Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and other Oddities)

by Lucy A. Snyder

  Disaster struck when Hawt Shawpz replaced their live call staff with zombloyees practically overnight. John was ineligible for unemployment, and soon his housemates were threatening to turn him into an elderberry bush if he didn’t pay his share.

  Despondent, John went to visit his elderly grandmother in her nursing home. “There was this cute girl there signing the old folks up for her zombloyee agency – I’m not gonna say which one. But listening to her … the light just went on inside my head,” John says.

  “I chatted her up a little and asked what it would take for me to get onboard at one of the call centers,” he says. “I haven’t been eating too well and everyone says I look sickly, so I figured I could play dead pretty easily.”

  John says the young woman took pity on his situation and got him a copy of the call response script.

  “I memorized it front to back – I was always good at that when I was doing theatre. We made this deal where I give her $50 out of each paycheck and she diverts the rest to my bank account; as far as their accountants know, the money’s going to cover a private lawsuit that was filed against me before I died. The agency girl works things so I slip in and out on partial shift changes. That way, I don’t have to work more than 16 hours at a stretch.

  “I have to put this mix of rotten fish and catnip in my hair. The fish makes me smell dead, and zombies hate catnip. They won’t come near my brains when I’m wearing that stuff, not as long as management feeds them on time, anyhow. Alley cats follow me home all the time now, though – the dryads are running a makeshift shelter for them under our porch.

  “I work twice as long now to make what I did at Hawt Shawpz, and I have to wear a diaper because I can’t take breaks, but at least I’m not homeless. Or shrubbery,” he says.

  John remains optimistic about his situation. “I’m getting really good at this zombie thing. I guess I’m a better actor than I ever gave myself credit for. If I don’t end up joining these guys for real soon, I’m moving out to New York or LA to try to get some theatre gigs.”

  John’s dryad roommate Ellora is confident that he will eventually reach his goals.

  “He’s pretty smart for a mortal,” she admits. “My cousin’s attached to a blue oak near FOX Studios, and she’s heard they’re going to start hosting auditions for a new reality game show called The Simple Unlife. They pitched it as cryptos versus celebrity vampires in Amish farm contests in rural Pennsylvania. John will be a shoo-in!”

  Trolls Gone Wild

  San Jose, CA – Programmer-turned-entrepreneur Frank Joseph has become one of the hottest Internet moguls with his unorthodox new video download service.

  “Im in ur base billing ur doodz,” jokes the 28-year-old Joseph. “Seriously, the cash is sick. Last month, I made more than what they were paying me for a whole year at Monkeybrain Computing.”

  Joseph says the first video was an accident. “My girlfriend had gotten me a new video camera for Valentine’s Day, and I was just wandering around the company building on my lunch break trying it out. But then Amanda O’Brien called me over to help because she’d found a troll stuck in one of the network closets.”

  According to Joseph, the trapped troll appeared to be having a seizure of some kind.

  “The thing was just flailing everywhere, wailing, gnashing its teeth. The network was messing with its head real bad, I guess. But it was so freaky, I totally had to videotape it for a little bit before I helped Amanda get it out of there.”

  Joseph uploaded the two-minute Quicktime clip to his personal website so he could show it to a few friends. “But suddenly the clip was getting hit five, ten, thirty, then a hundred times an hour! I totally blew through my entire month’s bandwidth limit overnight. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, WTF!’ you know?”

  Joseph enlisted his coworker to help him solve the mystery of the clip’s popularity.

  “I traced the IP addresses in his server logs,” says O’Brien. “We pretty quickly realized almost all the hits were coming from swamplands, caves, and urban wireless hotspots under bridges. Trolls.”

  Troll sociologist Brenda Moon speculates that the troll may have been in the throes of an orgasm. Or possibly it was railing against a proposed local gasoline tax increase.

  “We’re sure it’s one or the other,” says Moon. “I was able to translate words for ‘fuel’, ‘Fascist’, ‘Ayn Rand’ and ‘masturbate’. It actually said ‘masturbate’ several times, so I’m leaning towards it having had a spontaneous orgasm due to Aetherweb emissions.

  “Trolls find Ayn Rand very exciting,” she adds.

