Does That Count?:  UNIX Demons


	Bill knew something was up when he walked into the building, there
was a strange smell like burnt sulphur in the air. He raced up to the AI
lab, where he worked, which seemed to be the source of the smell.  The
fire alarms hadn't gone off yet, but there was over a million dollars
worth of UNIX servers in that lab, there to support their prototype AI,
ACE, the Auto Corrolation Engine. Plus there was ACE itself, of course,
but there were offsite tape backups of the AI. Still, Bill wasn't taking
any chances, he was the project manager, and if the project lost all that
hardware, it'd be months before they were back online. 

	He peered through the glass of the security door, everything
SEEMED alright, but when he finally fumbled his keycard into the lock, and
the door opened, a wave of sulphurous stench rolled out. Walking into the
lab he saw the place was a mess. There were papers, notebooks, disks and
CD's strewn everywhere, it was like there had been a tornado IN the lab. 
On the big plotter they usuallly used to diagram ACE's cognative
structures was a sheet of paper with some bizzare design consisting of a
five-pointed star in a circle with odd symbols and words in what looked
like latin around it. The center of the paper looked burnt, and all around
the table where the plotter sat were sets of four parallel gouges, like
massive clawmarks. Also, oddly enough, sitting on top of the main console
monitor, curled up, apparently asleep, was a small, brightly colored
reptile of some sort.

	He looked around for someone who might have seen what happened. 
He was usually one of the first people in in the morning, but Greg, the
net admin worked nights, so he could get system maintinence done without
getting in the way of the ACE team. He SHOULD be here, and if he wasn't
then he'd have an awful lot of explaining to do. 

Bill walked into the lounge next to the lab.

"Greg! Hey! Greg! you 'round here? "

"Yeh!" came a faint voice. 

Confused, he walked back into the lab, where the voice seemed to
origionate. 

"Greg?"  he said, looking around the lab. There was still noone else
there.

"Yes!!" came the still somewhat faint voice.

"Where are you? I can hear you but I don't... "

"HERE!! Right over here!", said the reptile on the console, who was now
awake, and looking at Bill, with his hands resting in front of him, and
his tail drooped over the front of the monitor.

"hunhhh??!!"  Bill commented articulately, as this time he happened to be
looking in the right direction. His mouth fell open, and he leaned forward
to get a better look at the creature, who had most definately spoken.

"What THA He.." 

"DONT SAY THAT!!!  Please! He's gone now, but I DON'T want to push my
luck!" 

"WHO'S gone??" 

"The demon!!"

"Uh.. Demon?  Uh... Greg, is that you??"
 
Bill blinked several times, in an attempt to recover his senses.  

"YES, It's me." 

"Excuse me..." He fumbled at a nearby chair. "I need to sit down.
This... Is a bit much." He more or less fell into the chair. 

"Erm.. YOU think this is a bit much??" 

"Oh. Yeh. Sorry.  Uhmm.... Ah... WHAT happened here? What this about a...
Demon?" 

Greg pointed at the scorched design on the plotter.

"Uhmmm... You summoned a demon?! "

"Er.. No.." said Greg, looking sheepish, which is a pretty impressive
feat for a reptile, " I didn't. ACE did."

Bill's eyebrows, which had ALMOST returned to their normal position, shot
up again. "The COMPUTER summoned a demon??? "

"Uh-huh" Greg nodded affirmitively.

"Why? HOW?? How could it have... Did _you_ tell it to do something??"

"Welllll... Uh, yes. But I never expected anything like THIS to happen!! I
mean, Everything worked out FINE before..." 

"What did you ask it to DO?" 

"Well, I mean,  you've got this AI here, I thought I'd have it do some usefull
 work, sort of a real world test yaknow..."

"And what the... " Bill glanced at the burnt pentagram " ...heck were you
asking it to do?"

