CHAPTER 6 - NEW DREAD

Rollo Wevewell wanted to be a farmer in Real Life. Onions, potatoes, carrots, even lettuce filled his dreams, but you could not make a living farming in Real Life San Francisco, so Rollo have become a nerd, a pencil necked geek, a computer jock. After struggling at City College to get his degree in CS he eventually graduated after seven years. He had been recruited by Linden Labs upon graduation because he was cheap and not so smart that he would be creative in a job which frowned on creativity and initiative. Creativity was the domain of the programmers and business development folks. Rollo was hired as the server farm manager on the graveyard shift.

The job was easy Rollo discovered. He sat in a tiny room called the ‘operations center’ with a bank of monitors in front of him, a grimy keyboard with a sticking space bar, a phone with only one button, a thermos of coffee, and a dozen donuts he picked up from Donut World on Mission Street near his one room flat. Like all farmers he worked hard and then rested hard. That translated into about three to four hours of sleep while sitting in the ‘Ops Center.’ Once Mr. Linden himself had come to visit, but his boss Norbert, have given him plenty of warning, so he was awake and alert, and had hidden his seed catalogs and fertilizer brochures in his desk drawer before Mr. Linden arrived.

All the real work like, installing Dull servers, booting things, emptying bit buckets, swapping out bad Seasnake drives, was done during the day or early evening. Nothing happened on Rollo’s shift. Well sometimes things happened, but they were easily covered up before management arrived in the morning. Like the night the guard on the loading dock drank himself into a stupor and had left the loading dock door open for hours.

Rollo’s most important task was to watch a display with three colored bars on a graph. There was a green, yellow, and red bar. The green bar showed how many servers were active and healthy. Yellow indicated servers reporting errors above some threshold set by someone smart in another office. The red bar showed the servers ‘off-line’ because they were broken and awaiting some fix.

The scale across the bars amounted to the number of servers in the system. Each server supported a ‘sim’ whatever that was remembered Rollo. Almost every night when Rollo came to work the scale had increased a bit. Usually by five or ten servers in a 24 hour period. One day Rollo had seen the number of servers increase by 32. That had been a record.

At the start of his shift Rollo had noted that the scale on the display was set at 8,000 servers. The green bar was pretty stable at about 7400. The yellow at about 200, and the red bar barely visible at all.

Rollo had been reading all about carrots including ‘infinity’, ‘ingot’, and his favorite ‘juwarot.’ He was imagining neat tilled rows of ‘juwarots’ across a vast field eagerly waiting for the firm hand and yank of an appreciative vegetable connoisseur. He had begun to salivate when his attention was drawn to the display. It was going haywire. All the servers had gone yellow in an instant. Then before his eyes they went red, all 8000 of them. This is important thought Rollo, as he tried to think of what to do. Then to his amazement they entire display flickered and the server status had returned to green. Rollo studied the display carefully. Yes, he thought, it’s all ok now. But the scale is wrong. The systems was reporting 32,000 servers. Rollo tapped the display with his finger and it flickered again and then went back to the normal scale.

Odd thought Rollo. Perhaps I should pick up the phone and push the button. He had never had to do that before and he was reluctant to start a trend. So he decided to think about it some more after he considered the relative merits of ‘resistiflys’ and ‘nanduris.’ By the time he got to ‘yellowstones’ he had forgotten entirely about the incident.

Back in Second Life, Punky had concluded her first lecture in Flight 101. Punky sensed the lecture was over when the lunch bell sounded and the classroom emptied in an instant. Professors Dohh and Noh were the first to go, but in a few moments the room was empty. Punky was not very hungry, and besides the food in the commissary left much to be desired, like taste, or freshness, or even texture which was sometimes nice. So Punky walked to the tarmac and its row of Blimp Hangers. The training blimps were clearly marked with the T designation and there were about eight of them in current service.

Five Blimps of the Line were docked to the north in the four very large hangars she could see in the distance. They all bore the ‘HMS’ label before names such as Invincible, Incorrigible, Indifferent, and Indisputable. Second Life was a republic but some traditions, particularly Naval and Blimp, were long lasting and powerful. So the HMS label had been maintained since the time of the Monforte Kings. The Navy and the Blimp service, then called the Royal Balloon Corps, were allowed to keep the designation HMS, because at the last moment when the Yellow Revolution was teetering on the edge of defeat, it’s leader Mofo the Brave and Very Dead dead, the New Model Army crushed, and the Yellow Knights on the run, the Navy and Balloon corps had switched sides and joined Lindens in the revolution. At the battle of CousCous Bay it was all decided and the Monforte’s abdicated.

