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Dec Wars - Chapter 10

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 was restarted and managed to escape the shell. "Quickly!" shouted Con, "We've got to warp into virtual space!" The Bookie made several attempts, but it was obvious that a CE had not done PM in a long time and it would take a lot of decimal adjusts to byte align all the data registers. After much debugging, virtual space was finally achieved. "Do you know the path?" asked Princess LPA0. "No sweat", said Con, "All we have to do is check the free space map".

<< rest of star wars, especially the dog fight >>

<< beginning of empire strikes back, especially the battle ... >>

Some months later...

Luke was feeling rather bored. 3CPU could get to be rather irritating and RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language. Suddenly, Luke felt someone's eyes boring through the back of his skull. He turned slowly to see...nothing. A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him.

"Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you." Luke froze, which was a good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't likely to be particular about direction. Luke guessed that his odds of getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good. Unfortunately, the Bookie wasn't available.

"Yes. Very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network interface is totally undeveloped," the voice continued. A small furry creature walked out of the woods as Luke stared on. Luke's stomach had now joined the rest of his body in loud complaints. Whatever was peering at him was certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come from Alpha Centauri.

"Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke. "Frobozz, y'know. Morning, name's modem. What's your game? Adventure? D&D? Or are you just one of those Apple-pong types that hang around the store demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes. Perhaps if he couldn't see it, it wouldn't notice him.

"H'mm," muttered the creature. "Must use a different protocol. @@@H @@ @($@@@H }"@G$ @#@@G'(o% @@@@@%%H(b ?"

"No, no," stammered Luke. "I don't speak EBCDIC. I was sent here to become a UNIX wizard. Must have the wrong address."

"Right address," said the creature. "I'm a UNIX wizard. Device drivers a specialty. Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?"

Luke eyed the creature cautiously. If this was what happened to system wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted anything to do with it. He felt a strange affection for the familiar microcomputers of his home. And wasn't virtual memory something that you got from drinking too much Coke?