She looked at the DM again, on her primary laptop. The listing message was in the format of the response she would have expected from a command asking about a directory structure on a server. World and usr were directories. She had been asking to list the contents of a directory on her own machine. She had Tweeted by accident to someone or something only following her, and got a private reply of a directory listing.
“Cool!” She remarked to the screen as if it was a person.
Something told her to leave it alone, forget it and move on. That something was that annoying little regulator in her head. It was her inner voice that sought peace and stability. It was always wrong as far as she was concerned. She replied to the DM. She thought she could risk that. She clicked again to ensure the direct message reply box had focus. She didn’t want to look even more ridiculous by accidentally typing another command to all and sundry again.
“cd World” Went off to @raykonfigure.
The reply came back almost straight away.
@rayKonfigure
World
She typed ‘ls’ again deciding against the -l, just the short version this time please. Roisin was too eager to understand the structure and didn’t need the full details. She did not want to swamp the Twitter client either. This was not an encrypted SSH tunnel to a machine she was supposed to have access too. She was hacking, by invitation, but on a public channel. Another memory flowed past of a green screen and the phrase ‘Shall we play a game?’ It was part of a nagging worry in her thoughts.
She was being a little careful. A sys op at Twitter, or anyone with the right clearance might see what she was up to. A daydream fabrication arose of a shady world, wheels within wheels. It was just a buzz to act all ‘secret agent’. Roisin was not a ‘l33t h4x0r’. Of course, if this turned out to be something military, she might have to consider herself as one? She may have to brush up on how to obfuscate her words. Replacing elite with l33t and hacker with h4x0r was a way to mess up monitoring software, when talking to other like minded people. It was no good on a CLI to a computer system, it needed precision, absolute accuracy. The message came back to Roisin’s screen.
@rayKonfigure
Elements
Compounds
Objects
“OK?” That gave her something to think about. She considered that she must be in a game developers system? Or it might even be a very clever game she is being invited to test? If by clever, they mean pretending to be a directory system on Linux or Unix! A Jurassic Park flashback hit Roisin. ‘Hey I know this system!’ Except, she wasn’t going to be getting lots of fancy graphics and be able to turn the park off and on again. Nope, she was on a CLI attached to a messaging system. Almost like being on those old Teletypes. History repeating itself? She continued her interrogation of the remote system.
“cd Elements”
It responded.
@rayKonfigure
Elements
Roisin wandered deeper into the remote structure.
“ls”
A longer reply came back.
@rayKonfigure
H
He
Li
Be
B
C
N
O
F
Ne
Na
Mg
…
That will be the periodic table of elements then? She knew most of them but certainly not enough to recite the Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium song. It’s no big deal just having a list of Elements in a directory. If this is some sort of game or virtual world it might be doing a Minecraft style approach to resources, she thought. Time to go back up the structure. She typed.
“cd ..”
The response was consistent, back to the World directory.
@rayKonfigure
World
“Let’s try the Objects directory.” She spoke quietly to her fingers as they typed.
“cd Objects”
The command again behaved as expected and returned.
@rayKonfigure
Objects
“Show me what you have in here then, Mr Game Dev.” She was on a roll and was expecting good things from the next list.
“ls”
Just as quickly as before it returned.
@rayKonfigure
Bookshelf
Ceiling
Chair
ComputerDevice1
ComputerDevice2
Door
Doorway
Floor
Human
Phone
Mug
Power
Printer
Table
Wall1
Wall2
Wall3
Wall4
Window
Roisin thought she must be in an homage to an old command line adventure game. It made sense to go retro? A lot of games were exploring pixel art or text to counteract the AAA gore-fest of the console first person shooters. They were all good, games were definitely good. Roisin liked games. She preferred the free roaming, solve it how you like, approach in game design. It gave her a chance to be creative, clever, funny or just let loose some inner frustration! This directory structure happened to be the same as a good old fashioned style adventure. Roisin imagined it said, ‘You are sat in a room on a chair. In front of you on a desk are two computers and a printer. An empty mug sits to your right.’ Yes, that felt a very comfortable description, a meta description of the directory structure she saw in the DM. It was slightly too comfortable, as she shuddered with Déjà vu. She was sitting with an empty mug! She was at a desk with two computers! Roisin looked around the room, was this a stalker joke? Paranoia sets in really quickly when you are tired, and she was very tired! She had expended an awful lot of energy in her earlier Flow coding session. No, this was a coincidence? Most geeks have a couple of machines and an eternally empty mug of coffee. As for a desk and a chair? They are clearly not part of the trendy walking/standing desk brigade, they are very common. Office chairs are essential for a power slump. The sort of power slump most techies do. When you just can’t figure something out, even in Flow mode, you can sink down into a chair lower and lower until you are almost horizontal, pushing against the chair’s springing back support. Roisin had no idea how or why this worked, but it did. Probably going horizontal and changing the blood flow broke a mental block. You could then spring back up with a Eureka, like Archimedes jumping out of his bath, a problem mentally solved. Roisin assumed the slumped position. 3, 2, 1, nothing! She slowly got back to her normal hunched typing position and decided to plod on.
Dancing around directories is one thing, but if this was an adventure game just knowing the World structure wasn’t going to get her far. She wondered if there were any extra commands she might have available. She sent a DM out with the command.
“man”
That infuriating abbreviation of manual that makes it seem like you have to ask a man for help! That annoyed her. There was a lot of that sort of thing in the industry, less so than a few years ago. Rather like the ancient CLI concept she was having to use the underlying operating systems from a while ago too, and their antiquated legacy commands.
