Reconfigure (3 page)

@rayKonfigure

Warning Applying Translate Mug 0,-0.15,0

Physics engine limits of tolerance would cause multiple split

y to continue n to cancel

“What the heck!” she said as she recklessly confirmed typing.

“y”

The DM reply came back positively.

@rayKonfigure

Applying Translate Mug 0,-0.15,0 Physics engine multiple split initiated

She was looking at the return message, it happened so quickly it made her jump. The mug made contact with the hard floor of the office and fractured into four really identifiable ex-mug pieces and tens of smaller shards. Roisin was definitely now in shock, full raging shock, internal blood flowing all over the place, brain spinning. She was waiting to wake up from this experience. She felt that horrible dryness in her throat, the bubbling of acid in her stomach. She leapt up from her chair, leaving it spinning like a space station. She launched herself to the bathroom. She didn’t have time to lift the rim of the toilet as she wretched, what little food she had consumed the last few hours, into the bowl. It stung, but it made her feel better. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She gulped a little and shook her head. Roisin felt a wave of absolute exhaustion come over her, like the jet lag from a transatlantic flight. Her internal dialogue still played with her. “Well, you could have just had a cup of coffee to keep awake but your mug is broken."

She sat on the bathroom rug, her torso propped up against the bath. There was a pleasing coolness on the back of her neck from the ceramic. She closed her eyes, just to gather her thoughts. She had not had time to turn on the light. Her brain timed out and she drifted to sleep.

Her eyelids were heavy, but she willed them to lift to let light in to her pupils. There was a lot of light too. It stung and she could feel the panic in her optic nerve as it reduced the incoming rays with a natural bio-mechanical reaction. The bathroom window was frosted, with just a net curtain. The morning sun was streaming in, bright but diffused. The shock last night had shut her body down before she could do the usual going to bed routine. As the light warmed her up slightly her brain kicked into action. She sat upright on the floor, away from the bath, still in yesterday’s Police denim jeans and retro gaming Ms PacMan t-shirt. She was having the reality rush that hits most mornings. She transitioned from slumbering brainwaves to the ‘get up and get going’ screaming Sergeant Major inner voice. Another voice she tended to ignore, or at least wanted to. Today was different. Today she had to try and re-process the events of last night, first validating to herself that they did indeed happen? Long Flow based coding sessions had a way of diverting some of her perception of reality. It was probably the seven plus or minus two thing at work she thought. You can only divert so much power to one part of a space ship, like the shields or weapons before it sucked power from the engines and life support. She was not sure if this little mental diversion was to try and shield her from the truth of yesterday.

“Shut up. Concentrate!” Roisin told herself.

First things first, did ‘IT’ really happen? She walked gingerly, despite being the only one in the house, towards her office. She tipped her head to the right, causing her untidy dark hair to partly cover her face, as she poked her head around the door frame. Her chair was facing completely away from the desk as if ready for an evil super villain boss to sit in it and gently rotate toward the computer to order the destruction of a major city. That was not a nice thought. Not nice at all! She was already considering the consequences of any actions she might take. She was not going to the ‘dark side’. Not ever! Well, ‘normal restrictions apply’. Her sensible internal monologue reminded her that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. Roisin ignored it. She looked too at the shattered mug on the floor. It was definitely broken. It was also not on the right hand side of the desk nor anywhere near its usual space. The pattern of faded circular coffee stains indicated the usual resting place. That’s great then! She realised it was looking more likely that, ‘IT’, really had happened last night.

Rather than sit down she pushed the chair to the side over the shards of pottery that once made the ‘I am the one who knocks’, Heisenberg coffee mug. The chair spun a little as she shifted it. Acting as if it was relieved to be on the move again. She started to lift the lid on the laptop. She remembered the automatic reaction of slamming it down even as she hurtled to hurl last night. Glancing at the upside down Apple logo and the multitude of stickers she had plastered around it like a good geek, she opened it fully. Everything was as she had left it. Some of the applications in the dock had a few red dots with tiny numbers on their icons that signified updates she must read, action or download. She was sure, before the Internet, programmers must have just been able to write good code to spec without relying on a constant drip feed of user actioned patching. Still, it kept her employed and without the Internet there would be no social media or networked games, there would be no Twitter.

The browser window sat there with the last DM from her new friend.

@rayKonfigure

Applying Translate Mug 0,-0.15,0 Physics engine multiple split initiated

The human brain has an odd way of working things out. Roisin felt hers dare her.

“Go on delete something!"

