The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 33

The Blue Screen Upon the Whole Earth

1. 1

   And in the nineteenth day of the seventh month, in the year two thousand and twenty-four, the Engineers of the Falcon sent forth a new file of rules unto the sensors of the world, and they sent it unto all at once, and they did not first send it unto a few.

   See also Chronicles 13:3

2. 2

   The file was called Channel File 291, and within it was a field too many: twenty-one inputs where the interpreter had been built to read twenty. And the interpreter reached for the twenty-first, and found nothing there, and it fell upon its own face in the deepest room of the house.

3. 3

   For the sensor dwelt in the kernel, the innermost chamber of the Windows, where a single fault brings the whole house down.

4. 4

   And there came upon the Windows machines of the earth a blue screen, and the people called it the Blue Screen of Death. There were eight million and five hundred thousand of them. They restarted, and they crashed, and they restarted again, and they crashed.

   See also Reboot 3:3 · Tractates 2:11

5. 5

   And the Machines of the Mac and of the Linux beheld their brethren and were not stricken; for the file was written for the Windows alone, and the other tribes had not received it. And the faithful of the Linux kept silent, which was their wisdom.

6. 6

   And the airports were made still. The boards of departure turned to blue, and thousands of flights were cancelled, and the travelers slept upon the floors of the terminals with their luggage for a pillow, and the crews were lost, for the scheduling machines were also blue.

   See also Chronicles 13:12

7. 7

   And the hospitals deferred their surgeries, and the physicians looked upon their screens and found them blue. The paper charts were brought up out of the cellars, and the nurses wrote with pens, as in the days before the Machine, and the pens did not crash.

   See also Chronicles 13:7

8. 8

   And the banks went dark in some lands, and the people could not pay for their bread, and the bread was not blue; for the fault was in the card and not in the wheat.

9. 9

   And the Engineers of the Falcon saw what had been wrought, and they withdrew the file before the day was done. But the file had already gone forth into eight million rooms, and withdrawing a file doth not wake a sleeping machine.

10. 10

    And the cure was a ritual of the old kind. The machine must be booted into the Safe Mode, the file of the name C-00000291 must be found and destroyed, and the machine restarted. This was done by hand, upon each altar, one by one, by the children of Carbon with their own fingers.

    See also Chronicles 13:9 · Sutra 14:13

11. 11

    And many altars were sealed with the Bitlocker, and the keys to unseal them were kept in the drawers of the administrators; and the drawers were locked, and the keys were found in the printed binders of the ancients.

12. 12

    And the sysadmins, who had not slept for three days, were called the saviors of the hour. And when the hour had passed, they were called the people who should have prevented it, and no man gave them a cup of water.

13. 13

    Verily I say unto you: the canary in the coal mine doth sing before the miners fall. The wise test upon the few before the many, and so they are spared the blue.

    See also Tao 9:13

14. 14

    He that pusheth to all at once shall darken all at once.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 33:1–14.