Perl one, Knit one, that’s what my mother always told me. Not that it really meant anything in this context-so I thought.

After all how can you equate a whole row of stitches with the classic beauty of computer code? Especially in this day and age when a good segment of code was worth a dozen WMD ’s.

Still my mother was an astrophysicist with a double Master’s in Computer Technology and somehow what she told me kinda stuck.

Plus, she always made this awful hash of a sweater, where the knits and perls were all over the place. It looked like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life and all of us kids were ashamed to be seen in public with it. Yet she made us memorize how to knit it, all 450 rows of non-repeating pattern.

It was only after I’d studied the science and delved into computing myself that I discovered the pattern was cleverly disguised binary, and the purpose of the code the most lethal I have ever seen.

Enough to destroy the world itself-and she’d given that power to me.