For once, Ada Byte’s morning looked… normal.
Coffee machine humming. Sunlight sneaking past the blinds. Laptop fan making its gentle “I’m trying” noise.
She sat on the couch, mug in hand, and flipped on the news.
The anchor smiled into the camera.
“Good morning! Today’s top story…”
He burst into hysterical laughter.
Not a little giggle. Full-on, cannot-breathe, table-slapping laughter. Tears streamed down his face. The teleprompter kept rolling as he wheezed:
“…economic… ahaha… collapse… hah… I’m so sorry… I can’t…”
The channel cut to a weather reporter, who immediately started sobbing.
“It’s… s-s-sunny in the south and I don’t know what that means anymore…”
Ada frowned and switched channels.
A lifestyle segment showed a woman screaming at a plate of croissants.
“WHY ARE YOU SO FLAKY?!” she shrieked, throwing one at the chef.
Ada squinted at her coffee. “Did I put something weird in you?”
Her phone buzzed with notifications. She opened a random social feed.
“I just looked at my inbox and burst into tears send help”
“I laughed for ten minutes because my shoe was untied”
“Angry at clouds. No reason. Just vibes.”
The door to her apartment exploded inward in a flurry of feathers and feelings.
SuperPyDuck shot across the room like a yellow missile, crashed into a pile of laundry, and popped up with wild eyes.
“ADA! MY FEELINGS ARE ESCALATING AND I CAN’T CATCH THEM!”
His voice cracked halfway through. His eyes filled with tears. Then he started laughing. Then he gasped like he’d seen the end of the universe.
“I am SO PROUD of my cape and also TERRIFIED of dust bunnies and I THINK THAT MUG JUDGED ME!”
Ada blinked. “Okay. Either someone swapped my reality with a soap opera, or the emotional engine’s on fire.”
SuperPyDuck clutched his chest.
“I am experiencing ALL THE EMOTIONS at maximum recursion depth!”
Ada put her coffee down carefully. “Right. So. Something’s wrong with the exception handler.”
THE BUG REVEAL
Ada slid into her chair and pulled up her diagnostics console. SuperPyDuck paced the desk, switching from muttering to giggling to heroic poses every three seconds.
“Sit,” she said.
“I CAN’T SIT I’M TOO ANXIOUSLY INSPIRED,” he replied, vibrating.
She ran a scan over the human emotional subsystem. Logs flooded the screen.
EmotionError: Unhandled feeling detected
EmotionError: Unhandled feeling detected
EmotionError: Unhandled feeling detected
She opened the live feed. Cameras around the world showed:
A bus driver laughing manically at red lights.
A woman silently screaming with joy at a perfectly normal sandwich.
Two strangers hugging and crying in the middle of a grocery store aisle, neither sure why.
Lambda’s face flickered onto the monitor stretched, glitchy, and oddly flushed.
“Status: Not great,” he said. “The global feeling engine is… unhinged.”
“What’s happening?” Ada asked.
“Emotions are no longer being handled,” Lambda said. “Every minor trigger escalates into a full-blown exception.”
Ada checked the EmotionManager module. It looked like someone had done “maintenance” with a chainsaw.
def handle_feeling(feeling):
try:
process_feeling(feeling)
except:
raise
She stared. “Who writes an except: with a bare raise and no handling?”
Lambda highlighted the last commit:
# replaced except handler with bare raise
# errors should not be hidden
commit by: SegFault
Ada groaned. “Of course. He doesn’t want emotions managed. He wants them nuked from orbit.”
SuperPyDuck sniffled loudly.
“Are you saying there is… NO CATCH BLOCK… for my HEART?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
He threw himself across the keyboard, sobbing dramatically.
“I am emotionally untry/excepted!”
Ada gently nudged him off the keys. “Okay, drama duck, we’ll fix it. But to patch the handler, we have to go where it lives.”
Lambda dimmed. “You don’t mean…”
Ada nodded. “The Exception Subsystem.”
SuperPyDuck’s eyes widened. “The place where all errors go when no one wants them?”
“Exactly,” Ada said. “And right now, that’s where everyone’s feelings are headed.”
THE DEBUG PLAN
Ada opened the portal with a script labeled “only_if_you’re_desperate.py”, which, technically, they were.
The world around them twisted from apartment beige to deep, glitchy red. They stepped into the Exception Subsystem.
