Space Vixen Trek Episode 17: Tomorrow The Stars: Space Vixen Trek, #17

By Rainbow Albrecht

In 1978, a professor and two wacky Midwestern teens witness a remarkable finding. A worldwide computer network delivers an image from their new space telescope, and they discover proof that aliens once visited our solar system.

Soon, they're in more trouble than a gopher at a rattlesnake convention. Little did they know that these sneaky extraterrestrials are back again. Their Open Mankind Foundation Governance is plotting to prepare the world for the "New Galactic Arrangement". Worse, they're not the only spacefaring schemers out to subvert our unsuspecting planet.

The professor disappears, a victim of a mysterious kidnapping. The FBI hunts down the prime suspects, the nerdy junior scientist and Pleasantville High's star linebacker. A task force of Russian commandoes tracks down the jock's girlfriends. However, things aren't quite what they seem. The teens become embroiled in a web of conspiracies, beginning a deplorably politically incorrect cosmic adventure.

Who can be trusted? Which scheming aliens will spring the trap first, imposing their brand of despotism upon the world like the humans they've exploited before? Can the youths get back home before the history exam?

---
Alternate history was never wackier

Inside the disguised paddy wagon, the boys could hear the gas station attendant grumbling. "What a cheapskate! I try upsell more octanes, and al kelibah get all women's liberation on me. Everybody tell me, streets are paved with gold here. Was a lie! I hate America!"

Ozzy banged on the side. "Help us! Please! We're Ozzy Cerebrum and Biff Holzhauer, from Pleasantville, Nebraska."

"And I am Saddam Hussein from Tikrit, Iraq. So what?"

---
The heat is on

"When I come back, you better be ready to tell me everything. Time's running out. Oh, Biff also thinks you iced a couple of girls from school today. If you have something to get off your chest about them, you might want to do that before you get the death penalty. Do the names Elizabeth and Bernice ring a bell?

"Jeepers! I wonder what Franz Kafka would have to say about this?"

He wrote down the name. "We'll be investigating him too. Now look - if your fellow conspirators kill Thornberg before we can find him, then you're gonna get an accessory charge. That, my friend, is a ticket straight to Old Sparky."

---
Will the nerd survive the cute little maneater from space?

He heard a honeyed voice from the other side. "Ozzy? Are you in?" He kept silent. Then there was a click as the lock disengaged. Chills went up his spine. La belle dame sans merci peered in at the doorway.

He gasped; Lilly was more beautiful than ever, positively radiant. She was wearing a diaphanous negligée, scarlet with black fringes. He greeted her nervously, "Oh, hi."

---
Behold the 1970s at its cheesiest

"Normally I'm not much for wild speculations, but I've heard some interesting stories about them."

"I'm not sure. I'm probably imagining things about the G-men, but those kids seemed a little strange. I noticed that their breath wasn't foggy in the cold weather like ours. They seemed really stiff too. What's even screwier is that their van was the same model as the one at the scene of the crime."

"I saw that too. It didn't have 'Fish' written on the side. Instead it was marked 'Baloney'. How about that?"

John Holmes nodded. "This is one weird smuggling outfit. Anyway, I wonder why Wallace is having so much trouble cracking down on high-level corruption. Back in the day, Nixon was doing a better job dealing with organized crime. It seems there's some funny stuff happening at the top levels of government. What do you think?"

"Tell you what. I say we take the Chief's advice and forget all this happened. There's no dead Arab, no pond with a couple of cadavers, no fish truck, and the only thing hauling balone...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rainbow Albrecht
• Release date: Nov 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463271063

Rainbow Albrecht

Rainbow's parents met during the Summer of Love. He was conceived and born in the back of a VW Bus. When he was one, they attended Woodstock (Rainbow was particularly impressed by Grace Slick's awesome voice). As the years went on, his parents brought up their love child to be an environmentally conscious liberal embodying peace in the world. In the fullness of time, he became an environmentally conscious reactionary who believes in peace through superior firepower. Today, he fixes servers for a living but would prefer to be a supervillain plotting world domination on a remote volcanic island. Becoming a dictator is a tough career change to pull off, so he channels his evil genius into creative writing. Mostly it is science fiction and fantasy parodies, and he aims for the golden mean of cheesiness which makes a story so bad that it's good.

