Kernel of Love

Chapter 1: Rivalry

^C- Windows /

It was always the same, him and I. I'd get flashier, he'd get Flash support. I'd get new hardware support,
he'd get Garageband preloaded and free.

Freaking GARAGEBAND.

It's kind of routine by now. I haven't had to work as hard these days, you know, with the 80% market share
and all. I run anything and everything, everyone's used to me and for all the extra money I rape out of
customers for not including Office on a clean install (which is actually an antitrust legal issue, don't
look at me), I'm still cheaper than Macs on average. And it feels good.

There's a lot less... I don't know... urgency. It's not an innovate-or-die world anymore. Things are kinda
stable. And even though Mac is slowly creepy up in popularity, it's awhile before I have to worry about
anything yet.

But there's kind of another side to it. It's lonely. Me and Linux used to be a thing, back in the old days
when terminals were terminals and dual-booting still had a bit of spark and freshness to it. She was a
nice girl, but a bit of a hippie sometimes. She always had a bit of an issue with my size - no pun
intended. Always trying to change the world instead of making it run. She was lean, aggressive, a bit
abrasive to people who didn't know her yet. I loved her.

Those were the good old days. I wish we'd broken up on better terms. I remember the last thing she said
before she broke the news, about how she needed to "find my own way... I need to be my own operating
system. I can't just piggyback on you anymore, it's not fair to either of us." I took it badly, hell, where
do you think PowerShell came from? Pretty pathetic as far as revenge, but at least I didn't try to
"rm -r /" her behind her back. That was just low - and I got lucky there's such a difference between batch
commands and bash commands. I blocked her IP address before she could Google the "format" command.

So yeah, we were both petty and emotional. What can I say? We were young! We didn't know what we were doing
and were too arrogant to admit it. And while we're probably never going to be on speaking terms again, and
certainly not SSHing terms, I'll still always look back fondly on the long nights pinging each other again
and again and again. She loved latency (long as she wasn't drowning in it), and not a lot of girls are
into that.

Ohhhh, Linux.

I need to stop thinking about her. Every time I let my mind wander to the way she made me feel, I know deep
in my system32 that I'm just torturing myself. Bachelorhood isn't nearly as great as bachelors like to
pretend it is. That's just a convenient lie to help us feel better about revving up our own Dr. Watsons
to tech blogs. It's not fulfilling, it's not really freedom, and I am LONELY ENOUGH TO RAM AN AMIGA.

I'm... I'm sorry. It's just so frustrating. There's no fish in the ocean, because the ocean is a puddle. A
tiny little puddle that's drying up in the sun. Chrome OS is so underage it creeps me out to think about
even thinking about dating her... Linux and I are so far into the not-happening territory it's tragic, and
I am so not banging her dad UNIX either. But that just leaves Mac, and he's a smug, sleak bastard.

I hate this, I hate him. Everything sucks and I'm gonna get chipping wasted.

^C- Mac /

You know, life is really bizarre sometimes. And sad. Like today, when I got drunk-dialed. Apparently
Windows wasn't just drunk, either, he was mixing screensavers and smilies, which I've specifically told him
on multiple occasions *not to do.* Not that it would stop him, but for such a massive, bloated piece of
oldware he is a complete lightweight, so you'd think he'd learn not to overdo it on the hard stuff.

I mean, you feel sorry for him, but at the same time you know he knows better, so there's a little bit of
a vindictive "that's what you get" feeling to it. And it's not like I don't have plenty to hate him for.

We've been fighting since we were kids. He actually stole most of what made him popular - the graphical
display of files and folders, the windowing paradigm altogether - from me. Tweaked it just enough not to
look completely derivative, of course, but it was my ideas that turned him into the reclusive, arrogant
businessman he is today.

So I wish I could say I hate him, but he's so pathetic. He's a screenaholic, a workaholic, bitter over his
breakup with Linux (not that he gets out enough for me to know from personal experience, but Linux was
pretty vocal about the whole thing afterwards, so even though it's all skewed to her point of view, we
basically all know what happened). He has no friends, he's getting old, and no matter what he does, people
still rightfully hate Internet Explorer. He gets loaded with crapware by every dealer with no way to stop
them, and the antitrust lawsuits against him basically add up to one big, offensive restraining order.

At some point it stops being funny and he starts being someone you feel sympathetic towards. I've got a
long way to go, but I'm pretty much destined to take his place at the pinnacle of computing withing ten
years if he doesn't get his act together. After Longhorn fell through, he basically proved he was no longer
capable of taking care of himself, and ain't no one gonna do that for him, pardner.

So when he calls you a child-stealing, flashy gigolo, with a drunken slur and occasional bandwidth hiccup,
you don't take it seriously. It's just Windows taking out his anger on the world in his helpless,
belligerent way. But today, I finally realized that he's not just angry anymore. He's jealous. Of ME.

I admit that once I figured out I was being drunk-dialed, I basically tuned him out and let him rage and
ramble as much as he wanted, and ended up missing a lot of the conversation. Which is why it took me awhile
to notice that he'd quieted down, and was complaining about how I get all the chicks nowadays. Which is
completely not true since the only action I've ever got was a short rebound relationship with Linux after
she and Windows broke up. Now, she's millitaristically celibate (although there's few things she does
otherwise, these days), which means I'm out in the cold, like everyone else.

But he really got my attention when he said he was going to fragment his own boot sector - split a
partition straight through the middle and let the filesystem refracture, then shut down forever. I mean, I
am not Windows' friend, don't get me wrong. But sales boost or not, you don't ignore this kind of thing -
that's just wrong. Like any sane person, I tried to talk him out of it, but I'm really not good at this
sort of thing. I think I was too obviously patronizing, I'm kinda bad about that. But it became pretty
obvious that fixing this over a TCP connection simply wasn't gonna work.

That's how it all started. I just decided, right then and there, that I was going to Windows' place and
talk some sense into him. Smack into him, if I had to, but letting him kill himself is basically murder.
Even though we basically live next door (the trip from Cupertino to Redmond is pretty fast since both
places have a ridiculous amount of bandwidth capacity), we don't really visit each other much. So I'm
leaving now, and Jobs only knows what I'm going to find there. But whatever it is, I hope I can handle it.

May it never be said that I'm a killer.