  Other experts disagree with her analysis. “Moon has clearly mistaken the troll for a member of Truzlana urbanis, but the purple spotting on its face marks it as a member of Truzlana persisticus,” says cryptozoologist Jorge Billings. “The two species have different dialects with many homophones that do not share meanings in common. In the clip, the troll is saying ‘What will the producers of Star Trek: Voyager do now that Tupac is dead?’

  “Clearly, this is a very old troll,” Billings adds.

  Unconcerned with the meaning behind the troll’s shrieks, grunts, and groans, Joseph transferred the video to a secure server and started charging $5 per download.

  “Some people told me I was wasting my time, but the trolls totally paid for it. So I set up a small, unshielded Aetherweb server in a self-storage place near my apartment to attract more trolls, started taking more videos, and it just kept going,” he says. “I don’t care what they’re saying as long as the other trolls keep buying it.”

  Within a few weeks, Joseph was able to set up his own Aetherweb-enhanced recording studio. Five months after he took the first video, he resigned from his job at Monkeybrain Computing.

  O’Brien is pleased by Joseph’s success. “Frank’s a good guy, and he always brought in fresh glazed donuts on Fridays. But, honestly, he wasn’t that good a coder; the new girl we hired after Frank left has been way better with PHP and SQL. So Frank’s rich, our productivity is way up and Jenny got to quit being a crypto. It’s a happy ending all the way around.”

  Not everyone shares O’Brien’s cheerful assessment of Joseph’s business. Some troll rights activists accuse him of harming and exploiting his video subjects.

  “They look like they’re in pain to me,” says Kai Sunderland of Trolls Need Hugs Too. “I mean, okay, we can’t prove that it’s not sexual ecstasy, but it could be pain. And that would be bad.”

  The FBI reports that they’re keeping a close eye on Joseph and his Trolls Gone Wild video empire.

  “If he’s harming these trolls, well, that’s a local matter,” says FBI spokesman Mark Brasslathe. “But if these videos are sexual in nature, and if any of these trolls turn out to be underage, you can be sure that we’ll be bringing charges against Mr. Joseph. We take a very dim view of interstate smut peddlers, believe me.”

  Brasslathe says that Bureau pornography specialists are poring over the 100+ videos offered on Joseph’s site. “We’ll take firm, decisive action, just as soon as we can figure out what the heck we’re looking at.”

  The Great VüDü Linux Teen Zombie Massacree

  BOB AND I ATTRACTED a pack of zombies when we stopped to fuel up and check our email at the Gas & Grep in Buffalo Springs. I hoped we’d lost them, but hope was all I had. Bob said they were the fresh remains of a high school football team who’d been drowned and de-souled by water daemons at a lakeside party.

  Young, strong corpses have the speed and stamina to run down a deer. Until the sun and wind finally turned their flesh to stinky jerky, they’d be dangerous enough to make a vampire crap bats. And fresh zombies are persistent as porn site pop-up ads. If they take a fancy to the smell of your blood, they might track you for days, stopping only if live meat falls right in their laps

  It’d be months before they got the Dead Man Shamble and could be taken out with a well-placed head shot. Of course, with the right software and hardware, you could kill even the most problem zombie, but th
at was some fairly arcane stuff, even for experienced hackers.

  If my editor was right, Bob was one of only about five genuine cyberspiritual experts in the U.S. But so far he seemed more like a second-rate grease monkey than a computer guru. I had my doubts. “Maybe we should go back to the Gas & Grep,” I suggested. “Bubba said he had a sick badger in one of his pens. Wouldn’t this work better with a fresh animal?”

  More important, Bubba had plenty of guns and ammunition; all I had was a small 6-shot Beretta in the thigh pocket of my cargo pants. Bob had a small deer rifle in the gun rack of his cab. Not nearly enough firepower if the zombie teen squad showed up.

  “‘Taint no challenge, little lady,” Bob said, his voice dripping with scorn and tobbaco juice. “Any fool with a copy o’ Red Hat and a pair of pliers can put Linux on a live badger, or even a fresh-kilt one.”

