HuMoR - TIADA LogOn TANPA SENYUM ™

Dec Wars - Chapter 4

A long time ago, on a node far, far away...

 
      XXXXX   XXXXXX   XXXX           X    X    XX    XXXXX    XXXX     X
      X    X  X       X    X          X    X   X  X   X    X  X    X    X
      X    X  XXXXX   X               X    X  X    X  X    X   XXXX     X
      X    X  X       X               X XX X  XXXXXX  XXXXX        X    X
      X    X  X       X    X          XX  XX  X    X  X   X   X    X
      XXXXX   XXXXXX   XXXX           X    X  X    X  X    X   XXXX     X

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE VAXHACKER

It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network...

Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.

"It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual) trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes as he whirled to face the parallel processor.

"I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around any Imperial TTY fighter. She's fast enough for you."

"Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobie.

"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie."

"Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent, or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves.

Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them. "Imperial Bus Signals!" shouted Con Solo. "Let's boot this popsicle stand! Tooie, set clock fast!"

"Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out of here!"

"Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space! I'll try to keep their buffers full."

As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters appeared around the Milliamp Falcon. "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't you do something?"

"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!"

"Three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie started paying off bets.

"Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity."