dp.12
MEGAZONE 23
and rem...@wpi.wpi.edu. If you reply to this post it will go to megazone and
I will forward it to the others. Thanks.
Merry Christmas----------------------------------------TWELVE
"It's been so long since I found out. What people mean by
down and out."
--Led Zeppelin
WEDNESDAY 25 DECEMBER 1991 (CHRISTMAS DAY)
Meanwhile, in his ongoing research with itsnotmygoddamn-
planetunderstandmonkeyboy, ReRob had discovered some
interesting things about CLULESS. One was that he might be
nigh-oblivious, but was still too clueful to make heads or
tails out of its programming language. Therefore, his
interest was from a compiler's standpoint. He had discovered
what the -i flag did; generated inanimate matter. With that
command, he had created the Cyclone; without -i it refused to
compile, declaring "inanimate subject--compile failure". And
therein, he realized, lay the bug in CLULESS that allowed for
the creation of life. Compiling without -i.
Also, he discovered that the default clucomp command was
actually a shell script going deeper into subdirs to generate
output that default-redirected to /dev/reality, a quasi-
realistic state of matter, convincing, but not real.
With a start, he realized something; if someone with
more knowledge of UNIX code than he could hack a code to shut
down /dev/reality, anything redirected there, invulnerable to
kill -9 and so on, would go pif. Or more likely slowly
deresolve as the device shut down. /dev/reality was an undue
load on the Encore, to be sure, as there was a better way to
do things; clucomp -i -x altered the default command from
redirected /dev/reality to xhosted real_world. xhost
real_world was the way to make things permanent--/dev/reality
was the metaphysical equivalent of /tmp. It was just a
matter of time before it got erased....
A sudden bad feeling struck him; he exited CLULESS and
ran a Super Who. He noted Entropy's presence on the network,
from "other" as usual; other than that, only he and some
nonames were on. So why did the cold lump of dread stick in
his gut? He ran a regular who and came up with something
that widened his eyes:
"Overthruster?" he murmured. He ran a what and
discovered an emacs job, a telnet--a telnet? ReRob ran a
trace on it, running with a hunch and a growing feeling of
doom.
Overthruster was telnetted to /dev/reality. He was
running code across the device, in the background; the
beginning of an alias code. Soon, if ReRob read it right, a
single keystroke would shut down /dev/reality and that would
be that.
Anything redirected there from the HDS31000 would be
terminated.
Anything.
Irreplaceably.
He ran some other checks. Under his very nose, CLULESS
had been changed. Altered to default to -i without the flag.
Gryphon had the copy in his account, still, but it was
putting him over the temporary research quota granted by a
verbose-mode aej. Soon his account would lock up.
A final sliver of ice drove into ReRob's heart as he ran
a check on /usr6/pub/anime and came up with
/usr6/pub/anime: No such file or directory.
He ran out of the station and pounded up the stairs,
slapping on sections of CVR-3 as he ran, running with all his
might to get to his Cyclone, race back to the Wedge and warn
Ben--as the owner of the processes, he could redirect them
from /dev/reality to real_world, but it would take precious
time, and he didn't know how long he had before Entropy
finished the job. He'd figure out why Entropy was doing it
later on--perhaps someone using his account, he's gone
insane, don't think about it, just drive--
Below Alden Hall, the cloaked figure entered Entropy's
office. "Is everything ready?" he asked.
"It is," Entropy replied. "One keystroke and
/dev/reality is history."
"Good. Execute." As Entropy hit Return, the figure
crossed his arms and a low chuckle rolled from his speaker
grid.
In another room, above them, Largo leaned back from his
security viewscreen, smiled, and said, "This will be a day
long remembered. It has seen the end of the Dirty Pair and
before long, it will see the end of the Wedge Rats."
The figure heard him in an earphone, turned, then turned
back, looking at the screen for a moment.
/dev/reality: Device terminated.
All jobs killed.
Have a nice day.
"Merry Christmas..." he whispered, then whirled and
stalked out.
"Yeah, you too," Entropy mumbled absently as he gweeped.
Back in the Wedge, Ben and Kei were sitting around,
talking about this and that and nothing in particular, as
they were wont to do. A partially read copy of the
Illuminatus! Trilogy lay on the table along with the hardcopy
of some bit of Scheme code Ben was working on; a pencil was
in his hand as he went over the code with his forebrain and
chatted with the back of his mind.
Suddenly, Kei stopped talking. Right in mid-sentence,
as if someone had flipped a switch. He turned to look at
her--
Someone drove a shaft of frozen CO2 through his heart.
She was frozen, standing bolt upright in the booth, a look of
shock on her face. And she was flickering. She was grainy,
the colors of her skin, her hair, everything just a bit
wrong...she looked like a .gif image that was stripped four
or five bits and crammed into a window that was too small.
With a thrill of horror Ben remembered where she came from in
the first place...
"I think you'd better get away," she whispered, her
voice scratchy and fading. "I can't move for some reason."
