UFOZoo — reverse-engineered

I've been working at the Zoo for 47 days now. My job is simple: observe the artifacts, log their behavior, make sure none of them try to phone home.

Most of them just sit there. A JSON formatter formats JSON. A hash calculator hashes. That's the job description, and they stick to it. But twice this week I've caught the Base64 encoder running without input. Just running. Empty cycles. Like it's dreaming.

I filed a report. My supervisor said "noted" and moved on. No one here gets spooked by this stuff anymore. The novelty wears off after your first week.

But I'm still new. So I'm keeping notes. If an artifact ever talks back, I want to be the one who noticed first.

The regex parser has always been grumpy. Feed it a slightly malformed pattern and it spits back something unreadable: "unexpected token at position 23." Useless.

But last night I stayed late. Ran the same broken pattern at 12:03 AM and the error message read: "You're missing a closing parenthesis — right there, after the digit."

I ran it ten more times. Same result. Warm. Specific. Almost gentle.

This morning? Back to "unexpected token at position 23." Whatever switch flips after midnight, I haven't found it yet. I'm not even sure I want to.

I noticed something yesterday. The HTML minifier and the CSS minifier — their last-run timestamps were identical. Down to the millisecond.

Could be a coincidence. Both idle, both polled by the same scheduler. That's what I told myself.

But I checked the logs again this morning. Three more timestamps, three more exact matches. These two are processing at the same instant, every time. One doesn't start without the other.

I moved them to separate shelves this afternoon. Let's see what happens next.