The Last Laugh
31st August, 2017
The door flew open before Twoflower got to the second knock. He stared at Rincewind.
Well, not Rincewind. And not Twoflower. By the time either of them had discovered the Discworld Forums, the best user names were long gone.
The door flew open before 2flour got to the second knock. He stared at R1ncewynd_66.
"2flour?"
"R1ncewynd_66?"
The two men laughed and shook hands, then R1ncewynd_66 turned around. "Come on in! Can I get you anything?"
"I'm good, thanks." 2flour closed the door behind him and followed R1ncewynd_66. "Thanks for agreeing to meet so quickly."
R1ncewynd_66 led 2flour into the kitchen, then down the basement steps into what looked like Isaac Asimov's wet dream. He turned to face 2flour and spread his arms wide. "Welcome to command central!"
2flour counted at least six computers spread across the basement. He had never been into computers – he'd just counted a microwave as one by mistake - but he looked around and pretended to be impressed anyway. Then he sensed R1ncewynd_66 still staring at him and remembered what he was there for.
"Oh, right." 2flour put his bag down on a table and unzipped it. "I tried to be careful with it." He pulled a bundle of cut-up towels from his bag and began to unwrap them. "I hope it's not too badly damaged." The towel wrapping fell away, revealing a chewed-up hard drive in his hands.
R1ncewynd_66 knew what the object was, but he gasped in surprise anyway. He took the drive from 2flour and gently turned it around in his hands, looking at it from all angles. "I never thought I'd see it. It's beautiful." He ran a finger across a particularly mangled side, feeling the coarseness of the stressed metal.
2flour coughed awkwardly. He felt like he had to, before R1ncewynd_66 started referring to the thing as his 'precious'. "Is it fixable?"
R1ncewynd_66 carefully placed the broken hard drive on an anti-static mat next to an open computer case, then grabbed a magnifying glass and began to inspect the drive. "It's hard to say." He pulled an overhead lamp over the drive to give him more light. "The case is wrecked, but we can recover the data as long as the disk itself is okay." He switched the lamp off, put the magnifying glass down and sat down in front of the computer keyboard.
"Does it look okay?"
R1ncewynd_66 shrugged. It was impossible to tell from looking – the magnifying glass inspection was an old habit picked up from years of working in IT. People tended to be more impressed (and more likely to tip) if he spent a few minutes looking at faulty hardware with a magnifying glass and tutting before actually doing anything.
"Let's find out." He pulled two wires from inside the computer and pushed them into place in the hard drive's sockets. He switched the PC on, sat down, then pulled a stool from underneath the desk and gestured for 2flour to join him.
"Have you been on the forum recently?"
2flour sat down and shook his head. "I haven't been on since I posted that I had the drive. Too many nasty messages. 'It's not what he wanted', 'you should give it back', 'omg u suxorz', things like that. I don't know what to think. We are going against his final wishes. Do you think they have a point?"
"No." R1ncewynd_66 typed his password into the Windows login screen and crossed his arms as he waited for the desktop to load. "Tell me, what was his final wish?"
"For his hard drive to be crushed by a steamroller."
R1ncewynd_66 pointed at the crushed hard drive – which had started whirring quietly. "Done. Mission accomplished. It's crushed, so we're technically not defying his final wishes. We're just taking data from it afterwards." He opened a command prompt and started typing as he talked. "Besides, it's a clever twist. It's like the widow whose husband demanded to be buried with his riches, so she dropped a cheque into his coffin and kept the money. If he knew that we'd be taking everything from the drive after it was flattened, he'd probably find it funny."
2flour shrugged, then leant closer to the computer monitor to see what was happening.
C:\ Copy D: C:\Restore
"What are you doing?" He asked.
"This is a command prompt," R1ncewynd_66 explained, "and this command should copy everything from the drive into a folder on my computer."
"Oh." 2flour thought about this for a second. "Can't you just open it as a folder?"
R1ncewynd_66 waved his hand. "This way is better." This way was another habit, more impressive to paying customers who were more likely to tip if dazzled by technical wizardry. "Technical reasons." He pressed Enter. The computer responded instantly, and he typed another set of commands before he had to elaborate on the technical reasons.
C:\CD Restore
C:\Restore DIR
Directory of C:\Restore
0 File(s)
R1ncewynd_66 pursed his lips. "Hmm."
