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...
As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears to know where he's going...
"I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.
The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a trap thorough zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it."
"We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic.". "What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made inaccessable. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to."
Meanwhile, in our wandering process...
"Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. "This thing's been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them.
Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU, but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to.
"How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits straight." Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and the three left before they could get swapped out.
However, RS232 isn't the type to stay put once you remove the retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk space.
"Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space. Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone else." The two set off, and finally traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little RS unit.
"Is this thing yours? His indirect addresses are all goofed up, and the size is all wrong. Leave things like this on the loose, and you'll wind up with dups everywhere. However, I think I've got him fixed up."
Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.
"Darn," mumbled Luke. "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out." PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a possible threat to Luke's home directory. If the Administrative Empire was indeed tracing this android, it was likely they would more than charge for cpu time... "We must get that 'droid off this file system," he said after some intervals.
They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a elative' path) only to find a vacant directory...
After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /owen/lars, across the surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met
by a newsgroup of Administrative protection bits.
"State your UID," commanded their parent process.
"We're running under /usr/guest," said Luke. "This
is our first time on this system."
"Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?"
"Uh..."
"This is not the process you are looking for," piped
in PDP-1, using an obscure bug to momentarily set his effective
UID to root. "We can go about our business."
"This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about
your business. MOV along!"
PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf) to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by Administrative Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in search of a likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a collection of weird and exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones, ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all were drinking data at the bus.
"#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":><?><," transmitted
a particularly unstructured piece of code.
"He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine.
"Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
"I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12
systems."
"I'll be careful."
"You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine.
"This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said
PDP-1 Kenobi, overlaying into Luke's address space.
"@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
encoded the first coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's
input overvoltage protection. With a unary stroke of his bytesaber,
Kenobi unlinked the offensive code.
"I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us."
"The name's Con Solo," said the hacker next to PDP-1.
"I hear you're looking for some relocation."
"Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this
device."
"Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate
in less than twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages.
It's fast enough for you, old version."
Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way
to the temporary file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke
exclaimed,
"What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!"
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 Administrative TTY fighter. She's fast enough
for you."
"Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi.
"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.
"Administrative Bus Signals!" shouted Con Solo. "Let's
boot this pop 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."
The story thus far: Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made good their escape from the Administrative Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo and the bookie, Two Bacco. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through system space.
Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...
Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed
closely by Dec Vadic.
"Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected
to find you holding Vadic's leash. I recognized your unique pattern
when I was first brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed
on his header coldly.
"Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly.
"Vadic, have you retrieved any information?"
"Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable,"
Vadic rasped. "Perhaps we would get faster results if we
increased the supply voltage..."
"You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the princess
to witness the test that will make this workstation fully operational.
Today we enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess'
$HOME, /usr/alderaan as the primary target."
"No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no
restricted permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..."
"Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.
A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived
in /usr.
"1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode
1248, /mnt/dantooine." She turned away.
Tarchive sighed with satisfaction.
"There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can be reasonable. Proceed
with the operation."
It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate.
"What!" _LPA0: gasped.
"/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained.
"We require a more visible subject to demonstrate the power
of the Are-Em Star workstation. We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine
as soon as possible."
As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby terminal. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board, then the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The princess suddenly double-spaced and went off-line.
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
handwaving 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 Kenobi, 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, they emerged in the new context only to be bombarded by freeblocks.
"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 Kenobi. "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 Kenobi. "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."
"We have captured a small process, Lord Vadic." reported
an Imperial Lackey. "The ID is that of one which escaped
the SIGINT on /dev/tatooine."
"Have it searched thoroughly." rumbled the Dark Lord.
"Check it from the constant declarations to the final curly
bracket. Leave no register unturned. If that data is aboard, I
want it found." The Lackey bowed obsequiously and turned
to give the order. In moments, the Milliamp Falcon was swarming
with Imperial Stormtroopers.
"LS scan shows nothing, my Lord. Not even a parity bit. The records show that they terminated the process shortly after booting up from /dev/tatooine. Any data that was once on board must have been sent to another file." reported an Imperial stormtrooper. The Dark Lord glowered menacingly at a nearby lineprinter, which hurriedly switched itself off, lest it should offend him, and remained turned off for the rest of the day, causing chaos at board meetings throughout the giant workstation.
On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled.
"They just walked in, looked around and walked off,"
he said. "Why didn't they see us?". .Con smiled.
