MAJOR EDIT: I got overconfident in my abilities and didn't proofread. I'll not be making that mistake again. I also fixed the travesty that FF .net caused to the early sections of the story.
A security camera view. A timestamp reading 16:23:19 Jun 20 2016 in the bottom right. The camera is very high quality. It shows a view of a large room with a computer terminal in the center. The camera is a 90 degree unit which makes objects appear taller and thinner than they really are. The walls are decorated in a Minecraft-esque style. A large view port decorated like Tinker's Construct Clear Glass in one wall shows a view of the lunar surface. Closer examination reveals that the view port is, in fact, a large flat panel display. Most of the rest is painted in a Cobblestone pattern. Iron Doors with blacked out windows are in two walls with Signs above them with labels such as "Plant Room 1: Emergency Power and Provision Generation" and "Cryogenic Sleeper Chamber." The fourth wall has no decoration. It is plain, solid concrete. A large gray steel door is embedded in this wall. A sign above it reads "Warning: Airlock to Main Fission Power."
A musical chiming sound is heard from one door. A feminine voice announces "Sequence complete. Arrival confirmed." A few seconds later the door opens with a loud squeak, briefly revealing a Star Trek like transporter room with four pads. A male Mobian hedgehog with upward pointing quills, deep red fur and an orange face walks in. He wears a black T-shirt reading "I don't often test my code, but when I do, I do it in Production." and comfortable cargo shorts. Behind him are three tails, one a normal hedgehog tail and two being a pair of cybernetic fox tails. They are metallic gray with no aesthetic modifications. The camera view moves to a thumbnail in the bottom right. A tooltip appears above it for a few seconds reading "Tap to enlarge." The main display is filled with a view from the same camera, this time cropped to show the Mobian in a normal field of view. Data scrolls past
Visual Scan Commencing… 25%… 50%… 100%… Done
Checking local identification database… Done. 1 match
Identification: Sabara
Species: Mobian hedgehog
Verifying secondary ID…
The image freezes. Rectangles appear over the tail tips, rapidly shrinking over about a second to enclose just the tips of each tail. They flash red and white. Unintelligible symbols flash next to each box After a second, both boxes go solid green and disappear.
Verification Complete
"Welcome Sabara," announces the feminine voice. The image resumes moving. The hedgehog walks to the chair in front of the terminal and sits down, sliding his tails through a hole in the back. A series of boot logs appear, rapidly scrolling before a login prompt appears
Login: sabara
Password:
Welcome. Last login 39?93 Jun 19 2016 from 59. 68. 896. 579
You have mail
sabara zero:~$ mutt
The console is replaced with a program displaying several emails. The hedgehog's cybernetic tails stop their normal circular pattern and stick straight out in alarm. He murmurs something that sounds like "How… impossible! How did they..." The top message subject reads
ada .hopper QVAR.4982.59:diegeekdie .co .uk Subject: An offer you cannot refuse
The hedgehog opens the message. The text reads
From: Ada Hopper [ada .hopper QVAR.4982.59:diegeekdie .co .uk]
To: [large black box]
Subject: An offer you cannot refuse
Sabara,
It has come to our attention that you are chronicling our adventures. You believed we were a fictional character. What you were not aware of was that by the act of writing our story you were unconsciously writing down the events of alternate dimensions, like any fiction writer. With the right equipment the subject of a story can open a Link to the writer's world for communication or transport. There is a text file attached to this email. Publish it, and any subsequent files to your hosting site under the tile of Demon Administrator. If you do this, we will not bother you in any other way and you may continue writing our other stories at your leisure. Do not edit the file with the exception of adding your starting and ending notices. Do not refuse to upload. You will have two days from the receipt of the message to post. We can tell if you do not upload, and we can tell when you open the message, overriding your read receipt setting. If you do not post the file as is within 48 hours of viewing… Well, you can guess.
Post now:
Composite
ATTACHMENT: 1. Prologue .odt
"How could they have found us? How are they real?" Sabara sits back in his chair, almost trembling with fear and awe. He logs into Fanfiction .net and loads the odt file.
ATTACHMENT 1: Prologue .odt
We were simply flying around, hauling some… uh… perfectly legit commodities around the galaxy. Camanion came online and we started talking.
"Hey Composite, there's a magazine web series you might be interested in."
"What's it called?" we asked
"Uh… Much as I don't like to curse, Bastard Operator from Hell. It's a series of magazine columns about a fictional network operator. It's been running for 21 years now, 25 if you count the original Usenet posts before the magazine Datamation picked it up. In 2000, it moved to a UK magazine The Register. It has become the icon of what network and system administrators, including myself, would do if we could get away with it. I'm sending you a couple links to the older pre and post 2000 content. You should be able to scan it and create a Link."
We received the web link and spent the next ten minutes reading. The stories were fascinating. We could see why Camanion and Risa liked them. We opened the scanning algorithms Camanion had sent us and began to analyze the tunneling signatures. The Link was quickly established. We continued with our smuggling run and offloaded our cargo. A very high return, something in the neighborhood of 500k in a Cobra.
We entered the station and found a quiet corner, having previously activated our Ada morph before leaving our ship. A supply closet, Why not? We entered, removed our old Link to Awakening, and made a new one to the current station. We still had plenty of pages, and we could create multiple Links to a single dimension in our Nexus, though inter-age linking was still impossible for now, but no point in taking up extra space. We then selected a new morph from our Copied section. Yeesha. We transformed into the familiar form of Yeesha, an almost-human woman with less defined cheekbones and thinner lips and nose like a D'ni. We were now wearing the common D'ni clothes that were halfway between a cloak and a robe.
We focused on the dimension we wanted to travel to and pushed into the Link.
Time cut: One week ago in a different dimension
So me and my Pimply Faced Youth assistant have been randomly selected for a supervisor appraisal scheme, much to our surprise. And especially to the Boss's surprise because he distinctly remembers having our names removed from the list.
"Random" is such a misleading word.
I'll have to deal with him later. If he knows we'll give him a negative review out of hand he knows too much. But that's not for another few days.
So me, the PFY, and the Boss go to one of the executive's wastes of space, I mean meeting rooms, on the fourth floor to talk with a Mr. Gray (by name and nature) from an external consultancy company.
"So," Gray starts, "You are aware of the purpose of thismeeting?"
"Yes," I respond, "This is the meeting where you discover that my Boss has all the technical skill of a brick."
The Boss is starting to look uncomfortable.
"Well, he must have some skill to get his position, right?" Mr. Gray asks.
"Or be related to the CEO or the CEO's wife, or plays golf at the same club, or knows what a golf club looks like..." I say.
"Or be an Inland Revenue spook trying to see exactly how deep the tax evasion is in this company," the PFY adds.
"So you have a low opinion of your boss?" Gray asks.
"Yes. In all honesty he couldn't examine a litter and find a runt, let alone manage a network. When I suggested we not jump on board the Internet of Things bandwagon yet he asked if I meant those new websites with pictures in the main window instead of having to open a separate window like back in the '80s. When the PFY suggested we stick with CAT-6 cabling instead of upgrading to shielded CAT-7 because we don't need the shielding outside the production lines he asked what breed of cat we were talking about."
"So what do you envision in a supervisor?" Gray asks.
"Someone who can read and write without sticking his tongue out. Someone who can use a calculator instead of constantly asking us what four plus eight is. Someone who has the sense to sign anything I put in front of him no matter how controversial it may seem," I respond.
"Someone who knows that a 64 bit system doesn't have anything to do with the number of parts in the box," the PFY adds.
"So basically a yes-man and nothing more," Gray summarizes.
"Yep!" the PFY and I say at the same time.
"Well I beg to differ on that. You can't expect him to sign anything without thoroughly examining it first. After all, a delay of a few days is unlikely to hurt anyone."
At this we get up and leave. On the way out I hear the Boss warning Mr. Gray not to enter the lifts or any computer-controlled area. I smell a tragic accident in the near future.
A few hours later I'm in the control panel for the rotating doors when a shadow detaches itself from the foyer and makes a run for them. A quick [clickety-click] later and the doors stop with Gray halfway through and the security alarms go off.
A few minutes later me and the PFY wander down to investigate. Security is standing around helplessly (which is perfectly normal.) Mr. Gray is in the doors hopelessly. He knows the score.
"WELL, WE CAN ALWAYS BREAK THE GLASS!" I shout.
"Armour glass, have to put a car through it." says security. "We tried cutting the wires to the locking mechanism, hoping that would turn it off."
"IF IT WAS THAT SIMPLE ANY BURGLAR COULD GET IN! NOW IT'S ON AN INDEPENDENT BATTERY! TAKES 48 HOURS TO DISCHARGE." the PFY comments "taco shellls and cheese slices sound good though."
"What for?" asks security.
"To slide under the door to him," I reply, "I JUST HOPE HE'S BEEN TO THE TOILET RECENTLY. WOULD HATE TO SPEND 48 HOURS IN A GLASS COMPARTMENT WITH FULL EXPOSURE TO THE STREET, NO WATER, AND ONLY MY BRIEFCASE AT MY Convenience.!"
Life can be rough, especially when you're trying not to think about things.
And that's the prologue. I know the stories are about to get a lot shorter, but that's because i'm trying to keep them to the length of the source material, which has an 800 word limit, except sometimes it goes up to 1600. Composite won't be showing up in the next couple episodes though. Ada will be a cameo next time because I'm setting up for them. Ada will appear regularly, and Composite will appear soon. Five episodes at most.
The BOFH series is my favorite humor column. It's my dream job, the one I'll never get. A BOFH in the real wourld would be lucky to get life without parole. And for the record, I've never gottan an email from Composite. That's probably a good thing.
Shoutout this week goes to Simon Travaglia, the BOFH author.
I'm hoping to get two or three per week up. It reallly depends on what happens when school starts up.
Web show probably isn't the best place to put this, but it's going there because it's the closest I have.
So until next time, this is SabaraOne, Logging out!
Now I need to read the latest episode. Apparently the PFY has discovered Pokemon Go, or rather that the Boss had a serious addiction already. I smell a tragic accident coming up.