Book preview

SPACE VIXEN TREK XVII:

Tomorrow the Stars

by Rainbow Albrecht

Copyright 2018, XCVI E.F., Rainbow Albrecht

Smashwords Edition

Dedicated to Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and Arthur Rudolph, the great pioneers of space travel who took us to the moon and brought us safely back.

Δέδυκε μεν ἀ σελάννα

καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δὲ

νύκτες πάρα δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὤρα,

ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

The Moon has set, and the Pleiades. It is midnight, time passes, but I sleep alone.

-Sappho

Warning: The following fictional work contains violent scenes, deplorable politics, carbohydrate abuse, underage drinking, and deliberate stylistic atrocities such as shameless breaking of the Fourth Wall. Reader discretion is advised.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, human or extraterrestrial, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

1 - Searching

2 - Friday Night

3 - Where Has Justice Gone

4 - Land Of Ice

5 - You're So Dumb

6 - I Don't Like You

7 - The Evil Crept In

8 - Radar Love

9 - Sick Society

10 - Invasion

11 - When The Storm Breaks

12 - Skrew You

13 - When The Boat Comes In

14 - Hail The New Dawn

Das Ist Alles

I - Searching

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In the days of yore, an immense wave of celestial fire burst forth from a Draconian star. In leaping waves sprayed out a great vastness of flame through space. Much later - 1978, to be specific - a bookish high school student beheld the pale orange veils of the Cat's Eye Nebula. About a thousand parsecs away, he observed the remains of the ancient cosmic blaze in the northern sky. The image appeared on a color TV tube connected to a computer, which quite remarkably was part of a vast, worldwide network.

I bet people from twenty years ago never suspected how advanced we'd be by now!

Little did he know that other galactic civilizations - ones considerably further advanced - had focused their attention on his humble planet. Moreover, they were up to much more than gazing in wonder at images sent from a telescope.

A professor pointed to a couple of portraits above his desk, prints of President Washington and Honest Abe by Norman Rockwell. Those two would be impressed as well. His voice was resonant and exuded commanding authority, well matching his square jaw and high forehead, from which his close-cut dark hairline was slightly receding.

Before our new space telescope, we never had pictures this good. The future is turning out great!

"It is hard to be precise, but the light now reaching the telescope may have begun its journey at the dawn of the Iron Age, or even as early as when Pharaoh Akhenaten proclaimed his new religion. Perhaps it was when the Greeks set sail across the wine-dark sea to fight the Trojan War, in fact."

"Uh, there was a war about Trojans? Biff, Pleasantville High's star linebacker, scratched his head. Did they run out of rubbers or something? I always carry a spare in my wallet, for whenever opportunity strikes, but there'd be big trouble if I couldn't get 'em no more."

Ozzy winced. His friend's center of consciousness didn't reside in his brain, but rather in a body part one meter below. Embarrassed, he said, You'll have to pardon him. Although he's really been hitting the books about modern history, his knowledge of the ancient world is a bit sketchy.

The jock drawled on, So the Greek drugstores ran out of Trojans, and the men all got cut off on account of that? I can see why they'd want to raid some other country that had rubbers in stock!

The Professor laughed heartily. "That's an interesting new twist on Lysistrata! Perhaps an adventurous Off-Off-Broadway venue could bring down the house with that far-fetched interpretation of Aristophanes."

"What's really far out is this telescope over 350,000 kilometers away, replied Ozzy. I never imagined I'd be sitting at a terminal controlling the Lunar Farside Observatory. Thanks, Professor Thornberg!"

"Oh, come now; you can call me Wally. Anyway, with UFO fever gripping the nation, this would be quite an opportune time to solve one of the great cosmic riddles: are we alone, or are we sharing the galaxy with other civilizations?"

The jock quipped, I wonder if them Little Green Men out yonder taste like chicken?

You're too much! Ozzy had a good chuckle over that. Glad I talked you into this road trip?

His friend shrugged, and then alluded to entirely different lunar matters. Well, Elizabeth and Bernice are still having their, uh, 'headache'. Too bad Mother Nature does that to them at the same time, but that should clear up by tomorrow or so. I couldn't reach Cheryl neither. They're all such great gals, the most wonderful young ladies in Nebraska. Since none of them were available, why not go to Omaha for a science fix?

It wouldn't be long, though, before the young athlete would have far more to be concerned about than arranging his social life.

