The Sys Admin's Song
By Laura E. Campbell

I used to be a Systems Administrator.

I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all. I’ve met the walrus, I’ve met the clams. Hey, I met Cary Elwes, who was angry at the time. The universal user.

I’ve had bugs, all kinds. E.g.1: ants in the mail server. E.g. 2: something wicked in the backup machine. Reboot and things worked exactly once. What was it? Part of the sixth universal plot (you know the other five): the battle between hardware supplier and software vendor.

I stopwatched my life once. Summed loading times and reboot times. Multiplied it out over forty years. You don’t want to know or you’d shoot your p.c.

I don’t have to. I’ve lost myself in Juarez and I’m doing fine. I’ll be here laughing when it all ends because I’m where it won’t matter.

Philip. That’s the word to remember. No, that’s not the word. I’ll give you that later. Philip’s the person to remember, but you don’t actually have to remember him. He’ll do it for you.

Sys admins ultimately go one of two routes. They become disillusioned and blase (guess what I am). Or they become God. Guess what had happened to Philip. He became so godlike he had to go work for a software vender, so he could spread the word (no, not that one). So *he* could spread the word.

We had called the vendor. We had bought. He came to instruct us pagans.

“I am Philip,” he said, coming in our door. No vendor name. No announcement. We treated him as a Help Desk walk-in.

We didn’t know. We were so sorry. We apologized.

See, I used to care.

Dana cared. It’s because she was God too. She’d been God a long time because she knew how to do it beneficently. She also had a horse to support. For many reasons, including those, the Boss chose her to interface with the vendor rep.

Dana met Philip. Philip met Dana. In the manner of the old style sys admins, Philip was sexist. He considered it the natural order of things. He attempted to instruct God, thinking she was a mere woman.

Can you say the word meltdown? (That is not The word. I promised that later, remember.) Dana came close to ripping his ears off.

In the perverse ways of any style sys admin, Philip thought it was love.

If the song had a chorus, this would be it. In pseudo-code:

     begin
     if man loves woma
          then woman loves man
          else man undoes world
     end

Woman did not love man.

The rule is: defeat the enemy through its weakest link. What is a sys admin if not a system’s weakest link. S/he’s flesh. S/he’s blood. S/he’s a wetware brain. I’ve got a brain full of ideas.

Philip had more. He had The Idea: the guard as the virus. The worm that turns. Use sys admins to end the very world they inhabit.

End their world and Dana would get her head out of her machines. She’d come looking for a man. The man. Philip.

He needed a means to infect. A subliminal means to infect, to get past the guarding instinct of the guards.

Philip thought he was God. If nothing else he could write code. It took him a month, but it came out small and elegant, vicious, and unobtrusive. A meme. An infectious idea, a thought that spread and multiples. His: a hidden-in-the-code, spread-out-so-not-to-be-seen infectious thought. Something the normal conscious mind wouldn’t notice, but a sys admin’s subconscious would put together, unknown to him or her. The system meme. A perfect meme.

That’s the word. You have it, now. It won’t do you any good.

The diagnosis is the vector.

Read the code. Read the manual. Go to the webpage. View the source. Hear this song. The meme spreads all these ways, hidden, unbidden, deadly, infecting the admins.

You understand? Of course you do: the sys admins know their systems’ breaking points. The holes. The vulnerability. They’re right there, inside the gates, with the code locked in their brains. Philip will signal. They will touch the right spots. They won’t mean harm, anymore than a virus consciously does, but that won’t matter.

When Philip decides the time has come, throw your ticket out the window. It’ll be all over. Fini. Kaput. Auf weidersehen.

There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you can say. The thought’s already out of the bag.

I’ll be laughing. I’m in Juarez.

You’re not.

The End

Story copyright Laura E. Campbell, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com