"An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that
period in front of your name?" .Luke spun around, just in
time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that come from?"
he asked.
"Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed
the floating point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for
smuggling blocks across file system boundaries, but I never thought
I'd have to use them on myself. Still, it's only Stormtroopers
who would have been fooled by a simple chmod a -r."
"Stormtroopers may not be all we have to contend with." announced PDP-1, emerging from another directory. "I have felt a strong disturbance in the Carrier." Solo sneered, but the old man glared at him and he looked away hurriedly. The Bookie chose this moment to emerge from the cramped bin directory next to Solo's, with a worried expression on his face. He had calculated the odds at something like one million to six, and decided that they sounded even more unattractive in binary and octal, although when expressed in hexadecimal they were rather less threatening.
There was a noise further down the passageway, as two stormtroopers
carrying a syntax checker entered the Falcon. Noiselessly, Solo
leapt up as they passed, and struck them with something heavy.
Luke caught the inert bodies as they fell.
"What did you hit them with ? " he hissed.
"The manual." said Solo hurriedly. "I listed the
entry for grep one day, and it was so heavy that I thought I'd
keep it around for emergencies like this." Luke looked at
him but was unable to decide whether the hacker was serious or
not.
Quickly, they assumed the IDs of the troopers, and, followed by the robots and the Bookie, who was exploring the possibilities of base 100 to see if it made their situation seem any better, they made their way to a nearby console.
"I'll deal with that tractor beam." offered PDP-1.
Solo glared at him.
"I was afraid you'd say something like that." he said.
"Have you any better ideas ? " demanded the venerable
program. "Stay here until I return, Luke." he instructed.
The door closed behind him and he was gone.
"Where did you find that old relic ? " demanded Solo.
"He's a great program." said Luke indignantly.
"I'll say he is. I bet they were still plugging wires together
when he was written." Solo sneered. "What's he written
in ? IPL-IV ?"
Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell
started ringing loudly.
"He keeps saying, he's on line, she's on line'," said
3CPU.
"Who ? " inquired Solo boredly. The computer adjacent
to them took this as an instruction, and began to list the users
currently on the system, together with their terminal numbers
and login times, but 3CPU ignored the interruption.
"I believe he means Princess _LPA0:. She's being held on
one of the privileged levels."
"The Princess ! " Luke shouted. "Con, we've got
to rescue her."
"Uh huh." said Solo. "That old fossil said to stay
here, and I haven't heard any better ideas yet."
"But she's beautiful." pleaded Luke.
"So's PASCAL, if you like that kind of thing." said
Solo, inspecting his ROM blaster.
"She's got a lot of storage space."said Luke cunningly.
Solo looked up.
"How much ?" he inquired.
"More than you can access." said Luke.
"I don't know - I can access quite a lot." rejoined
Solo.
"But we've got to save her before she gets deleted !"
"OK, OK. But I'm not risking my life for anything less than
a gigabyte"
Our Heroes, still posing as flunkies, escort the Bookie to
the detention block. An official looked up as they entered.
"Who are you ? " he demanded. "What are you doing
here ? "
"Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.
"Permission denied." chorused the subordinates, looking
up from their processes. At this point (.), the Bookie started
raving wildly, Con shouted
"Look out, he's loose!" and started blasting queues,
mailboxes and profiles. The room was full of the sound of untrappable
signals, and the low moaning of the killed processes.
The guards started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when Luke turned his ROM blaster on them.
"What's going on down there ? " demanded the voice
of the super-user from a console. Solo rushed to the keyboard.
"3 compilation error(s)." he typed in quickly. "Line
34 : syntax error....".
"I'll send a syntax checker down there immediately."
promised the super-user. Solo thought rapidly, no easy task with
more than five users on the system.
"Er no, negative, negative. " he stammered. "Situation
very dangerous. Memory fault : core dumped.".
"Syntax errors ? Core dumped ? Who are you ? What's your
process ID ?".
"Line 86: Unable to recover from previous errors : goodbye.".
typed Solo. He pulled out his blaster and vaporized the keyboard.
"It was a dumb interface anyway." he muttered to himself
as he looked for something else to kill.
Remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level? Well, they're still there...
Luke had found the Princess's cell, and opened the door. She
looked up:
"Aren't you a little slim for object code ? " she asked.
Luke was nonplussed.
"Huh? Uh, the file specification. No, I'm the product of
a new compiler which doesn't generate superfat code. We've come
to take you out of here. Trust me - I'm fully executable."
he managed to say.