"Well, I've been having ACE help out with the system administration. I
mean it's perfect, really, especially since you guys opened up that
netlink last month, and let ACE pull info off the web. Alot of that work
is just reading through all the documentation, readme's, man pages, web
pages, and all, and putting the info together, and drawing connections
with what your problems are. That's the kind of stuff ACE was designed to
do. I mean, one of these days, when the kind of computing power needed
gets cheaper, I'd bet that's one of the first things the'll be selling
programs like ACE to do ..." 

"Uh-Huh. That was really stupid, You could have fouled up months of
research..."

"HEY! It WAS working fine!!" 

" .. but really," continued Bill, ignoring the interuption "I don't think
that matters now. How did system adminstration lead to this??" he gestured
around the room. 

"er, ACE must have misinterpreted my request."

"and all this?? " bill pointed at the pentagram on the plotter.

"I guess once ACE decided it THOUGHT it knew what it was supposed to be
doing, it must have gotten all the info off of the web. Prolly got a piece
here and a piece there and put it all together, like it was designed to
do. " 

"And so it summoned a demon, who then, I'd guess, didn't like being
summoned, and turned you into a lizard? " 

"No, Not quite, actually. Actually summoning didn't seem to bother him. 
Tho' he DID seem a but confused at being summoned by a machine. Of course,
HE wasn't the only one, I can tell you!" 

"He?" 

"Uh, yes. He. That was obvious." 

"How could you tell?" 

"Erm, let me just put it this way, Demons aren't real big on clothes." 

"Oh." 

"Anyway, like I said,  the summoning didn't seem to bother him. No, It was
that SECOND spell... " lacking lips to whistle, Greg simply shook his head
"Now THAT... I'd like to know where ACE got the info to put THAT together!
BOY!! Was that demon mad! And frustrated too!! He couldn't get any
revenge. ACE has no soul to take, and isn't advanced enough to feel pain,
or much of anything really. That demon was steamed! Literally! He tried a 
few things, but ACE had him bottled up pretty good in that circle, and
the demon's attacks didn't seem to be real well suited to hitting a
computer program. He managed to blank the power, but the machines
rebooted themselves, and the fschk's fixed the file system damage. The
only permenant effect that I could see was that somehow all the file
modes got set to 666, but that was it. Of course it's kind of hard for me 
to type, ya'know, so I might have missed something" 

"Oookaaaay, so what happened to you? You try to chase off the demon or
something?" 

"ARE YOU KIDDING? I was hiding behind a filing cabinet the whole time!!
Wouldn't you? No, he just zapped me with a transformation spell out of
frustration, I think. He couldn't get much of his power out of that
circle, and I guess it was more effective on living things than
computers."

"Ah. I see." Bill nodded, as if he  encountered this sort of thing every
day. "So, what are  you anyway? A monitor lizard?"

"Huh?" Greg looked at what he was sitting on. "Oh. Hah hah. Very funny."

"I'm sorry. I'm, still trying to wrap my brain around this, and I can't
quite take it all seriously yet."

"Ah. Well, anyway in answer to your question, apparently I'm a Lesser
Wyrm, actually. Something like a little, tiny, wingless dragon. At least
that's what ACE says. I dunno where he got that, prolly the same place he
got the spells, I guess."

"Oooookaaayyyy... Which brings me back to my origional question... WHAT
did you ask ACE to DO??" 

"Ahhh.. Welll You know that email problem we've been having?"

"Yes?"

"Y'know... with the messages being scrambled up in the MIME conversions, 
and those messages from the Research Triangle labs being bounced coz of
those stupid MS-TNEF attatchments.."

"Yeeeeessss??"

"Well, you know I've been trying handle that for months. You even offered
me an extra three days vacation...."

"Uhhhhhhhh-Huuuuuhhh..."

"Well, I was getting frustrated trying to track that down, so I just told
ACE to do exactly what you said needed to be done..."

"Greg. WHAT... EXACTLY... Did you tell ACE to DO??"

Greg lowered his head down and looked as if he was trying to hide behind
his own tail, which was not entirely impossible. 

"Uhm... I asked ACE to fix the mail deamon."

Bill thought about this for a moment. Then he winced. "Ouch." 

Greg looked at Bill hopefully "Does that count?"