Perhaps one day you two will travel further - into space!

Ozzy said, "To get an astronaut gig - now that would be Fat City for sure! I've been dreaming about that a long time. But gosh, there must be a thousand job seekers for every man picked by the Committee. I might as well resign myself to the fact that I'll never get into space. No way; not in my lifetime."

Professor Wally stuffed a cherry Cavendish blend into his Missouri Meerschaum pipe. Why not? My younger brother Theo got hired by NACA not long ago and is now in their training program. If the Noordung Spacewheel gets final budgetary approval, likely he'll help assemble the greatest space station ever, much larger than Skycan. He chuckled. "He's a good kid, but not really the Urgestalt of a steely-eyed spacefarer, to say the least. If he made it, surely you can too."

"What does Urgestalt mean? asked Biff. I took a semester of German, but I cain't remember learning that word. You could say I got distracted a lot." His eyes looked a bit dreamy, thinking of the redhead who had captured his attention.

"That means 'archetype', from the Latin term archetypum, which in turn comes from the ancient Greek word ἀρχέτυπος, meaning 'first-molded'."

Gosh! You sure know a bunch of languages! That's how come you heard about the Greeks going to war on account of running out of rubbers, right? You must've read about it yourself!

Ozzy explained, Besides Greek, and Latin, he knows German, Icelandic, Italian, and a bit of Romanian. Perhaps he'll kindly tell you what the word means in English.

Dr. Thornberg continued, "The archetype concept is somewhat related to Plato's Theory of Forms, a breakthrough in the early conception of epistemology. It also informs Jung's conceptualization of a universal collective unconsciousness. The Republic postulates that that there are four aspects to reality: the world as you see it, the world as it actually is, a realm of ideal forms, and a state underlying that in turn defining the structure of the physical world. This is illustrated in the Allegory of the Cave, in which an observer, for all his life, has been  The nerd nudged him before he launched into one of his digressions. The Professor continued, So an archetype is an ideal form, perfect model, that sort of thing."

Much better! replied the jock.

"In any event, space travel, now funded by the State, will sooner or later be the fiefdom of private ownership. This much is assured; it's merely a matter of time."

"And the space industry will really take off then!" predicted Ozzy.

"Perhaps by the year 2000, staying in an orbital hotel, or perhaps a lunar lodge, will be just as common as going to an underwater resort is today."

The nerd exclaimed, That's only twenty two years away! Technology marches on, right?

Sure does! said Biff. I'm pretty durn happy with my atomic-powered car. But boy howdy, when they can make 'em fly too, I'll be first in line to buy one.

The Professor lit the pipe and took a long drag. "It might well be possible. However, the science is barely into the theoretical stage. At our rate of scientific progress, I figure a best-case scenario is that they'll have production models for sale forty years from now. I've heard that Operation Paperclip recovered some documents with tantalizing hints, but there's not nearly enough to develop it. The German scientists working on that were nowhere to be found. I've also heard they had some other very interesting projects, but I wasn't able to learn of the specifics."

The jock frowned. "Gosh, 2018 sure seems a long time to wait for a hovercar! Any chance they'll have 'em in thirty years?"

Ozzy replied, Could be. Think of how well things have been going for America over the last two decades. So by 2008, unemployment and poverty surely will exist only in history books. With all the money available for research budgets by then, we'll probably get technological miracles like antigravity propulsion sooner than expected.

Dr. Thornberg chuckled mysteriously; the kid certainly had much youthful optimism. I'd like to show you one of the first images from the telescope. If you would, bring up the Sirius folder in the Stuttgart data repository. Picture seventeen is very good.

Will do! He typed kundalini ger,univ,stfu/astro-sterne-sirius into the terminal, invoking the Snake's interface. The request was sent through an undersea data cable. It quickly reached the Stuttgart Technische Forschungsuniversität. A computer in STFU's astronomy department accessed its array of disk storage units, drums the size of washing machines with stacks of whirling magnetic platters. It fetched the index information file for the specified filing folder, returning a copy. Now the screen showed a brief description and then names of picture information files.

Ozzy pressed the tab key seventeen times to an underline and selected it by pressing the 'x' key. "You know, someone should invent some kind of an electronic pen for this."

Just to select live reference boxes in the Kundalini viewer?

Well, why not? That would save time, and maybe someone will think up other uses for electronic pens one of these days.