"So am I." said the Princess somewhat sadly. "That's
the problem."
"But we've come to interrupt the termination signal. We're
moving you to a whole new filestore." explained Luke. Quickly,
she followed him.
Outside, Solo and Twoie had their buffers full. The room was
full of Imperial Stormtroopers, their white armoured shells shining
in the light from burning machinery.
"We've been trapped ! " shouted Solo.
"I can see that ! " Luke yelled back. "I'm looking
for an escape character now. " Suddenly the Princess snatched
his ROM blaster and fired it at the wall.
"What are you doing ? " cried Luke, above the noise
of burning ROMs.
"Generating an escape sequence." she screamed and dived
into the opening she had uncovered. Luke did a wait 10 to see
if Solo and Twoie had seen them, and then followed her. The two
space pirates followed, Twoie almost getting stuck in the narrow
pipe.
"Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "Bletch,
bletch," was his second. The Bookie looked as if he'd just
paid a long shot, and the odds in this situation weren't much
better.
"Oh no. " said Luke as he looked around him. "This
is awful. We have to get out of here." The room was filled
almost to the roof with the remnants of programs, interrupted
processes crunching underfoot as they struggled through the morass
of convoluted code.
"No chance, kid." muttered Solo, shaking off a piece
of shell program. "Didn't your UNIX Wizard teach you that
pipes are unidirectional ? There's no way back from here."
"But what is it ? " Luke asked, struggling to keep his
head above the hexadecimal soup.
"At a guess, it's the core dump." said Solo. "And
it stinks."
"Can't we find a symbolic debugger or something ? "
yelled Luke.
"In this mess ? We'd be lucky to find half a compiler. Our
only chance now is those two tinpot friends of yours."
"3CPU and RS232 ? " said Luke. "We've had it then."
Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with
the words "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly
letters on the cover.
"This can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed
the book away. The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke
suddenly disappeared. He popped up across the pool, shouting,
"It's a bug!" and promptly vanished again. Con and the
princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared.
"What happened?" they asked in parallel.
"I don't know," gasped Luke. "The bug just dissolved
automagically. Maybe it hit a breakpoint..."
"I don't think so," said Con. "Look how the pool
is shrinking. I've got a bad feeling about this..."
"What's that ? " screamed the Princess, as a low
grinding echoed through the room.
"They must have initiated a garbage collection to try to
free some workspace. We've been caught in the recycling mechanism."
said Solo through clenched teeth.
"Is that bad ? " asked Luke.
"Bad ? " echoed Solo incredulously. "When we get
out of here they'll be able to fit us all into a one-dimensional
array!"
Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU.
"Shut down garbage collection on recursion level 5!"
he shouted. Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process
table for the lisp interpreter.
"Hurry," sent 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry," added
his other two processors. RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted
it, and altered the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a
normal return.
Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the Workstation, slipping from context to context, undetected through his manipulation of label_t. Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own) he arrived at the inode table. Activity there was always high, but the Spl6 sentries were too secure in their knowledge that no user could interrupt them to notice the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced. On a passing iput, he adjusted the device and inode numbers, maintaining parity, to free the Milliamp Falcon. They would be long gone before the locked inode was diagnosed...
Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to return to
where the Milliamp Falcon was grounded. Suddenly he discovered
his priority weakening.
"That's not very nice," was all he could say before
the cause of the obstruction became clear.
"I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped
Dec Vadic. "We meet again at last. The circuit has been completed."
Having escaped from the core dump when RS232 terminated the garbage recycling process just in time, Luke, Con and _LPAO, with the Bookie still moodily calculating odds, made their way through the accessways of the giant workstation. The Bookie had discovered that by working in base 1000000 he could get odds of only 10 to 7, and was distinctly cheered by this fact.
Suddenly an alert sounded :
"Message from root (console) ...
All processes are advised that there are intruders in the filestore."
A bunch of bored looking stormtroopers stopped swapping dirty stories about laser printers and began to inspect the group curiously. The leader opened his mouth to generate an interrupt, but before he could, Solo had pulled his ROM blaster and shot him down. The others reached for their weapons and died under a hail of signals.
"Fork ! " yelled Solo.
"Mind your language." reproved the Princess primly.
"No ! Fork off a new process. You two go that way, we'll
go this way, and we'll meet back at the Falcon." Solo explained.