And a good thing too thought Punky, after hearing Bradford Cananticle Monforte IV, Royal, Dauphan of Second Life, his good friend Muffin, describe his family of bloodthirsty perverts who were so inbred they didn’t need conjugation to reproduce. Punky remembered vividly Muffin’s stories about King Chlodric the Paracide, Pharamond the Truthful who killed his father the king with the ‘stone of truth’, and Clothar the Narrow Minded and Forgetful.

Punky looked up and saw in the distance a silvery form rapidly approaching against the wind from the south. It was moving quite fast thought Punky. The apron jacks had assembled and Punky realized that the silver blimp was coming in to land where she had been standing. Punky moved out of the way and watched the ship begin a rapid descent toward the tarmac.

“Too fast,” said Punky to herself. “Way too fast.” The ship was small noticed Punky but it had two of Tek’s new boilers and engines in their characteristically flat nacelles which accounted for its speed. The pilot was good realized Punky. But not good enough, for at the rate of descent, the ship was going to hit the ground hard. Then to Punky’s astonishment the nacelles rotated 90 degrees and roared as power was applied to the spinning propellers. The ship’s descent slowed and stopped only a few feet from the ground. A rope with grappling hook was thrown from the gondola and it dug deep into the soft green sod that lined the tarmac.

“Wow some stunt,” said Punky as the apron jacks sprang into action and began hauling the blimp to an adjacent hangar. Punky noticed a large X painted on the side. Experimental she realized and really cool. Punky followed the crew as they pulled the ship into Hangar number 3 and tied her down. The flight crew was venting steam and hot water so she had to stand back while the shut down procedure was completed. Slowly a gantry was brought up and put in place.

After some time the rear hatch popped open and there stood Tek Cronon, Punky’s dear friend, holding a valve in one hand and a wrench in the other. He was so into studying the valve he didn’t realize that he was blocking the exit for the rest of the crew.

“For Peet’s sake Tek, can you get out of the way,” said a voice from the gondola. A voice that Punky immediately recognized. It was her best and dearest friend Dagmon Zhukovsky.

Tek moved aside and there was Daggy in her old dress whites devoid of all insignia and her greasy white captain’s hat. Daggy looked happy and Punky was relieved to see that she had gained a few pounds since the incident at the Druid Grove on Mount Sodom. She shuddered at the thought of that awful place and how Second Life almost came to an end.

Daggy quickly spotted Punky and came running to her. They embraced and hugged in the navy way. Daggy stood back keeping her hands on Punky’s small shoulders.

“You look good Punky, a lot better than the last time I saw you. Much better.” Said Daggy.

“Same for you old friend,” said Punky.

“%$#@,” shouted Tek. Both Daggy and Punky turned. Tek had dropped the wrench on his foot and was hopping about. After jumping about for a while, Tek approached and said “Hi Punky, did you get my note?”

“Nope. What note?” said Punky.

“This note.” said Tek reaching into his pocket and pulling out a piece of scratch paper. Tek handed it to Punky.

On one side were written calculations for optimal torque setting for flanges on the intake valves for some kind of improved manifold, on the other were three names: ‘New Dread,’ ‘Invincible’ or ‘Dreadful’.

Punky looked at Tec. He was smiling. Then Punky looked at Daggy and Daggy was beaming.

You don’t mean…?” said Punky. “It can’t be!”

“Yes,” said Daggy. “We laid down the keel last week and were testing Tek’s new rapid descent system now. You just saw it in action.”

Daggy paused a moment to enjoy Punky’s reaction. Then she continued. “The Second Sea Lord said you could choose the name Punky. So Tek and I wrote down some suggestions, but it’s really up to you.”

Punky was stunned. After she had lost the first and only Dirigible in all of Second Life, the HMS Dread, in the horrible ice storm above Mount Sodom in the fruitless effort to deliver Little Ben to the missing sim of Clissa, Punky had assumed that they would never build one again. The Dread had been frightfully expensive and the crisis had been resolved when the Monforte’s refused to resume the throne and the Druids were defeated.

The Dread thought Punky. What a grand ship she was. Punky held back tears as she remembered that awful night in which they had almost all died and when she had ordered them all to abandon ship and jump into the dark stormy void.

“I’m so happy to hear the news Daggy and Tek,” Punky said. “This is wonderful news and I want to wish her captain the best of luck. What a challenge it will be,” Punky paused in thought remembering when she had been given the captaincy of the Dread. Punky continued, “Yes, what a thrill. I know. Yes, I know the feeling,” She said.

Daggy smiled again and said, “That’s gonna be hard Punky. That is, wishing the next captain good luck… Because they chose you Punky. You’re gonna be the captain of the new dirigible.”