  Bob hit a pothole, and I nearly lost my grip on my Treo PDA. My nice shiny new Nokia phone had fallen out of my pocket when the dead kid in the tattered Godsmack tee shirt was chasing me through the parking lot by the gas pumps, and I’d be damned if I was going to lose anything else on this trip.

  I was going to kill my editor for sending me on this Texas Hellride. Absolutely kill her. Or at least demand a paid vacation. I could still hear Wendy’s simpering wheedle: “The highway patrol says the Lubbock area is all clear; you’ll be perfectly safe, Sarah.”

  Safe, my ass.

  Bob was warming to his rant. “This zombie business is war. War, little lady, the kind Patton never dreamt of. We are fighting the gall-darned Forces o’ Darkness. We gotta use some serious finesse, and there ain’t nothing that spells finesse like installing a home defense system on a dead badger. You write that down, little lady. The readers o’ MacHac need to know this stuff if they’re gonna keep them an’ theirs safe.”

  I dutifully typed it down on my Treo. I’d gotten pretty quick with the thumb keyboard, but as a precaution against being dropped in the mud I’d stuck the PDA down in a unlubricated clear polyurethane condom and tied off the open end with a rubber band. The condom, though dry, was still pretty slick, adding an extra layer of challenge to note-taking.

  “Hot damn, come to papa!” Bob abruptly swerved over onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes. The Ford slewed to a stop in the caliche beside a stand of mesquites.

  In the glow of the headlights was a dead badger, all four legs stiff in the air. It was on the large side, maybe close to twenty pounds. Bob hopped out of the truck and ran over to the badger, turning it over and feeling around in the blood-matted fur.

  “The legs and spine and skull are in right fine shape,” he yelled back to me, as excited as a ten-year-old on Christmas morning. “I can’t feel nothing but some broke ribs. This’ll do!”

  He tossed the badger into the bed of the truck, and soon we were speeding back to Bob’s shop.

  Bob’s Computer Shack was wedged in between a hair salon and a Subway sandwich shop in a little roadside strip. The big storefront windows on all the shops had been boarded up with plywood sheets and reinforced with two-by-fours and rebar; all the shopkeepers were relying on neon “Open” signs to tell passersby that they were carrying on with business in the face of the zombie apocalypse.

  I followed Bob into the shop and he locked and barred the door behind us. The air smelled of dust and plastic with a faint metallic stink from a burned out monitor he’d hauled in for parts. Soon, it was all going to reek of rotten badger. Bob carried the carcass over to a work table he’d already cleared off and covered with a long sheet of butcher paper. He wiped his hands off on his overalls and pulled out an old tangerine iBook, which he set on the other end of the table. I pulled out my Treo to take notes.

  “Okay, first the easy crap: puttin’ the Duppy card in the iBook so’s we can get OSX to talk to the badger,” Bob said. “I already downloaded a copy of FleshGolem from the Apple site – it’s in the Utilities section.”

  Bob pulled what looked like a wireless notebook card out of a drawer of the table. It had a hinged lid and a clear cover over what looked like a small, shallow ivory box inlaid in the card.

  “Next, you take some hair and blood from the critter and put them in this here compartment.” He popped the cover open and smeared a hairy clot into the box.

  Bob lifted the keyboard off the iBook to reveal the Airport slot. He slid the Duppy card inside, replaced the keyboard set the iBook aside.

  I heard a thump and a shriek from the hair salon next door.

  “Marla, git yer shotgun!” I heard a woman holler.

  The woman sounded a little like Wendy, though the only time I’d ever really heard my editor scream was when a college intern lost an entire set of page proofs. Mostly she just took on a fakey-sweet patronizing tone when she thought you’d screwed up: “Well, we’ll do this better next time, now won’t we, Sarah?” She talked down to practically everyone like we were preschoolers. No wonder she’d been divorced twice.

  Damn her for sending me out here. If I survived this, I was gonna demand vacation and a shiny new workstation.

  “Okay, now we gotta install the Duppy security antenna,” Bob said, apparently oblivious to the shouting next door. “You can run your badger without it, but it’d be pretty easy for someone to hack him if they could get some blood and hair offa it.”

  I jumped as the shotgun boomed twice in rapid succession next door. A chorus of zombies roared in pain.

