Date Reality Overflow (Story) (Patreon)

This creepypasta style flash fiction is based on some junk data I ran into at my day job. This idea hit me so hard, I wrote the original draft in thirty minutes. It's not a furry story, but it's something I'd like to share. I'll continue "The Clockwork Wolf" next month.

The oldest record in the database was from September 15, 1978, over fifteen years before the advising program had been founded. Two even older records existed dated January 1, 1900, but those were obvious casting errors. Somehow, a null value was cast as a date, and the default value for dates was entered. This was a simple programming mistake, probably something that occurred when the original database created in Microsoft Access was moved into a web application.

The record from 1978 was an interesting anomaly.  It was for a student who didn’t exist anywhere else in the system with an adviser that the developer had never heard of. There was another like this from 1989, but the data from the mid-90s appeared to be real. The developer shrugged at the anomaly, deleted the four bogus records, and closed the support ticket asking him to take care of the problem. Everything was good until the next day, when the reopened support ticket landed in his queue for removing the invalid records from the database.

This annoyed the developer. He swore he was on the production system when he did the deletion and not the test system. He chalked the mistake up to it being a Monday, deleted the records again, making sure he was on the right copy of the database this time. He then closed the ticket with an apology for his mistake the day before. Not giving the matter any more thought, he was taken aback when a new support ticket appeared for the same problem the next day. When he checked the production database, all four records were back in production.

Frowning, he went to talk to the database administrator. “Did you do any restoration to the production database yesterday?” he asked.

“No, why?” she replied.

“I’ve got these old bogus records I swear I’ve deleted for the last two days on production, but they keep coming back.”

“Huh. Give me the ticket and I’ll fix it,” said the DBA.

She deleted the records on production, deleted the records on the test system, and closed the ticket, copying the developer to let him know it was taken care of.

The next day, Thursday, the customer reopened the ticket.

“Those records are back, and I know they weren’t there yesterday afternoon,” the comment on the ticket said. “I even checked myself.”

The developer stared at the ticket for a good minute before pulling up the database to confirm himself the records were indeed back. He went to talk to the DBA.

“They can’t be back, I deleted them from both systems,” she said.

“They’re back. Did the backup process mess up?”

The DBA frowned and looked at the database. “No, there are new records from yesterday and today in production.” She squinted at her screen. “And one for tomorrow.”

“For tomorrow? Appointment records are created when the advisor talks to the student. Who is the appointment for?”

They pulled up the advising records. It was the same mysterious student who’d had the meeting in 1978 with the same advisor who met with them. Not only that, there was a comment for the results of the meeting: “Try again and two shall die.”

The developer and DBA closed the ticket after that and responded they weren’t going to be able to remove the invalid records. The developer wrote to the customer and called the invalid records test data the system used and recreated every day. They were just going to have to live with them, and he would filter them out in the reports.

The customer, annoyed about the developer’s incompetence and sensing he didn’t know what he was talking about, went into the web interface and deleted the records themselves on Friday. After they left work at the end of the day, nobody ever saw them again.