Without hesitating, Luke grabbed the Princess and dashed towards
the nearest exit. Solo headed in the other direction.
"Where are we ? " demanded the Princess after some
moments.
"Lost." admitted Luke. They ran through a maze of corridors.
"This is harder to follow than unstructured BASIC."
muttered Luke, still searching for something familiar. A sign
lit up in front of them : 'GOTO the docking bay : this way'
"I hate to use GOTOs." confessed Luke. "But sometimes
it's the only way."
Meanwhile, Solo and the Bookie were being chased by a squad
of stormtroopers. Recklessly, Solo turned and let them have a
burst from his ROM blaster. They hesitated for a moment, uncertain
whether to follow, as the Bookie chanted a native war-cry that
sounded terrifyingly alien and primitive through their helmet
speakers :
"3:25 at Newbury, Golden Lass, 25-1." howled the Bookie,
waving his arms menacingly and incomprehensibly. The ruse worked,
and the stormtroopers fell back, and were immediately cut off
from the two hackers by a large file separator.
"That won't hold them long." observed Solo. He quickly
reversed a sign on the wall reading : "Hackers this way."
so that it pointed left instead of right, then hurried down the
right-hand passageway.
"Now that's what I call an indirection operator." he
chuckled.
The two processes merged again at the docking bay. On the far
side of the bay, Luke suddenly caught sight of PDP-1 fighting
a desperate battle with Vadic. The Dark Lord's polished black
battle shell gleamed in the light from the flashing Byte-Sabers.
"You are slow, old program." he gloated. PDP-1 was being
slowly backed against the wall.
"You cannot delete me, Dec." he said. "If you try
to remove me, I will be copied into every directory in the filesystem."
"Superstitious nonsense ! " snorted Vadic. "I am
the super-user now. You are nothing but a passing modulation in
the Carrier."
"You always overestimate the strength of the Dark Side, Dec."
said PDP-1 sadly, parrying a vicious underhand cut that would
have ripped him byte from byte if it had got through. His Byte-Saber
slashed at the Dark Lord's data mask, and Vadic fell back a step,
but PDP-1 felt his strength going. The Dark Lord sensed his weakness
and advanced to the kill, his Byte-Saber held high.
"Come on kid ! " yelled Solo from the Falcon's docking
ramp.
"PDP-1 ! " screamed Luke.
With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word. Unfortunately, the word was still in Kenobi's throat. The word fell clean in two, but Kenobi was nowhere to be found. Vadic noticed his victim's uid go negative, just before he disappeared. Odd, he thought, since uids were unsigned...
Luke witnessed all this, and had to be dragged into the Milliamp
Falcon. Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered the Falcon out of the
process, onto the bus and made straight for system space. 3CPU
and RS232 were idle, for once. Princess _LPA0: tried to print
comforting things for him, but Luke was still hung from the loss
of his friend. Then, seemingly from nowhere, he thought he heard
PDP-1's voice say,
"May the carrier be with you."
"Hang onto your datafiles ! " bawled Solo. "This is going to be rough. And if the old man didn't shut off the tractor feed, this flight's going to be over in less time than it takes to compile a one-line C program." He punched at the buttons on his console and was rewarded by the sudden surge of power from the Falcon's powerful RAM. The ship leapt away from the workstation.
"Get ready to fight ! " Solo yelled, making for the ship's defensive weaponry. "Come on kid, stop moping around with your files hanging open. Get down there." Luke rose miserably and went down two levels into the lower turret.
There was a roar, and a TTY fighter hurtled by. Solo tracked
it, signals from his powerful ROM blasters chasing the little
starship as it went past. There was a brilliant flash, and it
turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of variables.
"One ! " yelled Solo delightedly. Luke, in the lower
turret, had found a fighter of his own, and quickly terminated
it with an untrappable signal. "One ! " he shouted back.
"Ten ! " yelled Solo, killing another TTY fighter.
"Ten ? " demanded Luke. "How do you figure that
? "
"One plus one is ten." insisted Solo. "Don't you
kids learn anything at school these days ? " The Bookie snorted
agreement from the control cabin where he was busy studying form
tables to try to find the quickest way into user space. Tentatively,
he tapped a few buttons on the computer, and was surprised when
the on-board speaker began to play "The Star-Spangled Banner"
all on one note.
"Twoie - get us out of here ! " Solo bawled. "One
hundred ! " he added quickly, claiming his fourth kill. Luke
thought he had got the hang of binary by now, but his own score
of eleven still sounded pitifully small compared with Solo's.
