
avatar by @citriccenobite
you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.
i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi
I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory
they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"
There are over fifty million files living in the coastal city of Seagate, state of Compton. Most of them don't matter. They sit and wait, sometimes for days, until a program needs them. Some files just get forgotten about. Maybe it's a song nobody listens to, or a game that got installed and never played. They just sit there until their sectors go bad. The tenements and warehouses on the edge of town that nobody maintains, but the landlords take money for anyway, but with suspiciously clean signs out front, reading things like "Random Backups" and "Temp." Plenty of programs down on their luck live around there too, nobody really knows if they're even alive until they show up one day for work, cobwebbed and fragmented.
On the other end of Seagate you have the Downloads district. All upscale, fast moving part of town. Files coming in and out all the time, whether by taxi or jet. The Broadcom International Airport sees several gigabytes of throughput every single day, all of it being inspected bit by bit by the Department of Defender. Heard a while back they were all on the take from the Torrente family, but by definition it's none of my business. The Program Files offices have dealings with all of them on a daily basis, as does Central Processing, but me, I only go when and where I'm needed, and most of the time, I'm not. I just sit in my office in the System block, playing solitaire until such time as another program calls on me.
You could call me a file, you could call me a program. All I care is that I'm the guy that gets called when one of those fifty million files happens to turn up missing. The cops call it in as a four-o-four and the case inevitably goes cold. You probably know the headlines well. "File Not Found." An example of the blunt news-writing that we see from those hack error reporters upstairs. Doesn't comfort anybody. It's just a reminder of how fragile life can be sometimes in Seagate.
On this particularly balmy Patch Tuesday, the CPU thermometer was reading a steady 55 Celsius as files were shipping in and out. I supposed that today was backup day, and soon enough things were going to calm down. That's when I heard a double-knock. It came from the other side of my door, its frosted glass reading MARLOWE.DLL - Find Files & Folders. Beyond the glass stood the silhouette of...I couldn't tell if it was a man or woman or anything else that'd been added to the metadata specs since I'd moved in. They stood there almost motionless, only their outline indicating anything was there.