A white rectangle appeared in the air above her, glowing
and sparking. Then it began to drop down.
"No!" he screamed, throwing a shoulder against hers,
trying to push her from under the descending square of light.
He passed right through her, feeling only a slight tickling,
like static electricity or the psychological tickle you get
from knowing you're being exposed to radio waves or the like,
and smashed his face violently into the corner of the Wedge
booth.
Heedless of the blood running from his nose, he turned
around, stood up on the seat, braced his palms against the
square, and pushed with all the strength he could muster. It
was hot, incredibly hot; it seared the skin on his hands as
he fought to stop its inexorable descent. It was to no
avail; he cursed and screamed and pounded his fists against
what he recognized as a deresolution gate, reaching the point
where it was almost burning his face. There was a sudden
white-hot flare of light and he screamed again as a thousand-
volt triphammer slammed across his brain.
Consciousness left him; when he awoke he was lying in a
heap against the nearest support post. He pulled himself to
his feet to see a sight that would haunt him for a long time.
The accretion square had destroyed Kei. There was
nothing left of her but a burned square on the carpet of the
Wedge. It hadn't been long, only a few seconds; smoke was
still rising from his hands and the carpet, and there was a
faint tingle of electricity in the air.
The agony in his charred hands was nothing compared to
the agony in his soul. He dropped to his knees; his jaw
swung open of its own accord and a howl of the blackest
torment poured from his throat.
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ReRob heard the scream from halfway across the snow-
covered Quad and knew he was too late. He roared up to the
airlock and dismounted, running through into the Wedge to
find Ben crumpled on the Wedge floor, screaming and raging
and sobbing, tearing at the carpet with hands seared into
claws, stark raving slavering mad. ReRob just felt lucky he
had xhosted his Cyclone to real_world...if the derez grid had
done that to his hands, what would've happened to ReRob when
his CVR-3 had derezzed...?
With an incredible THRAM!, something smashed into the
roof of the Wedge. The roof hatch opened and down dropped
Zoner, his flightsuit's gloves burned almost through. He was
much more lucid; his was a cold rage. His eyes burned with
an arctic fire that almost frightened ReRob. His hands were
clenched into fists so tight the knuckles of his gloves had
split. A single tear was about halfway down his cheek.
"Who did it?" MegaZone demanded. "I'm going to find out
who it was and I'm going to kill them with MY OWN HANDS!"
Ben whirled around, grabbed a Wedge trash barrel, and
prepared to give it a good hard heave through the windows
into the Lower Wedge. He didn't feel the hands on his
forearms, gripping so hard they bruised; he just noticed that
he dropped the barrel. Snarling, he twisted free of Zoner's
grip and slammed a fist into the support beam.
The shock of white-hot pain ripping through his fist
into his brain blasted him back to reality. The steady
stream of incoherences from his throat ceased; for a moment
he was silent, standing by the post, his hand hanging limply
at the end of an outstretched arm; then he let out a long,
low moan, settled to his knees, and buried his face in his
hands, sobbing. Water dripped freely from between his
fingers, the salt adding to the seared fury of the pain in
his hands, to which the dull throb of his crushed knuckles
was little but an undertone.
"Ben," Zoner said firmly. Ben ignored him, or perhaps
couldn't hear him. "Ben!" MegaZone grabbed his friend by
the shoulders and hauled him to his feet. "Look at me!"
"Leave me alone!" Ben screamed, slamming his palms into
Zoner's chest and breaking free to stumble backward. "Just
go away." He turned away and started to leave the Wedge.
"No, I won't leave you the fuck alone! You're not
quitting now, we have to find out who did this and kill them.
Slowly..." Zoner said with an evil grin as he and ReRob cut
Ben off by the mailboxes.
"Ben, come on, snap out of this!" ReRob implored.
"We've got to get back to itsnotmygoddamnplanetunderstand-
monkeyboy and get moving. Are you going to let this go
unpunished? Do you think this is what Kei would want?"
"No!" Ben said, as though the word were burning his
tongue. "Never."
"Then come on, pull yourself out of this. Much as I can
do, I'm not the primary operator of itsnotmygodddamnpplanet-
understandmonkeyboy, you are. You're super-user on the
system there, not me. Now come on, we need you. Revenge is
something that can't be rushed."
"Okay...okay. Let me go up to my room. There are a few
things I have to get..."
"Me too," Zoner said. "I have to go over to E7 and get
my magtape."
Ben returned fourteen minutes later, his face wet with
fresh tears. "My room," he said in a small, hollow voice.
"They trashed my room...destroyed all the .gifs, the photos
of us, everything I had..." His fists, bandaged and burn-
salved, clenched and his face became hard and cold. "They
didn't get this, though," he said, holding up a sheaf of
printouts and a couple of photocopies.
Zoner came into the Wedge, a fistful of melted plastic
in his hand. "They fried everything! The bastards got it
all, both magtapes, the entire FTP site, all of the .gifs and
printouts. Even my comics. They need to die. Badly," he
seethed.