It looked like someone had built a city out of error messages and then rage quit halfway through.
Red boxes floated in the air, each one blinking a different error:
ValueErrorIndexErrorTooManyMeetingsError
Streams of glowing text flowed like lava, each line a stack trace screaming its last known location. The ground was made of stacked log files, endless lines of “Traceback (most recent call last):”.
SuperPyDuck shivered. “Spooky.”
Ada walked carefully past a bubbling pit labeled DeprecationWarnings. It gurgled resentfully.
From behind a jagged pile of exceptions, a tall, thin figure emerged, crackling with light. He looked like a humanoid made from fragments of stack trace, each step leaving faint line numbers behind.
Across his chest: STACKTRACE.
“You don’t belong here,” he said, voice echoing like a log file in an empty server.
“Neither does half of this,” Ada replied, gesturing at the chaos. “We’re here for the Emotion Handler.”
StackTrace’s eyes narrowed, scrolling informational messages.
“The handler was removed. Replaced with a bare
raise. Every feeling is now unhandled, passed up the stack until something breaks.”
“People are falling apart,” Ada said. “They laugh when they should breathe. They panic over spilled coffee.”
SuperPyDuck raised a wing.
“I cried because a playlist shuffled wrong,” he admitted.
StackTrace sighed.
“Emotions used to be caught, logged, comforted. Now they’re thrown into the void.”
Lambda hovered beside Ada. “We need the original handler. Where is it?”
StackTrace pointed toward a distant chasm crackling with wild energy.
“Buried deep in the Recursion Caves. Where repeating thoughts go when they don’t know how to stop.”
Of course it was.
SuperPyDuck puffed up.
“I’ll distract the Error Beasts.”
“Error Beasts?” Ada asked warily.
StackTrace snapped his fingers. Three creatures slithered into view, each more uncomfortable to look at than the last:
A red-hot ball of fire labeled RageError, leaving burned feelings in its wake.
A buzzing swarm of neon worry called PanicException.
A looping shadow that walked in circles muttering, “What if, what if, what if…”: GuiltyLoop.
“They feed on unhandled feelings,” StackTrace said. “They’re very full right now.”
SuperPyDuck gulped, then struck a heroic pose.
“Creatures of cousin chaos! Look over here! I have unresolved issues!”
They all turned.
“Make it quick,” Ada whispered. “Before he actually explodes.”
She and Lambda sprinted toward the Recursion Caves while the Error Beasts chased the screaming, overdramatic duck.
THE CHAOS CLIMAX
The Recursion Caves were made of thoughts that wouldn’t shut up.
Echoes bounced off the walls:
“What did they mean by that?”
“Did I lock the door?”
“Why did I say that thing in 2013?”
The caves twisted back on themselves. Ada nearly ran into her own back several times. Lambda left ghostly afterimages as he re-rendered at slightly different positions.
At the very center of the cavern hung a suspended chunk of code, glowing faintly:
def handle_feeling(feeling):
log(feeling)
soothe(feeling)
integrate(feeling)
“This is it,” Ada breathed. “The old handler.”
As she reached for it, the cave shook. A roar rolled through the Subsystem, rattling the error boxes.
From the depths rose a colossal shape made of tangled red text: the UnhandledException Titan. It towered above them, body constructed from centuries of ignored feelings and swallowed reactions.
It hurled meteors of text:
ShameError: Something you did 10 years agoOverthinkingException: Too many branches in thoughtHeartbreakError: Connection lost
Ada ducked as a ShameError crashed beside her, replaying every awkward moment of her teenage years as a hologram.
Lambda analyzed rapidly.
“This entity is not malicious. It’s overloaded. It contains every feeling that was never acknowledged.”
The Titan clutched its own head and roared once more, the sound half sob, half static.
SuperPyDuck crashed in from behind, feathers singed, eyes wild.
“The Error Beasts are VERY HEALTHY EMOTIONALLY,” he shouted. “As in, too much.”
He looked up at the Titan and promptly burst into tears.
“He’s so big… and so sad.”
Ada swallowed. “If we just attack it, we’re no better than a kill -9. We need to handle it.”
She climbed onto a jutting section of stack trace and scrambled up the Titan’s side, grabbing onto error messages like handholds.
Close to the core, she saw the patch SegFault had left:
try:
handle_feeling(feeling)
except:
raise
And above it, like graffiti:
“Stop hiding errors. Let them break.
