Read My Mind!

The Doom That Came From Finland

Jan Stafford an Editor at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com is running a contest for tall tales concerning the origin of Linux. How could I resist?
Who wrote Linux? The spy who loved Linux
My entry (With apologies to Charles Stross and H.P. Lovecraft):

I will not reveal how I came across the following information. Suffice to say that the price at which this knowledge comes convinces me of its reliability.

As Mr. Service observed, there are indeed "Strange things done in the midnight sun." Not the least strange is the occasional glimpses by those folk who live in the northern climes of the secret remnants of those "Old Ones" who were senescent when our world was young. The fields of cosmic particles trickling through that boreal hole in the magnetosphere combined with the preserving cold has kept certain artifacts well stored indeed, waiting to be discovered by the curious or the foolhardy. One such researcher into forbidden knowledge was a young Finnish man named Linus Benedict Torvalds who's secret wanderings and arcane interests were the stuff of legend at the pubs in Helsinki.

One cold December near the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Torvalds stumbled across a black, star-shaped object buried in the ice along the southern shore of lake Inarijarvi. It was perhaps a meter across and obviously very old. From his studies, Torvalds immediately recognized it as an Enterprise Server of the Elder Gods (E.S.E.G) mentioned in the dread Pnakotic Manuscripts, perhaps even one of the later E100K/StarShoggoth units with the squamous neural mesh interconnect and support for a slaved Batrachian storage unit. His stunned surmise was confirmed when pressing the small hypercube-shaped "ON" button brought the unspeakable thing to life with a glitter of eldritch blue LEDs.

A man of lesser courage or greater wisdom might have turned the machine off, if machine is a proper word for a thing as much grown as built, and run from that place never to return. Instead Torvalds, better equipped by his native tongue than most to use an Elder God voice interface, intoned the ancient System Administrator Password "Ia! Ia! Yog-Sothoth who guards the gate and is the gate. N'flgthwpt%Opus" A snaking tentacle whipped from beneath the ice and plunged its needle tip into the back of his skull instantly recognizing him as the descendant of an ancient line of food animals and coders created by the Elder Gods. At the appearance of the trapezohedron prompt he changed to the Shub-Niggurath directory, known as the root directory of the woods with a thousand branches and the black goat with a thousand young. From there he changed to "usr/src" where he found the prize he sought. The very source of life itself, the kernel of the Elder Gods.

As the tentacle released its hold, he realized that he now contained all of the knowledge of the ancients, and to his horror, the ancients were not POSIX compliant. The server dissolving into a noisome mush behind him, Torvalds staggered home where between fits of raving madness he attempted to do what no human had ever contemplated, to create from nothing an operating system in defiance of the laws of nature and of nature's gods.

By July, the deed was almost done. Only one great obstacle remained.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question
Message-ID: <1991Jul3.100050.9886@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
Hello netlanders,
Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix
standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably)
machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be
nice.

He could not admit the terrifying truth, so he referred in passing to a descendant of the well known KthulOS known as "minix" to put the inquisitive off his trail, but had someone only seen through his guise, had this blasphemous request been ignored that orphaned and twisted Operating System which now rules over us with its ever-available eye might never have been. Brave lawyers and coporations have sought to restrain it with ancient patents and cures, but now, now it is too late. The only penguin ever to be born in the North now owns us all.