Sunny and the Algorithms of Gloom: Chapter 4.2

Robert and Sunny hitched a ride on a boat floating down Conditional River. It was twilight by the time Queue Castle came into view on the left bank. It was shrouded in mists that gave it a mysterious atmosphere, and Sunny thought that it would be a rather fitting site for a confrontation with whoever left the secret code.

The two of them dismounted and were soon standing at the start of a winding cobblestone path leading up to the old castle.

The graying light illuminated the jagged edges of Queue Castle, and Sunny shivered as the trees along the path brushed their leaves together as if whispering. “Come on, Robert,” she murmured.

The pair walked and floated down the uneven stones of the path. A few turns ahead, they could hear soft voices, and Sunny wondered if it was one of the groups who had figured out the code before them.

Sunny almost missed a step. Hold on. Weren’t they supposed to inform the police first?

Sunny was about to mention it to Robert, but then she remembered her earlier comment about detective novels and the police being incompetent. While she wasn’t sure if that was the case here, considering they had needed to recruit codebreakers across Javalandia, perhaps it was… Besides. A hero’s job was to do things more efficiently than whatever lawkeeping bodies the world had, right? And perhaps this was only the first step of the puzzle.

With justifications out of the way, Sunny hurried to the end of the path.

There she and Robert were faced with an imposing, cast-iron gate. The curlicues decorating the gates didn’t make the spikes on top of them any less scary. A robot was hovering to the right with a half-lidded, almost bored expression on its face. “Team name?” it asked in a monotone voice.

Sunny exchanged a glance with Robert. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it certainly wasn’t to be asked for a team name as if this was a competition… Well, she’d go along with it for now.

Sunny had come up with a bunch of epic names for a group of dragon-fighters or fantasy quest-goers, but she was stumped as to names for a girl and a robot going on a coding quest. “Sunny and her stupendous sidekick?” she suggested weakly.

Robert glared at her.

“Yeah, sorry, that was in bad taste. Um. How about the Super Snazzy Semicolons?”

Robert intensified his glare.

Sunny threw up her hands. “Okay then, do you have any ideas, oh-so-judgy Robert?”

“Considering your love of fantasy, perhaps Code Wizards? Or Debuggers? Honestly, even The Rubber Ducks would be better than the Super Snazzy Semicolons,” Robert commented snarkily.

Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps coming along the path behind them. The robot to the side of the gate cleared his throat. “Well, you two are out of time. q.push(“The Rubber Ducks”);”

The robot pressed something and the gates opened inwards. “Please enter.”

Sunny exchanged a frazzled glance with Robert, then stepped through the iron gate.

Once the gate clanged shut behind them, a fog rolled in until Sunny could barely see Robert next to her. “Robert? Can code manipulate the weather here?” she asked nervously.

“If one is skilled enough, yes.” Robert turned on a light at his front. It barely helped against the fog. “But more importantly, are we really named The Rubber Ducks?”

Sunny thought back to the code the robot had spoken. “I guess so. What did the q.push thing mean?”

“Well, q is probably the name of a queue. Queues are data structures that store elements, like arrays, except they’re first in, first out. Meaning you can’t access elements from any position in a queue, like you can for an array. You can just add elements to a queue using queue.push() and get elements from the start of the queue using queue.pop().”

Sunny blinked. “That was a lot of words.”

The fog grew darker around the pair as Robert sighed. “Suffice it to say that queues store elements. Actually, perhaps you can compare a queue to a line for hot dogs. People are added to the back of the line. People at the front of the line get their hot dogs first, then leave the line. The line would represent the queue.”

“What if someone cuts in line?”

“Assume that doesn’t happen for queues.”

Sunny nodded thoughtfully. “Alright, that makes more sense with the analogy. Thanks.”

The fog darkened further until it appeared that night had fully fallen. Sunny shivered. “How long until we get to the castle?” She was beginning to feel like something was deeply wrong with this whole code and queue castle thing.

Robert started to respond, but he fell silent as the aforementioned castle arose out of the gloom, as if called up by Sunny’s question.

The crumbling stone and darkened windows made it look for all the world like a haunted building. Unfortunately, studying how to beat necromancers and apparitions had never been near the top of Sunny’s “How to be a Hero” training list. She looked up at the spires and gulped.

The main doors yawned open. “Well, here we go,” Sunny said.

Sunny rested a hand on Robert’s head for support (though whether she was supporting Robert or herself was unclear), and the two of them walked into Queue Castle.

There were a few moments where it was pitch-black. The air felt slightly warm, although the overall experience was like what it’d felt like to go through the portal— there was a change in air temperature, but for only a second.

Soon enough, Sunny and Robert emerged into a brightly-lit waiting room.

Sunny removed her hand from Robert’s head and looked around. Classical music played in the background, and there were cushioned chairs along the walls. A clean water fountain was to the left.

“Huh?” Sunny said.

“Hm,” Robert said.

The few people who were sitting in the chairs looked up at them. “Oh, great, more people figured out the code,” one of them grumbled.