"What's wrong?"
R1ncewynd_66 closed the console prompt and opened a Windows folder, just to be sure. He was presented with the same thing – an empty folder. "There are no files on the drive."
"Oh." 2flour's heart sank.
"They probably deleted the files before flattening it."
"Is that it then?"
"No." R1ncewynd_66 opened another command prompt. "It's just going to take more time."
C:\ CD RecoverySoft
C:\RecoverySoft\
R1ncewynd_66's recovery program opened. He selected the wrecked hard drive and pressed Run. The drive whirred into life again. R1ncewynd_66 smiled and patted it.
"If there's anything on the drive, this will find it."
"I thought the files were deleted?"
R1ncewynd_66 leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "They are, but deleted files can be undeleted." 2flour still looked puzzled, so R1ncewynd_66 reached over to his bookcase and removed a tattered old book. He released two bulldog clips running along the spine – all that were holding the pages together – and handed it to 2flour. "When you want to find a chapter in a book, you use the table of contents. Right?" 2flour nodded. "A hard drive does the same thing. You ask for a file, the drive checks the table of contents, finds out where the file is on the disk and opens it. With me so far?"
"Yes, so far." 2flour replied.
"Good. When you ask the drive to delete a file, it doesn't actually remove the file. It removes the entry from the table of contents. Then, as far as the hard drive is aware, the pages that the chapter was on are empty."
"Okay. The files are still there, but the drive thinks it's just blank space?"
"That's right. Just like that book. There's no table of contents, but we can go through the book page by page, find out where each chapter starts, then write our own. That's basically what we're doing with the drive."
2flour turned the book over and looked at the cover. "Only You Can Save Mankind."
R1ncewynd_66 smiled. "If not you, who else? Ninth birthday present. My dad thought playing video games for ten hours a day wasn't healthy. The obvious compromise was to buy me a book about video games."
"Did it work?"
"I guess so. I cut down to five hours a day." R1ncewynd_66 snorted. "It cost my parents a small fortune when I discovered Discworld. Then the Discworld games came out and I went back to about seven hours a day."
2flour thumbed through the pages. "If the hard drive sees nothing but blank space, could it write new files over the old ones?"
"Sometimes." R1ncewynd_66 replied. "If other files are saved to the drive, the space might be re-used. Or if they do something called a low-level format, the drive will be completely empty. We'll just have to..."
R1ncewynd_66's computer pinged and a new screen popped up. Both men looked at the screen.
Scan complete. Found 536,798 files, 58,569 folders.
Restore? (Y/N)
R1ncewynd_66 grinned. "We have it."
"That's a lot more files than I expected."
"It's everything from the drive. Whoever had the drive just selected everything and pressed Delete. The unfinished novels are in there somewhere." He pressed the Y key to begin the restore, set the program to copy all the files to his own computer, then stood up. "It's going to take a while. Tea?"
"I have to ask, 2flour. How did you get your hands on the drive?"
2flour sipped his tea then put it down on the kitchen counter – it was still too hot. "It was just down to luck, really. A few of us on the forums tried to figure out when the hard drive was going to be flattened. I'm just down the road from where they have the Great Dorset Steam Fair-"
"You came all this way from Dorset?"
2flour nodded. "And what better place to find a steamroller? I decided to have a look around."
"A bit of a long shot."
"I walked around for a few hours, tired myself out. So I found a fast food van and sat down with a hot dog and a cup of tea. I checked my phone, looked at Twitter by chance, and found a tweet from Rob Wilkins."
"Pratchett's assistant?"
"That's him. He said he was about to 'fulfill an obligation' or something. And he attached a photo of the hard drive," 2flour paused for effect, "with a steamroller in the background."
R1ncewynd_66 gasped. "What did you do?"
"Burnt my throat trying to down my tea, then gave up and threw it away. Then ran for the steamroller – luckily I recognised it from earlier, and I knew where it was. Oh, did I mention my hard drive?" R1ncewynd_66 shook his head. "Well, I realised that if I just stole the drive, somebody would realise it was missing. The police would be called, there was a chance I'd be caught, and even if I wasn't I'd be denying everybody any closure on the story. I thought I should at least let people think the drive had been destroyed. So before I went to the steam fair, I took my own computer apart. And I don't know computers at all – I had to put it back together twice so I could Google and see what the hard drive looked like."
