Case woke up with a foggy head and a headache. Late night surfing you see. He got out of bed and moved to the kitchen. His moves were mechanical throught everyday repetition. He opens the cooler and takes his beer. Then on to his bedroom to his linux box. On the way there a smile appears in his face on looking forward to the experience. The machine was on (as usual) with an uptime of 122 days. That was when 4.4.0 (stable) kernel was out. He turned on the interface and Alt-F'ed to the 3rd console (his lucky one). Besides he had some tunes in mp4 on the first one running on the foreground. He then took a last look at the old and rusty PII-233 and wore the electrodes.

The interface to /dev/vrt3 (virtual reality terminal) took a little getting used to and to this day he takes a good 2 minutes or so to adjust. The login prompt. He opens his eyes wide open because his eye scanner was a bit old and could get confused some times. He' s offered three choises: root, case, test. "hmmm let' s not get TOO confy", he chose case. The shell took over. It was a wonderfull, warm sensation of protection that the vbash offered. What Case found the most wonderfull was passing signals to the kernel and seeing those blue flashes when he did. It was like he was a friend to the machine.

He first (as always) took a stroll around the ext3fs. Everything perfectly in order. Just like the old days. His files in perfect harmony with 0.01% fragmentation. His favorite place was /proc. He used to have fun cat-ing its files and seeing them creating from nothing into... nothing. You can' t descride that. It' s something you feel. And then... something strange. It was a process that he didn' t recognise. He did a ps -f. The 3d display told him that it ran on the V-server and had a strange alphanumeric name. On to the log files. "Hmmm what have we here. A connection to port 4355 late last night". The numeric IP was 225.34.32.123.12. Strange. He was almost sure but he wanted to be positive about it. He greped his database and there it was. He had hacked into a classified MS NIC server a month ago, and it seems like it worthed the trouble. The IP belonged to a MicroSoft Server in Redmond. "Looks like they' re after me again".

He went passed the deamons to get to the spooler. The interface to the mail deamon looked a lot like vi (the best), in the way that he had to do fairly complex thought in order to use it. But once you got used to it you couldn' t use another, on match its speed. He wrote a v-mail to his buddies at the linux-rebels list. Told them what have happened. And then... on to the net. His financial state was not good (he didn' t like to hack for money) so he didn' t connect to the web during the morning. But this was a special occasion. It was wonderful how you could get from the chaos of your own machine to the unimaginable complexity of the internet.

He immidiately felt like home. When he didn' t have something important to do he used to hack into a Windows54 box just for kicks. He didn' t take pride about it just because it was so easy to do. After all nowadays those M$ products are basically writen by other programs that don' t have a clue about security.

A minute after he got in, 3 packets came, with M$ writen all over them. They tried to do some queries to the machine to see if it's running Windows. Fools. It' s not that hard to emulate the brain-dead Windows responce to those queries. The i-net deamon woke up (making a familiar sound) and spawned to the MS-query-handler that Case wrote himself. Standard operating procedure. But this time something was different. The queries went past the deamon and interfaced with the process on the V-server that I found earlier. "Great... here comes trouble". Case tried to be calm but he knew that you must not play with the V-server or you' re messing with your mind. Case prepared himshelf. He blocked all the ports he didn' t need and loaded up his counter attack. It was basically stuff that he wrote, cause you just can' t trust exploits these days. Many linux hackers ended up working for M$.

And then came the attack from Microsoft Network. Thank god it was slow or that the only thing they could do was flood me. They simply don' t have a clue. They used to treat us like those windows users that you just send a "shutdown" string at the windows echo port and expect to do just that. (That was a feature.. a great one). Well, by the looks of them, they didn' t even know what a string was. But then began the big attack. Their strategy was to keep the machine busy enough. That was obvious. "But why. They jast want to lag me?". He got his answer soon enough. For every packet send to him, Case replied with an exploit he made back in the 30s and hadn' t been patched since. MS-Servers dropped like flies (as Case used to say) but they came up again. And then, the CPU usage went up to 99%. top said it was the process at the V-server. He quickly su'ed to root. It was like everything bacame clearer and he could get anywhere. sigkill only accomplished making the proccess respawn.

And then that burning feeling in his head. It was like he couldn' t think anymore. Everything faded.

A green led in the vr-interface went on. It indicated that the brainwave signals were below ordinary. And then a red led. The signal started a script. It was /home/case/scripts/dead-mans-script. It automatically send the log files to everyone on the linux-rebels list with the tcpdumps and every usefull information preventing the same thing happening again. Then it started flooding the web untill the FBI men came and pluged it out two days after.