After one of the quickest local elections ever seen, the Labour of Varati has been defeated as the controlling faction of COL 285 SECTOR IX-T D3-43, with an unprecedented swing in favour of the pro-technology, pro-science, pro-reason Canonn Interstellar Research Group.
Following the announcement of the result, the Canon campaign HQ issued this press release:
We cannot thank the wise people of Phillifent Pont enough for giving their approval to Dr Arcanonn and his team of administrators and scientists. It takes courage to accept a faction that is relatively new to the system, but we’re glad they read our manifesto promises, liked what they saw and then took the leap in trusting our leadership.
We will not let them, nor the people of COL 285 SECTOR IX-T D3-43, down, and we hope that everyone will consider joining our science teams as trainees.
As you would expect, our representatives are already in place in the government offices at Phillifent Pont and are eager to begin the hard work of whipping the local government and the wider system into shape. The first matter they wish to attend to is the Varati Blue Public’s stewardship of Kagan Vision – which, as mentioned during the campaign, appears to be as a result of questionable payments that they’ve made to successive governments even during times of war. We are certain there has been some considerable impropriety here on all sides, and we intend to fix it as soon as we can.
However, there will be a short delay as we deal with some unforeseen issues that have arisen following the departure of Senator Hamilton of the Labour of Varati.
Upon our arrival, we discovered that none of the computer systems are functional and, apparently, the prime representative’s voicemail system appears to have been corrupted by the last message that was recorded by Hamilton himself.
We have our technicians on-site investigating the cause of the problems, who tell us it could be a few hours before they are in a position to start deploying fixes, as the systems are – to use a technical term – “completely fubar’d”.
As soon as these problems are remedied, we will get to work on serving the newest members of the Canonn.
I reached out to the technical team to see if they could shed any more light on these problems and, to my surprise, they responded with this status report, which I’ll append inline:
PHILLIFENT PONT COMPUTER CHAOS REPORT
Prepared by: Dr E. Dijkstra
We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like the whole office has been hit with that tech. plague that’s caused by the Unknown Artefacts – except this is very obviously man-made.
We’ve managed to get error logs off the storage chips from a few of the machines so far, and they all show the same pattern:
10:00:04 - User logged on: simmons.hamilton 10:00:04 - UDP Received from DC MW.C285IX-TD3-43.PhPont.DC1: Restricted Mode Required: Problem user 10:00:05 - Engaging Restricted Mode 10:00:05 - WARNING: PEBKAC ERROR, attempting fix... 10:00:05 - WARNING: PEBKAC ERROR - awaiting previous PEBKAC fix... 10:00:10 - WARNING: PEBKAC ERROR - awaiting previous PEBKAC fix... 10:00:11 - WARNING: PEBKAC ERROR - awaiting previous PEBKAC fix... 10:00:11 - WARNING: PEBKAC ERROR - too many PEBKACs, user session will be terminated 10:00:13 - FATAL ERROR - PEBKAC during shutdown sequence, this shouldn't happen. 10:00:14 - FATAL ERROR - PEBKAC during shutdown sequence, this shouldn't happen. 10:00:15 - FATAL ERROR - PEBKAC during shutdown sequence, this shouldn't happen. 10:00:18 - SYSTEM STOP ERROR CODE 0x1D107: General biological hardware failure detected. 10:00:19 - THE MACHINE ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DISABLED FOR 5 DAYS TO PREVENT POSSIBLE ERROR CASCADE 10:00:19 - SYSTEM SHUTDOWN
We thought at first that Simmons Hamilton was trying to hack his own office systems! Then – in the last few minutes, we received a message from Hamilton’s aide – Iain M Johnson – which explains it:
Dear Canonn – I can only apologise. If you have any sense, find a good market for scrap metal and ship this lot out as low-grade junk.
Simmons is best described as ‘feckless’ when it comes to anything more complicated than a blunt pencil, and he has shown a deft ability to destroy anything with a keyboard just by looking at it. It’s genuinely amazing to experience in the flesh.
In fact, I suggest you simply burn anything he ever touched – because it could be contaminated with even a tiny part of his cretinous genius.
I’m going for a long holiday now, hopefully as far away from Simmons as possible, otherwise I fear I might feed his eyeballs to him. Through a straw.
Good luck, and congratulations.
Iain M. Johnson – long-suffering aide to Sen. Hamilton.
So no – he wasn’t hacking – it seems that just by using these machines, he’s been able to bring everything to a standstill.
Thankfully the domain controller is still up and running, so we’re going to resurrect these machine accounts, delete Simmons’ account and then hopefully everything should be back up and running again.
Regards,
Dr E. Dijkstra
So let that be a warning – don’t ever let Simmons Hamilton near anything technological! Or if you do – make sure he’s in a straightjacket 🙂
Verity Gavroche
