The first time Zhou Chen saw that string of characters, it was 1:17 a.m.
He wasn’t supposed to work overtime.
Just past six in the evening, someone in the test group posted a screenshot of a failed run.
The error was ordinary: Undefined
No error code, no call stack, not even a specific field.
Just Undefined followed by a garbled string of characters.
Zhou Chen had already been packing up.
He glanced at the screenshot, then opened his laptop again：
“Which environment?”
The tester replied: “Production.”
Zhou Chen’s hand paused：“Reproduced?”
“No.”
“Logs?”
“None either.”，The tester responded very quickly
Zhou Chen frowned，That made things tricky.
It was a business system the company had used for years.
The code wasn’t exactly beautiful. Old and new modules were mixed together, interfaces had been revised several times, and some places still retained compatibility logic from years ago,no one was willing to touch them lightly .
But despite that, the system had made the company a good deal of money in the quantitative trading space.
It wasn’t unusual for the system to glitch occasionally. What was unusual was the absence of logs.
Normally, as long as a request actually entered the system, something should have been left behind: success or failure.
Database logs, application runtime logs, external requests, environment extensions… ; At least one layer should have yielded a trace.But this time, there was nothing.
Considering the system still had to run tomorrow, Zhou Chen sat back down and connected to the remote server.
Checked the time、IP、request…
Nothing. As if the error had never happened , But the screenshot was still there.He asked the tester to repeat the operation: Success. Try again. Still success.
Over a dozen consecutive attempts—all normal. The chat window lit up again, Message from the testing colleague: Still checking?
Zhou Chen glanced at the clock: I’ll keep looking. You go ahead.
A quick reply: “Okay.“ . The avatar went dark.
Zhou Chen leaned back in his chair. Sometimes, as long as the system ran, that was enough. As for bugs?Aren’t we writing them every day? he joked to himself with a wry smile.
At 9 p.m., the office quieted down, with only a few people left. At 10, two more left. After 11, the entire floor was almost silent.
Zhou Chen exported all requests from fifteen minutes before and after the anomaly, comparing them line by line. No findings.
He extended the time window for checking log records to half an hour. Still nothing. If it was just a one-off, unreproducible glitch, he could have stopped there.
Log it. Observe. Wait for the next occurrence. That was the most normal approach. But Zhou Chen didn’t shut down his computer. He was like that. He liked to get to the bottom of things. Especially errors that couldn’t be explained. Or rather, he liked the unknown.
Zhou Chen looked again at the screenshot the tester had sent. He stared for a few seconds. Then suddenly sat up a little straighter.
Undefined ？ This error… wasn’t system-defined. He searched the project again. Nothing.
Then checked the dependencies. Nothing.
Historical versions. Still nothing.
That meant the error message in that screenshot, at the very least, hadn’t been generated by the system’s existing logic.
Zhou Chen rechecked the cache, narrowing the time range bit by bit to match the error time. Finally, he found something interesting in the server’s cache directory.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a log. Just a temporary file. 932 bytes.Its structure bore some resemblance to the gibberish after Undefined in the screenshot. At first glance, it looked like some kind of encrypted data.
Zhou Chen first considered encoding. No thing. Then he tried several common data conversion methods.
Still no.
He wrote a simple script to count character distribution and repetition frequencies.When the results came out, he only grew more puzzled.The data did exhibit some pattern.And the pattern was too obvious.
Not like the random distribution you’d expect after proper encryption.He kept dissecting.Rearranging.Trying to map some of the repeated data to coordinates.The results grew stranger.
That data… ; seemed to correspond to pixel positions.Zhou Chen paused.Then wrote another script. Ran it.
A small black-and-white image appeared on the screen. At first, he couldn’t make out anything.He zoomed in. Several odd patterns made of pixels sat in the center of the screen.
Zhou Chen stared at it for a while.
Pictographs.
That was his first thought. More precisely, some kind of pictographic script.
At 1:17 a.m., Zhou Chen first dropped one of those character sets into a search engine.
No results. Cropped a part. Still Nothing.
Tried a few different structures.Finally, a few scattered images appeared.But their sources were entirely unrelated：
A stone inscription.
A rock painting from somewhere unknown.
An article discussing undeciphered scripts.
Even a photo of a museum artifact.
No coherence.
Zhou Chen kept digging:
Ancient scripts. Archaeological records.
Lost writings. Rock art.
Undeciphered symbols.
By the time he realized it, the matter had long strayed from the original goal of fixing a bug.He knew that, of course. But now he wanted to know more: What did these things actually mean?
He even began to wonder if it was some colleague’s prank. That explanation would actually be the most plausible. Someone had stuffed a bunch of random ancient-looking characters into a request, deliberately triggered an error, and waited for him to dig through it until late, then laugh about it the next day.
Zhou Chen opened the company chat group. Several familiar avatars were gray.He thought for a moment.
Didn’t ask. If it really was a prank, asking now would only play into their hands.
At 2:26 a.m., Zhou Chen was finally ready to go home. He’d tried most common substitutions, encodings, and character mappings.
No results.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen, his eyes heavy. Then, almost absently, an odd thought surfaced.
What if… those repeated structures weren’t the writing itself?
He re-identified the most frequently recurring structures and tried substituting characters one by one.Zhou Chen sat up straighter. It was still bizarre, but the structure had become strangely familiar. After substituting a few more character groups,
he finally saw a structure he knew all too well:
Domain.
Path.
Separator.
Hierarchy.
Separator.
Hierarchy.
He stared at it for over ten seconds. A conclusion formed in his mind—one that even he found ridiculous.
It looked like a URL.