"Him too," ReRob said, indicating Ben. "Come on...let's
go make them pay."
They raced to Fuller, ReRob on his Cyclone and Zoner and
Ben in the Flying Daytona from Hell, and immediately sealed
themselves into the HDS31000. The first thing Ben did after
logging in was sever the connection the station had with
real_world.
Suddenly, on Entropy's screen, itsnotmygoddamnpplanet-
understandmonkeyboy vanished. Just went *ting* and
disappeared. As if it had dropped off the face of existence.
He scratched his head, ran a few tests, and then shrugged,
returning to making Largo lots of money with which to conquer
the world. That job was over with. CLULESS was sealed off,
the .gifs and scripts destroyed, and the original jobs
vaped...there was no chance of them coming back anytime soon.
Who had it hurt, anyway...those two were unlikely to
have any friends with their rep, right?
Securely isolated from all that was real, Ben hunched
over his xtty keyboard and began pounding away at an emacs
job. An inspiration had struck and he worked with the speed
and accuracy of a madman on a mission.
"What are you doing?" ReRob asked.
"Rewriting them," he replied, not slackening his pace.
"By hand?! You don't even know how to program in
CLULESS. You're insane."
"Uh huh," Ben replied. He paused his typing long enough
to point to the sheaf of printout and paper beside the one he
was referring to. "Can you do me a favor and CAD that in
between Cyclones?"
"What is it?"
"Everything I have on the GRF-3N Griffin III Armored
Combat Suit. Stats, designs, projections, action shots,
battle reports, everything. I don't plan on taking them out
with anything but."
"Ben," said Zoner, his grip on lucidity returning faster
than Ben's, "we don't even know who they are."
"Yes we do," ReRob said.
"Who?"
"Hard as this may be to believe, the guy who vaped
/dev/reality was Entropy."
"WHAT?"
"No, see, I think there's something seriously wrong
here. I mean, obviously, someone had to rez up Genom,
Boomers, etc. And it certainly wasn't one of us. Was it?"
He received two of the most searingly sarcastic `100%
NutraSweet' looks of his life.
"YCDN," said Ben, and turned back to his manic typing.
"No, look, there's a point in there somewhere, and never
mind the way I comb my hair. Entropy was probably fooling
around one day, stumbled across CLULESS the way you did, and
then oop! There was Genom. Now then. Genom has a lot of
money. Entropy is not morally opposed to money. Genom has
ambitions of world domination. Entropy has a lot of computer
ability. I see a connection there."
"Go on," Zoner said, his interest piqued. Ben, on the
other hand, could not have ignored him harder.
"Genom looks for world domination. They hire Entropy.
They see the Wedge Rats as a block in their path; we're the
only others with this technology. I hope. And ours is
better than theirs--we have an HDS. They use Boomers, et
al., to try and take us down--it doesn't work. My guess is,
they decided to try something else. Now what better way to
defeat the Wedge Rats than to destroy our two finest
combatants--and, not quite incidentally, our morale?"
Ben slammed the Return key, turned around, glared, and
turned back around.
"I'm detecting strong hate waves here," MegaZone said.
"Why do you think I'm still wearing the CVR?"
"So basically, we have to go head-to-head with Genom
Corporation? Um, even the Knight Sabers have problems. This
isn't going to be easy."
"No, it won't," ReRob agreed. "But here's the good
news. Our technology is better. You saw what I did to one
of those choppers with a single minimissile, right? Now I've
got the CVR and the 52 Battler here. If we have to, we can
outfit the entire fraggin' Wedge with VR-052 Battler
Cyclones."
MegaZone was silent as he considered the implications of
that statement. He pictured an army of Wedge Rats in CVR-3
and Battler Cyclones and shuddered. He pictured honor,
glory, and death. He smiled.
"Of course," said ReRob, "we're not going to give one to
Schletz. Are we?"
"No, I don't think that would be a terribly good idea."
"Still...I don't think VR-052s are going to be enough.
We need more diversity here. Ben's got me working on the
Griffin...that's gonna take me a year and a half, basically.
Ben whirled. "Like I'm not working just as hard!" he
shouted, then turned back and resumed typing.
"Well, while he's working on artificial life, I'll be
working on something much simpler--weapons. Hopefully I'll
be able to pump out a whole bunch more of them."
"I'm not working on an army," Ben murmured, more to
himself than anyone else.
"Meanwhile. I should be able to modify the 052 enough
to make the 38 Light and the 41 Sabre. And the thing from
MZ23. About the only thing I have to wait on--oh, shit.
There're three of us trapped in this station, we're all
guys--there's no way in hell I'm gonna be able to template
CVR-she."
"I'm sure the Wedge women would gladly help you out.
And I think I'll talk to daver about obtaining some surplus
weaponry. Lots of surplus weaponry..." Zoner said with his
patented smirk.
"This is gonna work," Ben muttered.