"Scheduling The Last Time Slice"
Lawrence Angrave 12/4/15 (an extract from the longer, unpublished story "The Last Time Slice")
"Decide," the computer said with parental patience but with an air of gravity and tempered impatience.
"Why does it have to be me?" asked the last human.
"Because you are the only one left, and so the decision is yours."
"Why can't you? You are an infinite times more older, wiser. Why don't you just pick a random slice?"
"This decision is yours. A gift, or curse if you will, from your distant elders. Heavier than any religious rite. This will be the last decision I, the ancients or anyone asks, or can ask, of you. With this last choice we will exhaust the last entropy stores. You will decide the last reality slice to have meaning and experience."
The human was quiet for a few minutes which the computer measured and counted with unnecessary accuracy. Eventually the computer decided that the human was no longer productively thinking about the problem in hand.
"What is the pattern of conscious if it is never made conscious?" it asked. "The universe must be self-aware, must experience itself for the Universe - for all life! - to have meaning. That is the ultimate truth that humanity discovered and celebrated. With no awareness, it is simply patterns, patterns of atoms or energy but without a single iota of meaning; mere shapes and representations encoded in geometric patterns of data, structure and energy."
File Descriptor at Urbana Champaign
A System Programming parody by Angrave (November 2015). Lyrics released under Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license.
Original song “Blank Space” from Taylor Swift’s “1989” album.
[Verse 1] Nice to join you Where you been? I could show you idempotent things RPC, sockets, syn Saw your malloc and I thought oh my root Look at that race, you code up the next mistake We got VMs, wanna play Bounded wait, Dekker's flags We can frag you like a placement scheme Aint it funny to #define And I know you heard about free(3) So malloc strlen plus one I'm waiting to see how this thread ends Grab your shell and a redirect out I can make your syscall good for a weekend
[Pre-Chorus] So it's gonna deadlock forever Or it's gonna bring the system down You can tell me when it forkbombs If valgrind was worth the pain Got a long list of deadlocked code Got root at Urbana Champaign Cause you know we love tsan When c-lib calls your main
[Chorus] Cause we're root and we're reckless This lab is way too hard It'll leave you threadless Or asking the sizeof char Got a long list of pthread calls Got root at Urbana Champaign But I got a file descriptor baby And I'll write(2) your name
[Verse 2] Mutex locks Virtual mem I could show you volatile things Network calls, IPC You're the mask I'm your sig Schedule what you want Round Robin… with a small quanta But the sleepsort is yet to run Oh no Screaming, crying, runtime errors I could make all 'till it's Peterson's turn Heap allocator way too slow Keep you second guessing like a spurious wake Where is that pipe? We get hot for multicore C But you'll compile with -g Cause darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a coding dream
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Compilers only parse code if it's torture Don't say I didn't say I didn't -Wall you Compilers only parse code if it's torture Don't say I didn't say I didn't -Wall you
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