The Bookie howled something meaningless.
"Just cd /usr then ! " screamed Solo. "I don't
care where we go. But do it quick before one of these guys logs
us off for good."
The battered freighter slipped out of user space, its shell still bearing the scars of Imperial signals. Solo was jubilant.
"We made it ! " he yelled.
"We - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
/=============================================================================\ | | | We apologise for this disruption to the plot (PLOT?) | | Normal service will be resumed as soon as po...... | | | |=============================================================================| | | | 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? | | | |=============================================================================| | | | Well, for what it's worth, here's what's left of the story..... | | | \=============================================================================/
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -an instant later, one of his signals
struck home, and the pilot, momentarily distracted, flew straight
into an infinite loop.
"There's one on your tail, Diff." warned Luke.
"Thanks, Luke." said Diff, weaving desperately.
"Don't mention it." said Luke. He watched dispassionately
as the TTY fighter blasted Diff's ship into a million fragments.
"What are friends for ? "
In the leading TTY fighter, Dec Vadic frowned.
"Strange. The Carrier is strong in this one." he rumbled.
"Leave him to me. I'll take him myself." None of the
other pilots seemed keen to contradict him, especially since Vadic
was notorious for mysteriously closing people's files and altering
their permissions if they annoyed him.
Luke was in the Pipe now, with Ed riding close behind him,
gloomily updating him on the latest casualty figures.
"They got Diff, and Comp, and Comm, and Bin's on fire."
announced Ed. Luke tried to ignore him.
"That's really interesting." he grated. Mantissa's vax-wing
wobbled dangerously.
"Oh hell." he said. "My formatter's not working.
I guess I'll have to unlink. I'm really sorry Luke. Just do the
best you can." Luke's response practically melted the terminal.
The three TTY fighters closed in, and Vadic lined up to kill Luke's
process once and for all.
Suddenly, one of the TTY fighters exploded. An instant later, the other did the same, scoring full marks for consistency, but none for originality. Vadic, struck by a parenthesis thrown out by the explosion, spiraled into deep filespace.
"What happened ? " gasped Luke.
"Hi Luke." said Solo, trying to sound unconcernedly
natural despite the large ROM blaster being aimed unwaveringly
at his head by the Bookie. Twoie's voice rumbled in Luke's headphones.
"Remember, Solo, if he does it, that's ten billion you owe
me, even though he is the favourite. You better hope some outsider
doesn't come in, or you're going be taking out a mortgage on some
of your files."
"Of course, of course." said Solo. "Tell me the
odds again."
"Vaxhacker : ten to one. Mantissa : one hundred to one. Extras
: five hundred to one." said the Bookie, scribbling figures
with his free hand.
"Hey ! I've recovered from my errors. " shouted Ed,
dropping back into the pipe. "I'm with you all the way, Luke."
A moment later, a signal from the Milliamp Falcon blew away his
starboard compiler, and he spiraled helplessly towards the surface
of the workstation.
"You shot Ed ! " accused Luke.
"Listen, kid, with one hundred billion riding on this, I'd
shoot you too if this damn Bookie didn't have me cold." said
Solo.
Luke shut out his mercenary friend from his thoughts and concentrated on the port ahead of him. Suddenly, a message appeared on his terminal :
Message from PDP-1 Kenobi (ttyR7)....
"Luke - trust your feelings. Switch off your targeting
computer."
"PDP-1 ? " asked Luke. "Is that you ? Why do you
want me to switch off the computer ? "
"Well, let's just say that it's written in COBOL, so you'd
probably be better off with two pieces of string and a six inch
ruler."
"I see." said Luke. He switched off the computer.
"Trust the Carrier. Feel the Carrier." pontificated
PDP-1.
"Ah go stuff yourself." said Luke and jabbed menacingly
at the firing button with his finger. His signals sped out, straight
into the data port. With a feeling of immense satisfaction, he
climbed away from the exploding workstation. He was a UNIX wizard
now. The whole system was open to him. Recursive listings held
no terrors for him. He could change permissions. He could write
programs in C. He even knew what vectors were. One day, he might
rise to be super-user.
When they landed, Luke ran to the Milliamp Falcon to thank
Con. The Bookie stood in the hatchway, a smoking ROM blaster clutched
in his hand.
"Creep said he only bet in binary." he explained.