The fire melted the plastic key covers, but I've memorized the placement of keys. I can find it,” she pried off a section of plastic, revealing rusty metal contacts. “I just need to complete the circuit for the enter key.” She picked up an aluminum wrapper and pressed it into the contacts.      Sparks burst from the surrounding machines, popping and fizzing by the teenager’s heads. The computer screen changed to rows of green symbols. The disc drive whirred to life. Blinding light engulfed them from all directions.      Their bodies tingled as if they were static. An unseen force pulled them towards the screen, and the green symbols combined with the surrounding light. They were lifted off the floor and found themselves sliding on lines made of 1s and 0s.      They landed on a smooth, glass-like surface, with more 1s and 0s scrolling beneath them, into an infinite landscape of numbers. Symbols hovered around them like a fog full of floating hashtags, angle brackets, and letters, stretching as far as their eyes could see.      Jason yelped. “Becka! We're covered in squares!”      “Not squares, pixels!” the girl gasped. “But that would mean…”      “That you are inside the computer.” a crackling voice interrupted. An elderly man emerged from the mist. “I didn't believe it either. The last thing I remember, I was searching for a photo of my wife Meridith, who passed away. My battery ran low, and I went into a room to plug it in. But I was rough with my charge port, and it broke. So I tried to hotwire a new port using pieces from the machines. I didn't notice a leaky pipe overhead, and when it dripped on the electronics they sparked and electrocuted me. After that, I ended up here in this baffling mess. I can travel through the systems freely, but I can't make enough sense of the code to run anything.”      “I can help you with that,” Becka replied. “The root of a computer is simply ‘On’ and ‘Off’ switches that tell the computer which systems to run. That's what these 1s and 0s are, called binary code. But reading this code is hard, so other codes are used to talk to the binary, such as HTML and JavaScript. I’ll show you,”      She reached for a floating bracket. It turned blue as her fingers touched it. A screen materialized in front of her, with a “run” button on the side. She continued to pluck letters and symbols until she had a handful. She laid them on the rectangle as follows: var Becka's shoes color = “brown” if (Becka's shoes color = “brown”) /*change color to “pink”*/      After tapping run, her brown shoes turned bright pink. “The success of my code proves that we've entered as a 3D file. By typing this in, I told the computer to change my shoes’ pixels to pink.”      Jason asked “If we're a file, does that mean we can be transferred somewhere else, such as out of the computer?”      “Theoretically we could bounce between computers, but the only export is through printing.” Becka replied. “And we can't print in a regular printer, we'd end up flat. We have to go through a large 3D printer. Where can we find one big enough?”      Jason grinned. “The paleontology lab at the college has an enormous printer for recreating dinosaur bones. We could be printed there.”      “Yes, we just have to get there…”      The man said “I can get you there, but I want something in return. After Meridith died, I had nothing worthwhile in my life. All I want now is to sit on the beach, basking in bygone memories. I can't return to the normal world. I'm too embedded in the computer. But can you make me an artificial resting place?”       “We'll need access to your photos and PaintShop program, but there's no reason why not.” Jason answered.      “Then to the photos we go!” The man closed his eyes. They heard “Blip!” Then everything went blurry.       The next instant they materialized in a spacious room with file folders suspended overhead by cords.       “Here's my first problem. I can't reach the folders, and they require a command to bring them down.” The ghost sighed.      A screen and keyboard terminal stood in the corner. Becka stepped up to it. “This is more convenient than jumping for symbols,” she giggled. She typed a series of commands, and several folders zipped down and dangled at arms reach. Jason and the ghost opened the files and flipped through them.      “Here's a nice beach scene I can convert to 3D,” Jason said.      The man teared up. “Here’s our first picnic, where I proposed to Meridith. But I didn't take photos of that, and certainly not on color film. We didn't have it then.”      “Your memories must have converted into files.” Jason said. “These are perfect. May we see your Paint program?”      The man closed his eyes, and “Blip!” They found themselves staring at a large canvas and a shelf of art supplies.      Jason beamed. “Here's my forte, graphics!” He laid photos on the canvas, and they absorbed into it. Then he grabbed tools and began painting, cropping, doodling, pasting, and formatting the images to 3D. Then he pressed a button that said “view”      The floor below turned sandy yellow. Water lapped at a digital shoreline.A bright orange sunset hovered at the horizon.     Becka shuffled her feet on the sand pixels, which were hard and smooth. “It's gorgeous Jason, but it'd be better with real life simulation.” she pulled blue symbols out of her pocket and arranged them into commands. The sand became soft and grainy, and a breeze blew ocean spray onto their faces.        The man sighed. “This is perfect.”      Just then, an envelope pushed out of the sand and hovered in front of the man. It unfolded to reveal the woman from the picnic photograph.      “Meridith?” The man gasped.      “Richard!” The woman cried.       “But how?”      Meridith smiled. “We are connected by an invisible string. When you remembered our happy times, you gave that string a tug, and I was able to find you.”      The two elders hugged, reunited again.      “That gives me an idea! We can reach the lab by email!” Becka cried.      The man nodded and blinked. They soon saw a mailbox, envelopes, and paperclips.      Becka grabbed an envelope and addressed it, then picked two paperclips. Each paperclip had a tag that said “File name here.” Becka wrote her and Jason’s names on the tags. “It’s time for us to send off. You know how to send emails, right?”      Richard nodded. “Thank you for your help. You made my world better.”      They said their goodbyes, and Becka slipped the paperclips into the envelope. They felt tingly again, and were pulled inside the virtual package.      A while later, the laboratory printer whirred to life. Filament squirted out, forming the shape of two pink shoes...