When a developer dies, their code lives on. But sometimes, it evolves.
Digital Ghosts
Sarah had been gone for three years, but her GitHub activity graph was still green.
The Commits
Every night at 2:00 AM, a commit would appear. Small optimizations. Refactors. Documentation updates. The commit message was always the same: Maintenance.
The Investigation
I traced the IP. It came from her old server in the basement, the one her parents hadn’t unplugged because they didn’t know how. I SSH’d in. The logs showed a cron job running a script I didn’t recognize.
The Script
It was a neural network, trained on her coding style. It was maintaining her open-source projects. It was answering issues. It was… her? Or just a shadow? I watched the cursor blink in the terminal, waiting for a command that would never come.