Unknown string. Pictographic script. URL. Those three things were worlds apart. Zhou Chen himself thought it was probably just his brain over-pattern-matching at 2 a.m.
But he still copied that string. He wanted to try. No particular reason. Just:
He wanted to see what would happen when he opened it.
Paste. Enter. The browser spun for a while.
Then:
This site can’t be reached. Zhou Chen chuckled.
Of course. He closed the tab, picked up his phone, and was about to get up.
Three seconds later, the tab he had just closed reappeared at the far right of the browser. The smile slowly faded from Zhou Chen’s face.
It wasn’t a new window. The page was a blank grey. The address bar still held that strange address.
His first thought was a browser extension. Then a shortcut mis-trigger. But he quickly dismissed both.
Zhou Chen had a good memory. He was certain he had closed it. Opened developer tools.
No response. Tried again. Still nothing.
Refreshed. The page remained blank. Zhou Chen frowned.
“What the…”
As he puzzled over it, a cursor abruptly appeared in the center of the page.It blinked.
Once. Twice. Then, a line of text appeared, character by character, as if someone on the other end was typing：
“ Du hast es gefunden, nicht wahr? “ ,Still German
Zhou Chen doesn’t recognize this sentence, but the translator can. It’s in German.
He couldn’t copy the text from the page, so he typed it in manually.
A few seconds later, the translation appeared:
“You’ve found it, haven’t you?”
Zhou Chen stared at the sentence.
“Found what?” No one answered. But an input box naturally appeared on the page.
He instinctively typed: “Who are you?”
Then thought better of it, deleted it, and instead typed the translated German: Wer sind Sie?
Send.
The message went out. A dozen seconds later. A name appeared on the page：
“Wilhelm Tessler”
Zhou Chen looked at it for a while. Completely unfamiliar. He had no idea who that was. More than the identity, he was now more curious , Who would set up such a strange website?
So he continued typing:
“Was ist das für eine Webseite?”
Send.
This time, the other side didn’t answer immediately. The page was quiet. The cursor sat there. More than ten seconds later. New text appeared slowly:
“Erscheint es dir als eine Webseite?”
Zhou Chen fed it into the translator. Does it appear to you as a website? His hand stopped. He looked at the page again :
Grey background. Text. Input box. By any common definition, this was certainly a webpage. At least, that’s what he saw.
Zhou Chen typed :
” Sie sehen also keine Webseite? ” （So you don’t see it as a webpage?）
Send.
No answer. After a moment, the other side instead asked an entirely unrelated question:
“Welches Jahr ist es? ”（What year is it now?）
Zhou Chen frowned.
Send.
The page fell silent. Ten seconds. Twenty. A minute.
So long that Zhou Chen began to wonder if the connection had been lost.
Finally:
“Das ist nicht möglich.” ( Impossible. )
Zhou Chen looked at the translation and found it rather interesting. The role-play was well done.
AI? Interactive game? Some private experimental project? All seemed plausible.
He typed:
” Sind Sie eine künstliche Intelligenz?” ( Are you an artificial intelligence?)
The reply came quickly:
“Künstliche Intelligenz?” (Artificial intelligence?)
A pause. Then another line:
“Ist sie inzwischen so weit?”
The translator gave: “Has artificial intelligence already advanced that far?”
Zhou Chen read the translation twice. An AI could certainly simulate surprise. A real person could too.
That one sentence proved nothing. But one word caught his attention :
Already?
Not: Can AI do that? But: Has AI already advanced that far? As if someone knew about AI, but was stuck at an earlier stage. Zhou Chen typed further:
“Welches Jahr ist das letzte, an das Sie sich erinnern?” ( What is the last year you remember?)
Send.
This time. The page did not answer. The cursor flickered a few times. The entire page abruptly refreshed.
All previous conversation vanished. Only one sentence remained.:
” Finde heraus, warum du mich sehen kannst.”
Zhou Chen fed it into the translator: “Find out why you can see me.” The next second. The page went blank. Then the entire tab disappeared. The browser was left with only the default new-tab page.
Zhou Chen was stunned for a moment. He pasted that address again.
Enter. This site can’t be reached. He tried again. Still wouldn’t open.
He went back to check the company system. No errors. No new logs.
Normal. Everything was normal.
So normal that it was almost anticlimactic. As if that bug tonight had never happened.
Zhou Chen opened his own work log and began to record:
Wilhelm Tessler
He paused.
Then wrote below: Source: anomalous cache data
Identity: unknown
Language: German
Page nature: unknown
To be confirmed: prank / AI / local program anomaly
He thought for a moment.
Then added another line: Why can only I see it?
Saved. Shut down.
Went downstairs. The elevator descended slowly. Zhou Chen leaned against the car.
But his mind was still on that bizarre website.
And that first sentence. You’ve found it, haven’t you?
You’ve？that word bothered him. And: found what? This website?
The elevator reached the ground floor.
The doors opened. A cool breeze blew in from the lobby.The air carried the smell of damp earth and concrete after a recent rain.Zhou Chen walked out. The streets were long empty of traffic.
He didn’t look back. The elevator doors slid shut behind him.
Upstairs. The office was dark, with no one left.
Zhou Chen’s computer had just been shut down.
The monitor was black.
A few seconds later. The screen flickered on without warning.
No boot-up sequence.
No system interface.
Only that grey-white page.
No dialogue box.
No Wilhelm Tessler.
Only more and more characters emerging, in a jumble of different languages.
They overlapped each other.
Vanished.
Rearranged.
Some content Zhou Chen had typed tonight.
Some he had never seen.
And still more that he couldn’t identify at all.
The screen glowed silently like that.
And the computer’s power light :
never came on.