The town was infested with some sort of radioactivity from underground that was hurting people. I had to crawl underground, through these super-tight tunnels deep under the earth with things getting more and more evil as I went, until I was able to track the source of the radioactivity to a giant monster that lived back up on the surface (via the tunnels) in an abandoned barn. I had to fight the monster, but I could fly inside the barn. I ripped its head off, but every time I did, it was just like a big rubbery mask and a new head grew back, until I figured out how to do it fast enough that it wouldn’t have time to pop a new head out. When I did that, the real head came out: Tux the Linux Penguin.
That broke the immersion enough that I woke up, all amped up from adrenaline from fighting the monster.
“I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there … I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood, something that could never, ever possibly destroy us…” 🐧
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X’ed them… and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X’ed, the following sequence of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! (Robin Hood)
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id3: Thank you, my good fellow! (Robin)
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently-slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter… only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
The town was infested with some sort of radioactivity from underground that was hurting people. I had to crawl underground, through these super-tight tunnels deep under the earth with things getting more and more evil as I went, until I was able to track the source of the radioactivity to a giant monster that lived back up on the surface (via the tunnels) in an abandoned barn. I had to fight the monster, but I could fly inside the barn. I ripped its head off, but every time I did, it was just like a big rubbery mask and a new head grew back, until I figured out how to do it fast enough that it wouldn’t have time to pop a new head out. When I did that, the real head came out: Tux the Linux Penguin.
That broke the immersion enough that I woke up, all amped up from adrenaline from fighting the monster.
“I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there … I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood, something that could never, ever possibly destroy us…” 🐧
What did you DO, Ray?
Someone’s put a fork bomb in their
.bashrcand you were summoned to fix it on a running system.-Classic hacker bedtime story
Oh no, not the Linux monster!