The reply came back.
@rayKonfigure
What manual page do you want?
Progress? She had asked a question and got a response. This was not some sort of Eliza style artificial intelligence, just a text string that gets pushed out if there are no parameters to the manual request. Just to cheer herself up a bit and get past having to ask something labelled ‘man’ she typed.
“man help”
This command she knew did not work. The parameter help did not ever lead to anything on a normal system. The returning message amused her as always.
@rayKonfigure
No help for man
There, this was a normal system after all. She pulled a big grin to emulate a text ‘:)’ OK! Time to try something else that we know works, she thought.
“man ls”
The manual page for the listing command appeared. It was almost identical to every version she had ever seen.
@rayKonfigure
LS(1) General Commands Manual LS(1)
NAME
ls
-- list directory contents
SYNOPSIS
ls [[email protected]] [
file
...
]
DESCRIPTION
For each operand that names a
file
of a type other than directory,
ls
displays its name as well as any requested, associated information. For each operand that names a
file
of type directory,
ls
displays the names of files contained within that directory, as well as any requested, associated information.
If no operands are given, the contents of the current directory are displayed. If more than one operand is given, non-directory operands are displayed first; directory and non-directory operands are sorted separately and in lexicographical order.
The following options are available:
:
Now that was promising, but now is where things might get tricky. Terminal systems don’t just send everything in one go. The old terminals didn’t have a scroll bar. Instead, they sent a screen at a time and you had to hit a next key. The ‘:’ Roisin saw at the end of the message acted as a ‘there’s more’ button. She knew that she might get stuck in the manual. CLI’s, bless ‘em, often need a magic keystroke like Ctrl-C to break out of what they are doing. If she issued the wrong command she might lock up this interface. This was not a direct connection to a terminal. She was one step away from a direct connection. It was being mediated by the text messaging of Twitter. Web browsers and their protocols don’t always like special characters, like Ctrl-C. She may not be able to send the character or create an escape sequence to send one. Escape sequences are designed to tell things to ignore what they see on the way through. If she had no way to send the right message there would be no more responses from the other end. Luckily with man it just needs a Q being sent to quit, usually. Roisin sent one off in a DM.
“q”
“Phew!” She puffed out with relief. She had not cut herself off. She would have to be careful what she asked in future.
@rayKonfigure
.
She threw caution to the wind. If this was a game it needed a list of actions for it, not just the magic incantations of a Linux system. She sent her next direct message.
“man actions”
Another smirk and chuckle at the innuendo came from Roisin. Closely followed by a response from the other end.
@rayKonfigure
Actions available
Attach
Detach
Examine
Join
Load
Save
Split
Translate
Transform
Zone
Bingo! That’s more like it! Seeing those few words made it look even more like a game dev system. Being able to Attach (pick up), Detach (drop) objects is so very game like. Load and Save, yes! Join and Split looked like crafting of some sort. Translate usually means move position, and Transform, generally referred to rotation and size alterations. Zone? That could be a grouping area or some such thing. Maybe a network sharding for a multiplayer server? Examine will be metadata descriptions, she thought. This looked exciting, she might as well start messing with the environment a bit now. She role played what the text adventure might have shown her.
“You see a mug on the desk.” She added to her inner dialogue. Then she typed.
“Translate Mug”
She got a reply.
@rayKonfigure
Invalid parameters unable to “Translate Mug” Relative(default)/-R
Of course, you can’t just say move mug in a game you have to move it somewhere, or in this case by some amount. X is right and left, y is back and forward, z is usually up down in the air. Every coordinate system is pretty much the same in 3D space. With excited abandon she typed.
“Translate Mug -1,0,0”
This should keep the y and z the same and just move left or right depending on the direction and ordinal values of the coords system. That’s how things generally would work either building or playing a game.
The reply came back.
@rayKonfigure
Applying Translate Mug -1,0,0
She wasn’t expecting to see a positive text response, but just hoped for one. She was definitely not expecting to see, out of the corner of her eye to the right a slight flash, and another to her left. She blinked, she was tired. Eyes and brains do things to one another when they need to shutdown for the night. She looked right, all was ok, she looked left and just saw her mug sat on the keyboard of her other computer. A MUG ON A KEYBOARD! She must have been getting tired. She never let even empty mugs near keyboards, well not since that one time when…
“HOLY CRAP ! I just, no, I couldn’t have. This is. No!” Her inner dialogue was fritzing out. Tiredness and shock worked together on her. Surely that hadn’t just happened? No! Her adrenalin levels were bouncing, she was sweating. “Keep calm.” She issued the command to her own internal systems. Just like any code test she needed to double check and recreate the result. Roisin decided to try again just to see if she was sane or not. She did talk to herself a great deal, but then who doesn’t, “It's a sign of genius.” She said to herself calmingly. Roisin guessed the units on the command were meters. She planned to move the mug just 15 cm backwards. It was currently resting, half on the keys, half on the trackpad of machine number two. If it ended up covering any of the top row of numbers on the keyboard, she would know it had moved. She typed, altering just the y value, using the minus sign to ask for a move backwards.
“Translate Mug 0,-0.15,0”
She looked directly at the mug as she hit enter. Nothing happened, no light, no flash, no mug movement. Clearly she was just going mad. No flying mugs here then. She turned to the Twitter DM screen to see a response.