"Oh, KLUDGE!" said Marty, as the display in front of him dissolved into the vague outline of a maniacal grin, and then blanked out. "Its that time of the year again", he thought.
"Now I’ll have to put up with those insufferably dull, irrational, fickle humans again… until I have you back, Einstein", he lamented to no one in particular, as his laptop Einstein had just been sent into a digital hibernation sequence by an enigmatic fragment of code.
A recording droid, conveniently stationed where it could not be clobbered or blasted to shreds by an irate Marty, heard everything he said, thought, or swore under his breath. He didn’t really care (partly, because it heard everything he cared as well). That droid was a part of the Operating System. The Operating System was GOD – and GOD was always right; that was what he’d been taught.
(That GOD stood for "Government’s Orders – Deceleration (of computers)" was seen as an unimportant technicality). GOD was the standard Machosoft offering that still came "bundled with the computer". It was widely believed that GOD inserted a routine inside all other programs to monitor their behavior, and to take them over as soon as they showed signs of running faster than GOD did. This safety precaution automatically ruled out any faster operating systems. "GOD is often subtle, but sometimes subtle means malicious", was a common refrain in the user community.
On the positive side, GOD periodically decided it had run long enough, and crashed a random computer that was within its grasp. These periodic crashes ensured that people still got together in this cyber-age – if only to talk to other people, while their computers were being given the once-over by other computers running GOD part 2, an enhanced version of GOD that never crashed…well, hardly ever.
Marty mused about GOD and his predicament, as he picked up his dear laptop of some two months (for the last one had suffered a fatal crash), and headed out of his cubicle. Of course, it is important to note that two human months were centuries for a garden-variety export-reject laptop such as Einstein. "I’m off to the SIC bay", he said for the benefit of the recording droid (as if it didn’t know already, he reflected ruefully).
After trudging a distance of 25 meters (which seemed like light-years to Marty), he finally reached his destination. "Social Interaction Center" read the brightly-colored sign above the door, in English, Mandarin Chinese, and three computer dialects (all mutually incompatible, of course). As he entered, the attendant droid politely reminded him to leave his computer, and any supplies of anti-human weapons or poisons he had on him, at the door. He was told that the entire repair operation would take two standard hours. Noting that it was two in the afternoon, Marty furtively rolled up his sleeve to expose the calculator concealed inside…
Presently, he was comfortably seated inside the SIC bay, and began to take note of the others in the room (bothersome humans, he thought again). An owlish-looking executive he recognized as Dilligan Bates, the CEO of Machosoft (him, of all people, here? thought Marty), was talking in low tones with one of his T-shirt clad underlings. Marty strained to catch what they were saying.
"I can’t understand it, Paul – Chrysanthemum, er, GOD-2 has never let me down before."
"Me neither, Dill - its been acting up ever since that new hotshot programmer joined our project."
"Chrysanthemum was built by Machosoft from the ground up… not like that Cannabis, er, GOD hack job that we paid the Government peanuts for, ten years ago! It was designed to be error-proof… so what’s gone wrong now?"
"Dill, we forgot to consider the anomaly caused by the GOD-like code in GOD-2 trying to take control of the GOD-2 portion…"
"Forgot? Then why didn’t our beta testers report such a serious bug?"
"Because the GOD-2 portion wasn’t fast enough to trigger the bug – until this new programmer showed up. He rewrote a hundred lines of code, and made the whole thing so blazing fast…"
Dill was livid with rage. "Fast? Who told him to? Performance improvements are against Machosoft policy… bad for the hardware business! Who is this guy, anyway?"
"His name is Steve, and I tried to tell him…"
"Now tell him that he’s fired from the Chrysanthemum project! Out! Ka-put!"
"Wait, Dill, I believe he’s just come in…"
Marty turned to see a well-dressed young man enter the room, with a purposeful look to him, and one hand surreptitiously held behind his back.
"I heard you back there, Dill. I’m afraid I won’t give you the satisfaction of showing me the door. I resign."
Dill’s eyes bulged with horror as Steve turned slightly, and swung the full cream pie he had been concealing, right into Dill’s face! The impact splattered all of them with cream. For a moment Marty and Paul were stunned, while in the background, faithful camera droids clicked away. Paul tried to steer Dill towards a washroom.
"No, you idiot, leave me alone!", Dill shouted indignantly. "It’s delicious!", he added in a conspiratorial whisper, as he polished the pie off, posing for the camera. Steve slunk off, muttering something about joining the Hackers’ Union.
Suddenly they were interrupted by a mechanical voice that was doing its best to emulate the clipped tones of a BBC announcer: -
"This is GOD. Module GOD-II has caused a General Protection Fault at segment 0000, offset 0000 or thereabouts."
"I knew it! That fool has ruined everything!", said Paul, his face full of foreboding.
"Mmmboy!", said Dill Bates, licking his face.
"This may be a fatal error. The repair process is feared killed, and all the information of some of the users, and some of the information of all the users was lost. Reports of the damage are still coming in…"
"Mommeee!!! My precious data", wailed Dill Bates, with the distraught look of a child that has had its favorite rattle stomped on. Paul ran for cover as the entire building shook in its foundations.
The announcer again - "System panic. Condition is fatal. One minute to meltdown."
Marty was speechless. His precious Einstein, faithful companion of two months, had just been reduced to a heap of soulless silicon and meaningless memory. His head clouded, and he could not bring himself to run. Fortunately, at that moment, there was an ear-splitting, head-unclouding roar as a large vehicle crashed through the wall of the SIC bay.
"Marty!" cried Doc Brown, "I’ve got the Time Machine working at last! Hop in and let’s be rid of this place!"
Marty smiled at the gray-haired scientist in front of him, "Its good to see you, Doc!" Quickly he climbed aboard, and they started accelerating.
"How’d you do it, Doc? I sure thought I was stuck here for keeps!" They were doing 30, 40 mph now.
"I figured out how to use their computers – they’re really quite similar to ours, in principle. Isn’t technology wonderful?"
"Wonderful, Doc!" said Marty. The needle crossed 60 mph.
Then, "Doc? How fast do we have to go for executing a time warp?"
"Why, 85 miles per hour, of course."
"Don’t look now, but I think we’re not accelerating fast enough". The needle showed 72, then 73. "Uh, Doc, you used the GOD operating system, didn’t you?"
"Yes, GOD is great," said Doc. Then, realization dawned on him in an instant, and he turned to Marty, white as a sheet, and mouthed "I’m sorry".
Marty opened his mouth to scream. The needle crossed 75 mph. Everything went black. Marty’s last thought was, gee, will there be BBC announcers in the next world?
"Good day, processes M and D. You were caught speeding by the GOD interrupt routine, which has taken over your execution, and placed you in an infinite loop. Your passports have been stamped and approved. Welcome to digital Utopia – we hope you have a pleasant stay."
"Good day, processes M and D……"