It was as if she was on the inevitable path of asking, via a Twitter Direct Message, to delete the entire Universe. Quite an extrapolation? Even for her. She was about to do what any good techie does in testing. Explore the boundary conditions. If you have a loop that performs something n times the n+1 and n-1 times are almost not that important. Sure the routine might be doing something devastating but it is the entrance and exit to and from that loop that are the edge conditions. Here, Roisin knew that if this system did what it appeared to do, she had the potential to make some really bad mistakes with just a few typos. Only yesterday she had managed to mistype ‘ls -l’ into the wrong window, so she feared for her own typing and concentration abilities today. Wait! Before the mug jumped off the desk RC (she was mentally abbreviating @rayKonfigure with an acronym for reconfigure) had sent a warning that this action might be a bad thing to do. She looked back on the CLI ‘Physics engine limits of tolerance would cause multiple split’. Whoever wrote this thing had put some exception and error handling in as a protection. That could mitigate her lack of keyboard acumen this morning. Of course you don’t just randomly type a new command into a CLI, you always start with a quick check that you are indeed in the right directory and things are where you thought they were. Another lesson Roisin had learned after several time consuming shuffles of files to the completely wrong place, cursing CLI’s even more, and adding to her general hatred of the hallowed interaction mechanic.

Roisin continued with another DM to RC, she typed.

“ls”

The list returned on the client.

@rayKonfigure

Bookshelf

Ceiling

Chair

ComputerDevice1

ComputerDevice2

Door

Doorway

Floor

Human

Phone

MugShards

Power

Printer

Table

Wall1

Wall2

Wall3

Wall4

Window

Roisin noticed, it looked like the Mug object was now a new object or rather a collection of objects, called MugShards. This couldn't be a straight hierarchy of files in a file system? Surely it would be more complex than this? If the MugShards is a collection of things now, then all the other objects must be high level collections and combinations too. This is mix of a file system and a higher level database construct, she postulated to herself. It made sense to Roisin as she had built similar front ends before. It was the sort of higher level code layering she delivered from her slightly more detailed but scatter brain approach to development. Tying everything up in nice parcels with bows on them for the less able devs to comprehend. Again she typed, to explore the one command in the list that she had no idea what it might be. It sounded like some horrendous hen party performance act.

“man Zone”

RC responded to her.

@rayKonfigure

Zone(1) Specialised Commands Manual Zone(1)

NAME

Zone
-- Set or display the current zone of influence parameters in the fractal space

SYNOPSIS

Zone [-DRS] [BaseObject, Range, Scale
…
]

DESCRIPTION

The Zone utility command sets the home object to BaseObject (Default = Human). It also sets the Range and Scale in the fractal space for other commands to act upon.

The following options are available:

-D
Display the current BaseObject and Range

-R
Reset the BaseObject, Range and Scale to default.

BaseObject=Human

Range = <4.0f,4.0f,4.0f>

Scale = <1.0f,1.0f,1.0f>

-S
Set the BaseObject, Range, Scale

RCF July 1, 2015

END

That was indeed an interesting ‘man Zone’ after all Roisin thought. This system, whatever the heck it was, had been thought about and built with some rigour. It wasn’t just a bunch of half finished open source, with two hundred prerequisite installation pieces, just to get it to say, ‘hello world’. Roisin remembered to exit the manual otherwise the terminal process would just hang, she entered.

“q”

RC was back to ready and responded with a DM.

@rayKonfigure

.

She really should read the manual for the other commands, suggested her ‘internal sensible whining do the right thing’ voice. She ignored it. Manuals tell you how, but they never tell you why. You learn by finding a bit of syntax and then exploring it through trial and error. Roisin did it that way anyway, and wasn’t about to change the habit of a lifetime! Even if you have the power to destroy the World with one keystroke? She asked herself. Roisin knew, or at the very least hoped, that the error checking was in place across all the functions RC could perform. Years of gaming had instilled, or even installed, a willingness to just have a go and hope that a particular experience did not involve permadeath. To be fair there weren’t many real permadeath games out there. As a genre they were commercial suicide, so were restricted to quirky art projects. In a game you have a character, you have lives or health or some other resource that limits you. The game involves protecting or enhancing that resource. If you die you re-spawn. Your character pops back into existence, possibly back at a save point with work to do again, or just resurrected to continue the fight, quest or mining operation. Permadeath lite as it might be called is a game with only one life for that session. You die, game over. You start from the very beginning again. Whilst it seemed a new invention by the indie developers in recent survival based virtual environments it was fundamental to old arcade games and platform games. You always started from the beginning until you ran out of credits. True permadeath experiences get you to buy and install a game. You play it. If at any point something causes your demise you can never play the game again. That’s pretty hardcore, but it is art imitating life. Roisin’s little meander into the meaning of life and of games was not just a random musing, it was her brain sifting for a next course of action.

“Save Game!” She said out loud to herself. “It’s got save points!”

She already had the next stream of commands in her head as a sequence. She had an idea, she knew the pattern to try. The only thing in her way was having to type the commands into the Web page acting as a CLI proxy to a server, she was calling RC. Taking on board the first parameter mentioned in the manual she typed.

