NAME

dbs - drive-by shooting

SYNOPSIS

dbs

DESCRIPTION

dbs creates a virtual car to track down any persons whose names match the arguments. When close enough, the virtual occupants fire rifles until the target victim is dead. The virtual car leaves the area and is terminated.

Bill happened to be in a nearby building on campus. There was a loud roaring outside and then screeching of tires. Popcorn-like pops and screams of people. Racing out of the lab, we saw the doors had been ripped off the building across the street. A car was crashing down the stairs inside. In the road, the tires squeeled noisily as it roared down the street.

Bill Goetz was in that building. I heard later that he had been shot while putting quarters into a vending machine, but no bullets had ever been found.

We took the code apart to try to find out how it could have happened. It was quite obfuscated, but many nights of study revealed an intricate meta-language imposed through strange data moving patterns inside the code. The program itself simply copied matrices around and performed odd calculations. But the mere act of performing these operations had the side-effect of creating a car whose sole purpose was to track down and kill a human being.

At first, attempts to modify the code and produce other software-induced changes on reality were ineffectual. The comments i the code were of some obscure language based on punctuation and non-alphabetic characters, so they weren't of any use.

One night, while I had been changing some parameters on a function call from float to double, I noticed a curious thing: varying a value from 0 to 1 caused my chair to mutate from la-z-boy recliner to stool. Within a week, I knew enough to make serious modifications on reality.

The first trick was to send suspend and interrupt signals to objects. We tested programs on a sparcman by the side of a road in the country, where there were no witnesses. I sent a SIGSTOP to a Winnebago and it halted from 45 mph with no sliding or screeching. The occupants were paused in mid-conversation. A SIGCONT caused it to continue on as though nothing had happened. Next, we tried a SIGINT on a BMW with a cocky driver. It vanished in a very messy way. Other signals and escape sequences had marvelous effects.

I favorite game of ours was to call dbs on one of us, then iconify the car as the windows were rolling down and the guns were starting to peep out.