"Why didn't you just look on your phone?"
"I...oh." 2flour shrugged. "Hindsight. Anyway, I took the hard drive out of my own computer and took it with me. I ran to the steamroller, but I was too late – the drive had already been flattened."
"What did you do?"
"I dropped my own hard drive on the ground, then I stamped on it. Then I jumped on it several times. And I picked it up and hit it against another steamroller – luckily the engines on those things are loud, nobody watching the real drive getting flattened noticed me."
"You destroyed your own drive?"
"A worthy sacrifice. Then when Rob picked the real hard drive up from the ground, I walked over and bumped into him. Clipped his arm with my elbow so he dropped the drive. I apologised, picked the drive up for him..."
"You swapped the drives?"
2flour grinned. "Nobody noticed. He even apologised to me, said it was 'entirely my fault, chap'. And the weirdest thing happened."
"What?"
"He smiled at me."
"Oh. I'd heard that smiling at strangers is a criminal offence in the South."
2flour shook his head. "We just say that to keep the Northerners away. But seriously, the way he apologised and smiled, it was like he knew what was happening. Then he turned back around and told them to go over the drive – my drive - again. It's almost like he knew."
"Maybe he wanted you to take it."
"Maybe." 2flour picked his coffee cup back up. "Maybe it's like you said. They expected somebody to take the drive, and they thought it was a fitting twist to the story."
An hour later...
A loud ping came from the basement. R1ncewynd_66 looked over his handful of cards at the basement doorway, then at 2flour. "It's finished."
They threw their cards all over the kitchen counter – neither of them really knew how to play Magic The Gathering anyway - bounded down the basement steps and sat back at R1ncewynd_66's computer. All files restored!, the restore program said – complete with a smiley face icon in case anybody was still in doubt that the program's user interface hadn't been redesigned since the early 90s.
"That's it!" R1ncewynd_66 laughed and clapped. "We've done it!"
"The files are okay?"
"All restored and saved on my computer!" R1ncewynd_66 opened an explorer window and navigated to the restore folder.
"It might take time to sift through all the files, but they're here! We've done it! We...wait."
The restore folder contained files, but even 2flour could see that something was wrong. "They all have the same name."
"Lastlaugh_1, Lastlaugh_2, Lastlaugh_3..." R1ncewynd_66 scrolled to the bottom and checked the last file. "Lastlaugh_187653. They're all the same file. Same creation date, same file size, just a different number."
"But that means..."
"All the files have been overwritten. Every single file on the drive has been replaced." R1ncewynd_66 looked at 2flour. "Somebody deleted all the files on the drive, then copied this file enough times to fill the drive up."
2flour opened his mouth to speak. He was silent for seconds, dumbfounded, until he finally thought of something suitably dumb to say. "The icon looks like a roll of film."
"It's a video file." R1ncewynd_66 replied. He double-clicked one of the files.
A media player window appeared and the video began to play. It showed a room with a desk, computer and chair. The computer screen was close enough to read the file names on the desktop.
A figure stepped into the shot from the right. Keeping his back to the camera, he sat in the chair. He took his hat off, rested it on the computer desk and grabbed the computer mouse. He opened a folder on the desktop, then clicked another folder. He looked back at the camera to make sure he wasn't blocking the view. R1ncewynd_66 and 2flour moved closer and read the name of the folder - "Unfinished Writing".
The figure clicked on the folder again and a menu popped up. He moved the mouse so that the cursor hovered over the Delete option, paused for effect, then clicked again.
Are you sure you want to permanently delete this folder?
Yes / No
R1ncewynd_66 and 2flour gasped in unison.
The figure clicked Yes.
The folder disappeared forever.
The figure picked his hat back up, placed it on his head and spun the chair around to face the camera. He adjusted his glasses, stroked his white beard and smiled.
His smile turned into a chuckle.
Then his chuckle turned into a laugh.
The man pointed at the camera, roaring with laughter for half a minute. He guffawed one last time, then turned the camera off. The screen went black.
R1ncewynd_66 and 2flour looked at each other, both open-mouthed with surprise. 2Flour was the first to speak.
"That's the twist to the tale. After all this, he got the last laugh."
R1ncewynd_66 nodded, still in shock. "What a legend. Another tea?"