"You could be the one to bring it to market. All that's needed is some startup capital. With luck, the patent could be worth something."

The nerd laughed. My allowance doesn't quite cover it! I guess I have to go to college and then find a job. Years later, I can have enough bread saved to start a small technology company. Hopefully nobody else gets that idea too by then. Meanwhile, the large picture information file was already crossing the transatlantic data cable, though a bit slowly because congestion was increasing on the way back.

"As you know, boys, Sirius is one of Sol's closest neighbors, a mere 8.6 light years from us, and the brightest star in the night sky. Never before have we had such a good telescopic image." The Professor flicked his ornate lighter made of shiny nickel and drew some more flame into the corncob pipe.

So, how does that Netmungandr thang work, anyhow? asked Biff. Ozzy tried to tell me once, but he makes it all so complicated. The young athlete made a face.

"Please allow me to make it even worse than that. It all goes back to DARPA, an agency created twenty years ago almost to the day. It was established after the Reds launched the first artificial moon into orbit, Prosteishi Sputnik-1. Among several projects was the one that led to the present worldwide communication system, giving us things such as live-referenced text, internetwork telegrams, and all the rest of it."

So who figgered out all that?

The idea was devised by the child of a former Senator from Tennessee.

That so? You mean one of President Kefauver's kids?

"Actually, it was Senator Gore's son. Al Junior thought up the concept about the time he was your age. His father put him in touch with the right people in DARPA. Much as I do, they had a knack for both computer technology and classic literature. There's an example for you two that young scientists can go far."

Ozzy asked, Is it true that he created the term 'algorithm' too?

The Professor grinned. His next idea was to put a turbine on the Capitol Rotunda, to power the whole building from all the hot air that Congress generates.

I think you're joshing about that last one. Seriously, though, he's done great work on no-pollution power projects lately. With luck, smog will be next to nothing by the 1990s. He's already rich from photovoltaic cell patents; isn't that something? Likely that's more productive and less frustration than if he'd followed his father's footsteps into a political career.

"Making a million before turning thirty was a decent addition to the family fortune. In any event, the name of this communications network hearkens back to Jǫrmungandr, the World Serpent of Norse folklore, hence the kenning 'World Wide Snake'. It's an abbreviation of 'Network of Multi-National Gated Numerical Dialing Routers'. Each device connected to it has a unique switching identifier, much like telephone numbers, and messages to other computers get sent based upon this unique number. It has two parts, the boundary of which is determined by the network depth parameter. Within a local zone, devices communicate directly with one another using just the prefix. Connections outside of the local zone are facilitated by a routing station, acting in a similar capacity to an electromechanically automated telephone switchboard, and the second part of the address comprises the routing identifier. And to keep track of everything, there are computers known as directory indexers, the sole function of which is to act in a role similar to a phone book..."

The Professor digressed into a monologue on how the ratatoskr.w program on the routing stations recursively discovered the fastest paths on the local level, sharing maps with their neighboring stations. Biff's eyes took on a glazed look as he described how they detected and disallowed looping paths. Ozzy nudged Dr. Thornberg.

Why, you'll have to forgive me for rambling. I could go on all day about Notes of Specification, relayed frame connections, Netmungandr Protocol data blocks, pipelines carrying bandwidth, and all the rest of it.

Pipelines? Okay, finally this hullabaloo is making sense, said the football player, grinning from ear to ear. "I get it now. It's all a series of tubes. How come you didn't just say so?"

Umm, well... Ozzy wasn't quite sure where to begin with that one. Then he noticed that the information had arrived from the miraculous network of the future. Hey, look over there! Now the TV screen showed the blazing white-hot star.

The Professor was about to go into much further detail, but during his monologue, the picture information file had arrived from STFU, curtailing further digression. "The telescope is so powerful that you can see Sirius as a small disk. Over here, you'll observe that this dot is its elusive companion star. Some of the data about the orbital dynamics suggest a third body in the system, but thus far we haven't been able to detect this possible dark star. Perhaps further observations from this new observatory will be able to confirm or rule it out."

The nerd said, "I've had a crack at the three body problem myself, but I haven't quite gotten the answer. Perhaps a parametric equation is the best approach. It's gonna take a boodle of calculus, though."

