Bernd toileted at 7.34am every morning exactly. He would rise out of bed at 7.33am and walk to the bathroom, turning ninety degrees at a time if he needed to change direction. Urination would take 57.5 seconds to complete.

He would eat the same breakfast at the same time every morning. This method of doing things was the most efficient, the most logical.

“Is it okay, my clever snail?” his mother asked.

“Yes,” Bernd responded mechanically.

His mother would only ask him questions that could elicit a binary or a boolean response. Yes or No. True or False.

After eating, Bernd retreated to his room to continue his work: to decipher the encrypted sentence

MRUYDPHGGEPUDPMBWSZCVHRGH.

It first appeared to him upon completing a video game called ‘Amphisbaena.’ Solve it and you would earn the rarest achievement in gaming: The Gold Bug. Nobody had it. Even using an achievement cheater didn’t work. The trophy would reset itself instantly. Bernd was an obsessive completist. Every game he needed to achieve 100%.

Forums and discussions were mostly indifferent to the game. It was just another unobtainable achievement like ‘Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.’

Bernd had tried to decompile and disassemble the code to review the decryption functionality but every tool he used would crash when reading the executable.

The frustration became an obsession. MRUYDPHGGEPUDPMBWSZCVHRGH must mean something. Otherwise, why would so many obstacles be placed on the path to its solution?

Bernd contacted the developer but received no response. He found their company address but when he searched for it on Google Maps it took him to a point deep in the Gobi desert. This annoyed him, causing his mother to increase his dose.

Bernd read up on cryptology with its talk of ciphers and Polybius squares but the mathematical possibilities were overwhelming. If only he could become a computer he could crack it in no time.

His behavioural compulsions were triggered.

He began to schedule all his physical actions to set times. The remaining time was used to program his thinking patterns to become computational patterns. Was this true? Yes or No? His vocabulary began to decrease and convert into variable names and values.

The environment in which he computed became static. He stopped venturing outside and only frequented the rooms he had conditioned himself to enter at predetermined times.

His mother had seen him act out extreme fantasies before only to revert back to his ‘normal’ phase. She wasn’t overly concerned.

As Bernd became a glorified flesh and bone calculator his quest to decode the elusive sentence grew stronger.

Eventually, he did nothing but sit in his room and cogitate. He ate and drank less. He would soil himself.

Bernd began to rot, his physical presence overpowered by his computational mindset.

And then one day, emaciated, his organs slowly failing, he deciphered the code.

Feeble, he tapped the sentence into the game. ‘The Gold Bug’ achievement pinged.

100%.

Then Bernd closed his eyes and shut himself down.