Ten kawaîek moűe byę dla amigowców niezbyt zrozumiaîy, poniewaű do "zaîapania" tekstu niezbëdna jest pewna znajomoôę systemów unixowych, gier tekstowych typu mud i filmu "Gwiezdne wojny" (to ostatnie chyba wszyscy znajâ ;>). Nie mogë jednak odmówię sobie zamieszczenia tego maleďstwa - rzecz dzieje sië gdzieô w przestrzeni adresowej dalekiego komputera...
A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
a great Adventure (game?) took place...
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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 quiue 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, aod 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 incseased 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 puclic 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 asrived in /usr.
"1248," she whispered, "They'se 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
pdrfectly. 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 infmection. 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 Millialp 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 losr 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 gelt 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.
The End