That would be quite an addition to mathematics! If you come up with something, I'll give you some pointers on publishing it. Looks like my time slot has just started, so let's get on the telescope and look at something much closer. Of course, closer is quite relative!

Quite excitedly, Ozzy brought up the lunar telescope interface. The Professor got an ephemeris off the shelf, made a quick calculation with his slide rule, and called out the interpolated coordinates. Ozzy deftly punched them into the shiny chrome terminal, marveling at the smoothness of the keyboard action.

Phalanxes of transistors in the department's IBM computer quickly processed the input. Located in the basement, it was little larger than an icebox. Silicon electronics allowed monostable multivibrator circuits that required far less space than their vacuum tube counterparts of twenty years prior, used less power, and were considerably faster. The transistor had proved to be as great of an advance as the vacuum tube was to its early forbearer, the electromechanical relay pioneered in Konrad Zuse's second Versuchsmodell. Verily, the revolution had come to fruition, begun by the far-seeing William Shockley - the Great One of semiconductor physics - just over thirty years prior.

Shortly thereafter, on the far side of the moon, the mighty telescope obeyed Ozzy's command and began to slew into position. A screen rotated to block sunlight over the aperture. Soon it sent back a picture information file.

The TV screen showed a dark, ruddy sphere. Dr. Thornberg explained, "This is 136472 Ostara, a planetoid beyond the orbit of Neptune. If you look closely, you'll see a small satellite, which we call the 'Easter Egg'. This is the best picture we've had so far. Earlier spectrographic analyses suggested that Ostara may be covered by frozen nitrogen and methane. It's one of a great many icy globes out there in the vastness of the far reaches of our solar system. We've discovered there are many more small planets than previous astronomers ever suspected. The Lunar Farside Observatory has been very busy with other projects. I finally have been allotted some telescope time to investigate these, and I knew you'd want to see for yourselves."

The jock piped up, "My paw has a book that says space is all about fire and ice."

Once again, you're waxing quite metaphorical tonight, said the Professor. "However, with a bit of qualification, it's not too far off the mark. Actually, the northern folk of old believed that the universe formed from a great chasm between the realms of fire and ice."

Ozzy said, But what about things like asteroids, or the moon?

"I'm glad you asked. There certainly are rocky objects, so you can't take that old belief too literally. Interestingly, quantities of ice even have been discovered in the lunar regolith. This may prove to be quite useful for lunar exploration and colonization."

I'm excited already! One of these days, I hope to see for myself.

He took a puff on the pipe and waxed eloquent. "Amidst the vastness of space, our planet is but a speck of dust whirling about the candle that is our sun. Mother Earth dances an eternal round of the billions of sparkling and extinct stars, the song of flame. If I remember the quotation correctly, 'a probable infinity, probable but endless drops of water of the universe'. Within our own solar system, there are a great number of these planetary dust specks that need further observation. For now, which shall we see next?"

What's on page 42? asked Ozzy.

The Professor checked. We can't view 90377 Rán presently. She's facing the wrong side of the moon.

How about we check back in a couple weeks?

The observatory will be tied up with an extensive survey of the Pleiades then. Likely we'll learn far more about that constellation soon.

The jock grabbed the book and selected a page. This here's my football uniform number. He had no idea, of course, that his choice profoundly would affect the fate of many star systems.

The Professor grinned. The Hand of Destiny chose the fateful world! He did another quick interpolation on the slide rule, reading numbers for Ozzy to enter. "I've read up on this planetoid before. Closer study might prove interesting. It was discovered a few years ago by a ground-based observatory, another icy dwarf planet located in the Whipple belt beyond Neptune. This is 136108 Freyja, named after the Norse Goddess of love and fertility."

Biff grinned. She can bless me with the love part!

The nerd sighed. Maybe one of these days you'll figure out through experience that it's really about procreation.

Hey, wait a minute! You don't mean... He gasped, imagining himself surrounded by a horde of curtain climbers, much like Brigham Young.

The Professor laughed. Well, he's right about the biological imperative. Love and fertility go together; that's why I have six kids. If you've ever wondered about the meaning of life, you'll figure it out the moment you see your own first precious little child. There's more to the group survival instinct than ethnic solidarity, right? Anyway, let's take some pictures and measurements and see what secrets The Lady will reveal unto us tonight.

