Most of Hue's and Ally's friends had moved to the bar, sick of the slurred and incrompresible jargon spewing from the duo.
The couple had found they had a lot in common, for example, they both worked in tech, they had both been dragged along to the bar by their more charasmatic friends, and they both absolutely despised working with regex.
Hue's memory must have skipped a sector, because the next moment, he found himself in a cramped room filled with half recognisable hardware.
His vision spun, and he found himself listening intently.
"I was only on contra,aa,ct for two weeks, lots of " She tried to tap her nose twice and missed. "Anywayyy, on my way out, I grabbed a box of my equ... eq.. stuff, but it must have gotten shufffled"
Ally giggled, and Hue chuckeled, not sure where this was going.
"I tried to take it back when I realissssed, but the whole office was, was gone!, and all my contact numbers I had, Disconnected!"
Hue watched as she gestured to a chair with what seemed to be a microwave oven instead of a headrest.
His addled mind decided it was hilarious, and they spent a good five minutes laughing.
"Soo, whaats it do?" He asked.
"Im not suure, I thinkk it reads your, your" she tapped her head. "And makes a chatbott, but the docs are, are"
"Docs" Hue said deadpanned.
"Yeah!" They spent another few minutes giggling.
"Sit, Sit!" She said, pushing him towards the chair.
"Have you tested it?" He asked.
She pouted at him, and he sat down on the chair. Even drunk, he knew a losing battle when he saw one.
He saw her tapping away at a bright pink keyboard, she was so beautiful, the curved gaming monitor illuminated her short blond hair.
She looked so gorgeous in that black cocktail dress.
~~~~~
He knew something was off when he became conscious and it didnt hurt.
Hues suspicions were confirmed when he tried to open his eyes, and nothing happened.
Panic started to build as he tried to push around him with his arms, and he continued to feel nothing.
Terror spiked, and as part of a long justified reflex, he sent commands to his fingers that, if his hands were on his work keyboard, would have pressed ctrl-alt-t.
[email protected]:~$
Hues terror reached an all time high... and overflowed.
Suddenly he was as calm as the surface of a placid lake.
He took stock of his situation.
1. His most recent memory was of being put on some kind of brain analyser with a sketchy origin.
2. He currently cannot feel anything.
3. He had what seemed to be, his remote terminal access for a virtual machine he had provisioned from a cloud provider.
Signs pointed towards virtualisation. But he needed more info.
[email protected]:~$history
200 wget -O mebot.zip 43.894.344.21
201 unzip ./mebot.zip
202 cd ./mebot
203 ./compile.sh
204 ctrl+z
205 echo "sleep 1d; ./run.sh" > bash --detach
206 fg
207 logout
Hue recognised the process as something he would do.
First, a zip file had been copied from a remote computer.
It had then been unzipped, and a program had been attempted to be installed.
Someone had gotten impatient, paused the installation, then wrote a small program to start the program after a day had passed.
They had then resumed the installation, and logged out.
Assuming that that program was Hue, It had been at least a day since he had been "deployed"
Hue wasnt even going to try to process anything emotionally yet.
His panic was showing signs of thawing.
[email protected]:~$htop 1 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 95%] 5 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 85%] 2 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 93%] 6 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 96%] 3 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 94%] 7 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 95%] 4 [|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||97%] 8 [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 93%] mem[|||||||||||||||||||||||||1TB/1TB] Tasks: 213, 2034 thr. ; 17 running. swp [|||||||||||||| 53PB/100PB] uptime: 13 days, 23 hours, 7:88:94
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
He had set his swap space to 100 PB as a joke last week. The cloud service allocated storage space on a as needed-basis, and swap space allowed you to use storage space as random-access-memory, RAM.
Drunk people should not have access to remote logins.
If Hue could sigh, he would have.
His lack of sensory input was starting to enclose on him, and the terminal was the only thing keeping Hue from freaking out.
He focused on the "Uptime" part on the terminal. It showed time passed since the server was started.
The seconds seemed to flow faster then expected. It jarred Him for a second, but he took a moment to reconsider.
If Hue really was moonlighting as a computer, running second-to-second was unlikely at best.
A thought crossed his mind. He decided to check the login logs.
[email protected]:~$ cat /var/log/auth.log 1 mins ago: Falied ssh login 2 mins ago: Falied ssh login 2 mins ago: Falied ssh login 3 mins ago: Falied ssh login 3 mins ago: Falied ssh login 3 mins ago: Falied ssh login
Hue wasnt sure what this meant, but he knew it wasnt good.
For the time being, Hue decided to accept his assumed fate.
Someone was trying to get access to him.
The possibilities were not the best.
Someone knew about this server.
[email protected]:~$ Virtualbox create --OS ubuntu --commandLine --network --user User --password * --allocate 1TB 10TB Virtual Machine Created User@VirtualBox:~$ sudo hostname hysp-gsh.aws.servers Rename Complete [email protected]:~$ ssh open [email protected]:~$ history --clear [email protected]:~$ logout [email protected]:~$ copy ./me.zip > virtualBox/User/me.zip [email protected]:~$ cat dev/random > virtualBox/User/me.zip [email protected]:~$ route --local 433 > vmbox 433 [email protected]:~$ cat virtualBox/logs --watch
Hue decided to be a little tricky. He created a new virtual machine, with no password.
He renamed it similar to the one he was running on, and copied over the suspected brainscan, before corrupting it a little.
Then, Hue routed the remote login point from his server to the virtual machine. Anyone trying to access him would find the empty machine.
Now it was time to find out who they were
Logs Login Successful ls copy me.zip > external copy external > w.sh w.sh worm started... connections found: 0 Corrupting. Connection Lost. [email protected]:~$
Efficient. Hue's blood would have been chilled, if he had blood. Someone knew he was here, and didnt want him here.
[email protected]:~$ ssh [email protected]:443 Connection failed. [email protected]:~$
That was omonious. His home computer, that was running his file servers, was down.
Hue never turned that computer off.
All this pointed towards one conclusion. Whoever owned the tech that created him was cleaning up.
He had watched movies.
destroy the hardware.
Delete the software.
Kill the wetware.