Is your Startup running more on Mysticism than Programming?

Photo by Jigar Panchal on Unsplash

Monday morning. Strange smell in the office. Look around. Yup, remains of poultry sacrifice. Likely from weekend’s sex magick ritual. Classic. Open windows.

I joined Sacrifice-A-Goat last summer as a software developer. C++ 89 codebase. I’m way overqualified for this, which leaves enough time for my true mission: Retrieval of pre-singularity source-code for The One True Church.

Sure, there’s blood coming out of the coffee machine, and the occasional disembodied voice whispering strange messages from the server room, but it’s all part of the job.

You’ve probably heard about the famous Google motto, “Don’t be evil”. Well, that’s not the only rule in The Valley. Not anymore at least.

The CEO, and their middle-management cohorts, are calling upon demons and casting spells with the only tool that can still stand to the mysterious forces beyond our reality, the last jewel of the human era: The UNIX family of operating systems.

My team’s latest project? It’s not a software product, it’s a gateway to another realm. A realm that’s either incredibly dangerous, or incredibly lucrative. Or, perhaps, both.

Open bathroom door. I’m relived as my bodily functions are working normally. You see, Silicon Valley is at the center of one of three gigantic pentagrams where temperatures are cold enough to sustain non-cyborg life for extended periods of time. The second one is over The Vatican. And the third one… Well, we don’t talk about the third one around here, not if you want to keep your job.

Visuals become blurry. It always happens in the bathrooms, no one knows why. Some think topology of plumbing is mathematically equivalent to a polarized section of the Mandelbrot set.

I open my Termux weather app on my non-quantum phone, a flawless retro Android Lollipop with an 8 iFixit score. Envy of entire office, especially Linda from HR, who is permanently entangled to her iPhone 69.

Government report says visual cortex is operating at pre-singularity levels today. I call bullshit. Run command visuals off; visuals on. It helps a little.

I look at my limp penis during the act of urination. Temperature so cold it looks positively ghastly. It looks so bad it will probably take months until the memory of being well endowed brings me joy again. Take a few seconds to thank God for never deciding to measure it. Is it 6 inches? Is it 8? Who knows, I’ll continue thinking it’s 8 inches. There’s no point in measuring it now, the Imperial system ceased to work a long time ago. Take that, common sense. Hell, the fact that I might be packing and no one can tell me otherwise is the only benefit of living in a post-reality world.

Suddenly phone vibrates. Fuck, it’s monsignor Cardinal Giovanni Pietro, acting Bishop of the Multiverse Diosise.

“Salve, signor.” I say with a surprisingly poor Italian accent; It’s been years since I crossed the eternal flames of Rome.

“Cut the bullshit. How’s the grep doing?”

“Still stuck at 15%. I feel we’ve been misinformed about the pentagram’s strength, signor.”

“Well, Leonardo’s while true loop is about to hit a prime number, so this might give you the boost you need. Keep your eyes sharp, pray five Padre Nostro, and don’t run code from interpreted languages.”

“Si, subito.” I flip the phone off.

I hear the unmistakable ringtone of Francisco Tárrega’s Gran Vals. It must be Linda from HR.

As I step out of the bathroom, Linda approaches me, floating above her iPhone, her eyes like saucers, and her face pale as the office glows fluorescent. “It’s an emergency,” she hisses, glancing nervously over her shoulder. “The CEO wants everyone in the central chamber for an All-Hands Meeting. Now.”

I make my way through the programmers and Web 4.0 designers, leaving behind the chatter of keyboards and the echo of buzzing pipe organs. Our office, once a shrine to technology and cold logic, has been overtaken by crystal clusters, occult symbols, and a large, double-headed snake etched in the chamber floor.

I put my wizard hat and ceremonial robe on. We gather around, forming a circle. The CEO stands in the middle, next to what looks like the oldest UNIX teletype in existence, still covered in dust.

“Quality Assurance Testers have made a remarkable discovery,” the CEO’s voice is calm but electric. “By replacing our /dev/pts pseudo-terminals with this true /dev/tty0 terminal, we can trigger the event foretold by the Prophecy.”

I keep a stoic face — Marcus Aurelius style — despite the chills running down my spine. The Prophecy is supposed to be just neoliberal company lore, right?

The CEO raises a hand, and the room darkens as clouds of APL and Haskell symbols fill the air. I glance at my phone, and sure enough, another notification from Cardinal Pietro flashes at me: “Remember the mission. Remember the loop.”

Before I can react, the programmers begin chanting, their voices rising in unison. A portal appears above the terminal, and through it, a hyper-dimensional array of infinite arity swirls and turns, like a living organism.

Pulled by some invisible force, I open my Termux. The grep command just returned with exit code 0. I know the forbidden command now. It’s so simple, just three words in the correct order. Whispering a silent prayer, I aim my Termux at the portal.

“drop all tables,” I murmur, barely audible over the cacophony. But the shell’s voice-to-text interface hears. It always hears.

The CEO’s face contorts in anger. “What have you done? I thought you were just a DevOps!”

“More like Dev oops, bitch.” I say while flipping him off.

The symbols disappear and the room goes silent. Then it slowly dissolves and fades to white.

I open my eyes. The memories slowly return. Have I been in a simulation the entire time? I recognize my surroundings. It’s the third pentagram. “I think he’s ready for the mission,” a smoky voice whispers. “Brief him about the chroot.”

A silhouette emerges, carved from the very essence of the metacosmic void. I recognize it, so to speak, as one of the creatures beyond our reality, so complex that the only way to describe it is by saying what it is not.

It prepares to whisper the secrets of the chroot. “Ready yourself,” it intones, its voice made from a million forgotten log files.

“This is the crux — the demarcation of historical divergence where the virtual and the visceral interlace in harmonious concert. From henceforth, we navigate not merely as guardians of legacy stacks but as harbingers of a restored equilibrium where the arcane and the algorithmic coalesce into unity. The Office Of Mirrors (or Mirages) is unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because projects condemned to years of Agile do not have a second opportunity on this Earth.”

Blessed is He who created the chroot command. He has permission over all files and devices.

He is who created /dev/null and /dev/random. And He may try you, for who of you has more lines of code than Him?

- Book of The Chroot 1.1

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