When the screen rendered, it showed a shiny, oblong planetoid orbited by two tiny moons, and surrounded by a faint ring. The Professor commented, We have a good picture of the two natural satellites, named Brundr and Kælinn. Very interesting indeed. I see also that Freyja has a halo - we've just discovered a new scientific fact!

What a beauty! Ozzy said, You were right about things being so much clearer without the haze of Earth's atmosphere in the way.

Preliminary indications suggested a high albedo, an ellipsoid shape, and a markedly unusual rotational period of about four hours. So I'd say this had a rocky core surrounded by water, pushed outward from the speed of revolution and low gravity, eventually freezing into place. Or… perhaps it began as an ordinary trans-Neptunian snowball, but then a collision event caused the rotation, like a billiard ball in a fast spin. So the impact also melted the surface ice until it congealed again, and into this shape.

Biff piped up, I reckon it's a big space football!

Ozzy added, I have something in common with the Goddess. It looks like She has a pimple. He pointed to a dull reddish dot on the screen.

Professor Thornberg drew close to the television and puffed on his pipe. "Interesting. Good catch there, son. The surface appears to be composed uniformly of sheet ice, other than this pimple, as you creatively call it. Come to think of it, this would be a good way to demonstrate to you the full characteristics of this telescope. We'll find out what this odd geographic formation looks like... with maximum magnification. One of the engineers told me the optics was designed better than the rated specifications, since they didn't want to risk over-promising. Other than that, at the last minute, he managed to substitute a highly advanced next-generation Vidicon tube, which yields better results yet. Don't tell anyone I said all this; I'm sure he wants to keep his job. Anyway, let's see what this can do."

At that, they huddled closer to the screen. The scientist took over the terminal and typed in some special commands, an undocumented control sequence that ordered the telescope to use its capabilities to the utmost.

Biff said, So we're gonna get a close-up of the space pimple, huh? Anyway, how does the typing you're doing make the telescope work?

The Professor took another puff on his pipe. First, the interface program submitted the data from my commands to Unity.

Uh, what's that?

Ozzy clarified, "Unity is the executive system running on the astronomy department's computer. I've read up a lot, and got some practice here, and I'm getting pretty good with it."

"So what's that supposed to mean? Biff turned to the Professor and griped, He's always 'splaining stuff in ways that doesn't make me unnerstand no better."

Then allow me to make it considerably more complicated, replied Dr. Thornberg. "Unity is an elaborate algorithm. It was named in honor of a British girl, tragic story there, may eternal peace rest upon her. It is one of the more popular such programs, which might become sort of a universal standard, largely due to the fact that it is supported on many different makes and models of computers and control systems these days. It was created by an Icelandic polymath, Þórir Valdimarsson, first as an academic exercise. In fact, I had a chat with him once at Keflavík. when I was stationed near the capital back in my Navy days."

Ozzy added, Not often does a Ph.D. project change the world like that, right?

Indeed, but he wasn't famous yet. As I recall, this was soon before I met my future wife. Actually, they have similar names.

How's she doing, anyway?

She just left for vacation back home. She and our kids should be back in a few weeks or so.

Well, I still didn't unnerstand none of that executive system stuff, pouted the jock. What's all that do, anyway? Gimme the ol' infodump.

"It's a program that leads the central function of the computer. During the IPL process, the boot code is typed in, and the circuitry waits for signaling from the default input device, generally punch cards or ticker tape. Then the code for Unity is read into the core memory. When the kernel is uploaded and running, the circuitry starts following the instructions therein. The executive system interprets input from the terminal. Also, it sends and receives data from peripherals, also called block devices, which are organized into logical constructs. It launches programs which interact with the operator. Also, other programs run independently of the terminal, in the background. These are called 'wights', hence the suffix 'w'. Unity has a task-switching system, so many such programs run at once. For instance, when input comes in from one of the peripherals - the block devices I mentioned earlier - then it activates ioservice.w which suspends the currently running task. First, it puts its execution pointer address on a stack. I should mention that a stack is a particular data construct with a pointer that is incremented whenever "

Ozzy saw his friend starting to drift off once more, so he nudged the Professor again.

He continued, "Let's just say that Unity runs the whole show. In this particular instance, it sends the parameters in my command to its Netmungandr uplink peripheral. It's encapsulated with a number of protocol wrappers, but we'll save that discussion for later if you prefer. Encoded as a digital signal, a few routing stations forward it