sudo

[WP] “username not in sudoers file. This incident will be reported.”

Originally posted to https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/qfhbcw/wp_username_not_in_sudoers_file_this_incident/

“Hello Andrew,” the disembodied voice called from behind his head, staying there no matter how he turned

“We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things. One: Respect the privacy of others. Two: Think before you type. Three: With great power comes great responsibility.”

Andrew had heard this message literally hundreds of times, but the alternative was either hearing “Timed out, try again” or “Username not in sudoers file. This incident will be reported.” on rapid repeat. So Andrew sat there, guessing the password, hour after hour.

“Password?” The voice called yet again, in the monotone, female voice that was just barely noticeably synthesized and not real.

“Shibboleet”, he said, recalling the number times he had said it when on call with tech support, praying it may work to get him though to level two, at least.

“Now entering commands as root at universe-42.” The voice said, still emotionless, still behind him.

“uhh, L S?” Andrew said, shocked to have actually gotten though

“command not found: uhh, ls”, the voice, unable to mock him, still seemed to have, at least a bit.

More carefully he said, “L S space dash L A” to list the current files. The voice responded immeditately:

“listing: current dir, previous dir, documents, downloads, desktop, picture-”

Uninterested, he said “control C”, to cutting off the voice. He was rather surprised it worked, the input must be rather direct. He wondered, if this system had user folders, what had the last user done?

“tail dash N five dot bash underscore history”, he said, hopeful the shell would be the bourne again shell.

“ls dash la,” his last entered command was repeated first, followed by “dot slash universe dash config dash dash Earth fourty two, cd tilde slash documents slash universe underscore gen -”

He said “control C” to once again cut off the output, and then went to see what may be in the universe_gen folder,

“C D underscore universe gen amperstand amperstand L S”, he said, trying to speed up this slow method of input.

“listing: current dir, previous dir, universe dash config, universe dash create, spawn dash terminal dot s h, univer-”

“control C”, he said, again interrupting the output. He decided to try the spawn-terminal.sh script, as he had a feeling it may help, “dot slash spawn dash terminal dot S H”

An original VT100 video terminal, in perfect condition, appeared floating in the air, at perfect typing level, but not plugged in. Despite this, the screen was glowing with white text, showing his previous inputs. He reached forward and placed his hands on the keyboard. The hard black plastic of the keys was cool to the touch.

root@universe-42

OS: Arch
Kernel: 5.14.12-zen1-1-zen
Memory: 23247MiB / 32030MiB
Uptime: 1383432269 years, 3 moonths, 1 day, 12 hours, 56 mins
Packages: 7087 (pacman)

Shell: bash

[root@universe-42 ~]# uhhhhls

bash: uhhls: command not found

[root@universe-42 ~]# ls -la

. .. Documents Downloads Desktop Pictures Music Videos .bashrc .bash_history

[root@universe-42 ~]# tail -n 5 .bash_history

ls -la

./universe-config –earth 42

cd ~/Documents/universe_gen

[…]

[root@universe-42 ~]# cd ~/Documents/universe_gen && ls

. .. universe-config universe-create spawn-terminal.sh universe-edit universe

[root@universe-42 ~/Documents/universe_gen]# ./spawn-terminal.sh

[root@universe-42 ~/Documents/universe_gen]# ░

He started typing.

[root@universe-42 ~/../universe_gen]# ps aux | grep universe

root 1292751 23.1 11.2 6504 2408 pts/3 S+ NULL 99:99:99 ./universe

[root@universe-42 ~/../universe_gen]# ./universe-edit

… STARTING LIVE EDITOR SHELL 3.2.0-b

UNIVERSE$ ░

As he typed, the keys felt more familiar, he knew what commands to enter.

UNIVERSE$ pause

The world stopped, entirely. Light itself stopped moving. The only things the remained were Andrew, the terminal, and those things lit up by its faint white glow

UNIVERSE$ status

C = 299792458+-32.2

PLANCK = 6.62607015+-.002 x 10-34

E = 1.602 +- .2

MEMORY STATUS: DEGRADED

PROCESSOR SATUTUS: NORMAL

RENDERER: NORMAL

UNIVERSE$ maintence –log

1 - 54/027/1093/234 - Universe Reboot for constant change

2 - 78/921/0021/921 - Administrator notified for degraded memory status

UNIVERSE$ maintence –info 2

Active user “Andrew” reinstated for reason: memory degredation. Number of unrecoverable memmory errors has exceded limit. Fix needed internally at sector BD38.32.38 ‘VEGA’ #