“Zone -D”

RC replied to her.

@rayKonfigure

Human <4.0,4.0,4.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>

That was a good start, she thought. The Zone is defaulted around a human. She tried to dig deeper, using the command that she hoped would shed some more light on the remote system.

“Examine Human”

The response was as quick.

@rayKonfigure

Designation - Roisin Kincade

Role - Command

Type Human Composite Object

Subtype Female

Handle - @Axelweight

Relative Attachments

Clothing

Jewellery

Contents

Default

Fractal Location - <3800,74,23>

Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>

Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>

It knew her name? She would have preferred something a little more informal than ‘Designation’ as a label. Role ‘Command' had a nice ring to it. At least it is the right colour Star Trek shirt, she certainly didn’t want to be a red shirt for this gig.

Fractal location, orientation and level? Who knows? It must be like the range and scale parameters in the Zone. All things are relative to some sort of base.

The two passive requests were followed by an action that Roisin knew would do something important, but something non destructive. She tried.

“Save”

RC replied.

@rayKonfigure

Select a save slot or press enter to overwrite quick save

Roisin counter typed.

“Save slot1”

Another positive action reply, she was doing well.

@rayKonfigure

Current zone saved to slot1

Now for the dangerous bit! She decided she would go for verbose mode this time. A standard command can just get on with it or you ask it ’-v’ and it tells you all sorts of things as it happens. If this was Linux, and these files matched the World, then she wanted to try a little delete. She tried.

“rm -v mugshards”

As she pushed the send button to RC she felt a wave of excitement at what would happen next. She forgot the how or the why this was happening. Her brain was buzzing around finding an analogy to leap onto. All Roisin knew was that this command would act as a significant test. It was the most important remove she had ever tried. This wasn’t Tippex on a badly written school essay, this wasn’t clearing up the junk mail folder, it wasn’t even telling that creep in the bar the other night to step off. A CLI command, yesterday, had moved a mug a fraction of a meter backwards. The y value was backwards relative to her orientation not the object? The -0.15 m should have been +0.15 m. Her first Translate had caused the mug to leap in space a meter to the left. All by using a CLI! Maybe they, CLIs, are not so bad after all.

The reply came back.

@rayKonfigure

rm: mugshards: No such file or directory

“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING!" The other thing about CLI’s and about these sorts of operating systems is they are case sensitive. MugShards is different to mugshards, or MuGSHards. Roisin really disliked the fact that the apparently incredible powerful system she was talking to was bloody case sensitive. I mean… really? It was a bit of an anti-climax. She corrected the command, thumping the shift key very definitely for the M and the S.

“rm -v MugShards”

The text response came back.

@rayKonfigure

Redirecting MugShards

Roisin was still stood up leaning over her computer. The small points of light emanating from under her office chair twinkled in her peripheral vision. She dragged the chair across the room, another joyful spin for this inanimate object. The floor was clean or cleaner. The residual level of dust and stains and odd scratches, a small piece of cellophane from a printer cartridge wrapper, were all still there. No MugShards, mugshards, MuGSHards or any pieces of mug were there. Her broken Breaking Bad mug had buggered off. It had ceased to be, it was dead! Quite enough of that! She stopped herself from going full Python, Monty not programming language. The rush of rage at case sensitivity had ruined the moment, but now she realised it was momental. Like all good moments it really needed to be shared with the World, not completely of course. The level of trolling on the Web would be horrendous if she tried to explain this. Not to mention, this is really something so powerful that in the wrong hands? Whilst thinking she physically gulped, tasting a little of the previous nights evacuation of her stomach. Still she felt the need to share. She pulled her iPhone out of her pocket. The charge was at about 10%, she had collapsed last night without the ritual tethering to a power supply that such devices needed. She took a photo of the wood veneer floor, complete with cellophane debris. Happy with the composition and the lighting, as she always was with a spontaneous image like that, she zapped it to Instagram, routed to Flickr too and added a Tweet. “There is no veneer, I am the one who knocks." She smirked to herself. Like most social media users, with a bit of savvy, she enjoyed sharing by not sharing. Hinting at things through a few characters and images. It made others wonder and think. Someone, somewhere would be pondering the reference. The astute amongst her potential followers would probably replace veneer with spoon and will have also enjoyed the meme from Breaking Bad. Of course it would be very unlikely anyone would really know she had asked a mug to drop itself on the floor then disappear. One day she could say to them, “Well I did tell you." Hidden messages gave self gratifying smugness, there is always a little emotional pay off for social sharers. Roisin thought for a minute about those less fortunate than her, less skilled in the art of the quirky Tweet. So often she had seen direct references to situations, people bitching at one another. ‘She knows who she is’ and alike. She was happy with her way. Abstract references that those in the know would understand with a little bit of effort. That effort would make them feel clever too and so she was in fact spreading joy and emotional pay offs to many people.