The Terminal (June 27, 2021)
He felt a sharp ping arcing through the port just behind his ear. And then, he was instantly there. The Terminal is a dark and cold place, an old piece of technology. “I just hope it doesn’t brick my logger… That would really suck!”, he warned himself. It is a space of 256-colors but mostly a black background, with a blinking grey underscore until one codes it otherwise. Everything in it seems unbelievably familiar.
His logger didn’t record his thoughts while inside the terminal. Crucial for his mission, but almost impossible in the real world. With heightened senses and with some form of relief, he proceeded with what he came here to do.
“The Terminal is an empty shell and has no password to hack into.” Concerned with this finding, he immediately hardcoded his own operating system with a sophisticated compression algorithm that he had to upload to the Terminal’s kernel. He then stored his lifetime’s worth of memories and it barely scratched half a block of its solid-state drive.
“What they said about this ancient piece of tech was true.”, he thought to himself which what one could really only do inside the Terminal. An introvert’s paradise. It is decluttered, detached, and perfect! The Terminal was your own tangible computer which was an illegal piece of technology since everything must be accessed through quantum computing nowadays. It had its own central processing unit and RAM aside from an SSD unit.
“I can get used to spending time in the terminal.” He was happy with the whole experience which no one probably ever did in the past 1,000 years — being detached and being happy.
Mankind is too inefficient so it was time to move on. The logger was installed at birth and was suppose to keep everything aligned. It develops during the embryogenesis of the heart. It sends and receives signals, thousands of teraqubits per millisecond wirelessly from the sinoatrial node of the heart. Where it pings the signal to, nobody knows. It wasn’t from this world or from this dimension. But a few found a way to physically connect to it. And one was able to disconnect from it.
Whatever it was, it made things in harmony with mother nature. There are no borders, no governments, no arguments, and everything in the world was aligned and at peace. Earth will not take another catastrophic event that was always caused by humans. No one knew how or when the logger was mandated. Because of the logger, the world is an Elysium.
For a brief moment, I couldn't connect with him. What drove him to lock himself out of the real world. Was it human nature to disconnect? And most importantly, where did he go to? One cannot have his entire physical being uploaded without pulling out the only tether of his existence.
“This is it!”, he happily thought to himself. “This is the last time I am going to feel the air rushing into my lungs, the wind in my face, and the warmth of the sun”. It was time to transcend. This is what he has trained for all his life.
He executed the pwn-command and just like that, the final upload to the terminal was complete.
His compression algorithm was superb however the terminal can no longer accept data to fulfill his requirements. It was enough to create a 100 square meter room, a bed, a table, a chair, wooden floors, a ceiling, a light bulb, four walls, and a window to the black background.
“This will do.”, was his final thought, and then his logger bricked.
END
The Terminal is an experiment for a “rolling” story. The “rolling” concept was inspired by my experience with Arch Linux. It is a Linux operating system with a rolling distribution where there is the continuous development of its existence. Just like you and me!
I thought that this was an idea that I can implement in my writing. I will write this rolling story as far as I go, and post a new one as often as I can. I will limit it to 500-ish words per distribution. In effect, I hope that enthused readers will keep on checking my Medium account to look for new content.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my first title for this rolling story idea — The Terminal.