HuMoR - TIADA LogOn TANPA SENYUM ™

Dec Wars - Chapter 6

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

 
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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...

The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...

Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke. Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The Bookie, who had been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards. A little strange for a chess game...

Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice the commotion.

"On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember, the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Excess hand waving won't get you anywhere. Listen for the Carrier."

Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly.

Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day."

"~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobie, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a few seconds, and reasserted his control.

"What happened?" asked Luke.

"Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's equalized now."

"We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only to be bombarded by free blocks.

"What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly: /usr/alderaan: not found "It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest file?"

"3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by a bright flash off to the left.

"Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where are they coming from?"

"Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobie. "They all have direct EIA connections."

As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.

"This is no regular file," murmured Kenobie. "Look at the ODS directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed."

"There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in."