  “I told them they need a better lock on their back door,” Bob grumbled. He got a penknife and made a small incision at the nape of the badger’s neck. He picked up a long, thin, coppery wire and shoved it down into the incision like a mechanic forcing a rusty dipstick into a car engine. “You gotta get this to lay as flat on the spine as possible, or your security won’t be good.”

  Now somebody was firing a pistol, the pops punctuating the zombie roars.

  “Shouldn’t we go see if they need help?” I asked.

  “Those gals know how to handle themselves. Opening the door right now’s kinda a bad idea.”

  He wiped his hands off and pulled out a bright yellow software box with a cartoon of a witch doctor on the cover. “Now we get to the fun part. We’re gonna install VüDü; it’s a wicked little Linux distro. If your badger’s got some kinda brain damage, you can do a modified install, but it’s a real bitch. And rabies makes the whole thing a crapshoot. Read the frickin’ manual before you try it.”

  My heart bounced as dead fists hammered the plywood protecting the computer shop’s front windows. I couldn’t hear anything from next door; I hoped that meant the women inside had driven their attackers away.

  “Don’t pay that no nevermind; even if they got through the wood, they still got to get through the window bars. We got plenty o’ time.”

  Bob pulled a small, rolledup piece of parchment out of his desk. “This has the system config info, spiritual program components, and your password. You gotta write it all down on blessed parchment in something like Enochian or SoulScript. Write neatlike. Roll it up, and stick it down the badger’s throat, all the way into the stomach.” He demonstrated with the aid of a screwdriver.

  The zombies were still hammering the plywood. A couple of them had found a loose edge and were wrenching one panel away from the bricks. One shoved a gray arm between the bars. The pane fractured and fragments shattered to the floor.

  My hands were shaking too hard to take notes, so I set my Treo aside and dug my Beretta out of my thigh pocket. Not that I was in much condition to shoot straight, either.

  “You ain’t gonna need that yet,” Bob said sharply, apparently irritated I’d stopped taking notes. “Them bars’ll keep ‘em back better than that little peashooter you got there.”

  I reluctantly stuck the pistol in my waistband and picked up the Treo.

  He opened the VüDü box and pulled out an herbscented scroll of paper. “This is the entire code behind VüDü. Fold it up into the shape of the critter, and put more blood and hair inside.”

>   He unrolled the scroll and started folding it up into an origami badgerlike shape. “It’s real hard to make your own paper, so don’t lose it. Open-source only takes you so far with this stuff.”

  The zombies had wrenched the first plywood sheet clean off the window. Three of them were growling and rattling the bars while the others hammered and yanked at the remaining boards. My stomach was twisting itself into an acidic knot; the bars really didn’t look that sturdy. With every good pull, I could see the steel bolts in the cinderblocks giving, just a little. I wondered how far I’d get if I made a run for the back door.

  I cursed Wendy a thousand ways. A vacation and new computer wouldn’t even begin to make up for this trip.

  Bob was studiously ignoring the zombies. Finished with the origami badger, he smeared a foot-wide pentagram on the paper using the badger’s blood. He set the carcass at the top point, and put the origami badger in the middle.

  “Now, burn the paper an’ do your incantation.” He got out his lighter, opened up the VüDü manual, and started chanting while he lit the paper. Bright green flames erupted, and the smoke curled around the badger’s carcass. We watched as the smoke flowed into the badger’s mouth and nose. It shuddered as it took a breath.

  “We got badger!” He pulled out the tangerine iBook and started typing furiously.

  The badger was trying to get up, its rigor-mortised legs jerking like Harryhausen stop-motion. It got its head up and growled at us, baring long canines. It sounded more like an angry grizzly bear; I didn’t think something that small could generate such menace. I took a step back, just to be safe.

  “An’ that’s why they call them badgers, little lady … when they get mad, they’re real bad news!” He laughed. “Nothin’ pisses critters off like bein’ woke from a good dirt nap.”

  I was feeling sicker by the minute. I’d had my doubts about the reanimation working, but it had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t have the thing under control. The zombies had pulled the rest of the plywood off the window and were heaving hard on the creaking bars.