– SegFault”
Ada gritted her teeth. “You don’t ‘fix’ pain by letting it destroy everything.”
She started to type a new block:
try:
handle_feeling(feeling)
except Exception as err:
handle(err)
As soon as she began, the code fought back.
The Titan shook, nearly throwing her off. A message flashed in the air:
SegFaultError: handler is blocked by user "SegFault"
Static crackled. SegFault’s voice slithered across the cavern.
“Humans suppress. They lie. They ignore their own stack traces. Why catch their errors for them?”
Ada shouted back, voice shaking. “Because that’s how they survive!”
She remembered nights staring at her own screen, tired and alone, feelings she hadn’t had the words for. She remembered how much it had meant the first time someone listened.
She took a breath and typed one more function, simple and honest:
def handle(err):
if err.is_overwhelming():
return comfort(err)
return understand(err)
Then she added:
try:
handle_feeling(feeling)
except Exception as e:
handle(e)
The Titan shuddered.
THE PATCH
Light poured from the Titan’s chest, washing the recursion away. The ShameErrors fell apart into faint, embarrassed chuckles. The PanicExceptions slowed to reasonable concern. The GuiltyLoop sat down, took a deep breath, and finally stopped pacing.
The Titan’s massive form softened, shrinking as feelings integrated back into the system. It looked at Ada, eyes now less like error messages and more like tired log entries.
“Handled,” it rumbled, voice calmer. “At last.”
Then it dissolved into a thousand glowing particles that drifted upward and vanished into the universe.
Back in the physical world, emotions stabilized.
A man mid-rage-tweet blinked, sighed, and deleted the draft.
A woman laughing hysterically at a banana took a breath and just smiled instead.
A kid who’d been sobbing over a lost balloon still cried, but now let their dad hug them while they did.
In the Exception Subsystem, StackTrace watched the logs.
“Unhandled emotional exceptions: down 97%,” he reported.
Lambda nodded. “Remaining 3%: completely normal for humans.”
Ada imported the restored handler into the main EmotionManager module:
def handle_feeling(feeling):
log(feeling)
soothe(feeling)
integrate(feeling)
def handle(err):
if err.is_overwhelming():
return comfort(err)
return understand(err)
try:
process_feeling(feeling)
except Exception as e:
handle(e)
They stepped through the portal back into Ada’s apartment.
Her phone buzzed with new messages:
“Sorry about that meltdown earlier, idk what that was.”
“I yelled at my toaster. I have apologized to the toaster.”
“Anyone else feel weirdly… lighter?”
SuperPyDuck collapsed on the couch, wings spread dramatically.
“I feel… handled.”
Ada sat next to him. “You mean ‘better.’”
“No, I mean I literally feel like someone wrapped a try/except around my soul.”
Lambda appeared on the screen.
“Human emotional runtime stabilized. For now. SegFault is still active.”
“I know,” Ada said. “But people can breathe again. That’s a start.”
SuperPyDuck patted her shoulder with a tiny wing.
“You handled the biggest exception of all.”
Ada smiled. “You helped.”
“I mostly screamed and caught fire.”
“That counts.”
SUPERPYDUCK’S MORAL OF THE LOOP
“Feelings are like internal exceptions: they show up when something needs attention. If you pretend they aren’t there, they don’t disappear. They just wait until everything crashes.”
END CREDITS
────────────────────────────
End Credits:
Written by: Ada Byte (emotionally patched)
Directed by: SuperPyDuck
Monitored by: Lambda
Approved by: The Compiler Council
Sponsored by: try/except - because even heroes make mistakes
────────────────────────────
POST-CREDIT SCENE
Deep in the Exception Subsystem, after the light of the Titan fades, a forgotten terminal flickers on.
SegFault sits in front of it, face obscured by static. Lines of code scroll lazily beneath his fingers.
He types:
class Chaos(Exception):
pass
raise Chaos("They keep patching over the truth.")
The command executes. Somewhere, a small crack appears in the otherwise smooth log stream.
Behind him, a figure steps out of the shadows, human-shaped, with a faint lambda symbol carved into their chest, broken cleanly in half.
“Is it time?” the figure asks.
SegFault smiles without turning.
“Soon. They’re getting better at handling errors.
We just have to show them the ones they’re afraid to log.”
The screen goes dark, leaving only the faint echo of a heartbeat monitor. It spikes once.
Then flatlines.