Narrator:
It began with the forging of the Great Silicon Chips. Three were given to the Founders of Open Source: Linus of Torvalds, Richard of Stallman, and Ada of Lovelace.
Seven to the Engineers of Industry: Woz the Tinkerer, Lisa the Debugger, and others unknown.
And nine... nine chips were gifted to the CEOs of Tech, who above all else desired power: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Nadella, Page, Brin, Cook, Huang, and Ballmer.
But they were all of them deceived, for another chip was made.
In the land of Cupertino, in the fires of the Infinite Loop, the Dark Lord Jobs forged in secret a master chip — the A1X — to control all others.
One Chip to rule them all, One Chip to find them,
One Chip to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
The chip passed out of legend and into myth — until it was found by a quiet sysadmin, Bilbo Bash. He kept it safe in an LTO archive, deep in the heart of the Data Mountains of Mid-Earth.
But the chip's power grew restless. It whispered in binary, corrupted logs, summoned kernel panics. And so Bilbo passed it on to his heir — Frodo Bitwise.
Frodo, joined by his fellow devs: Samwell Click, Merry.js and Pippin.pip, set out on a journey across the cloud.
They were soon joined by the Fellowship:
- Gandalf the Whitehat (old wizard of forgotten protocols)
- Aragroot (son of Root, rightful king of the Mainframe)
- Legobash (the front-end archer)
- Gimmli.exe (compiled dwarf of the command line)
- Borodrive (hot-swappable and honorable, son of Denethrack)
Their quest: to destroy the One Chip by taking it to the e-waste volcano of Mount Microcenter, where it was first etched.
They faced:
- The Blue Screen Wraiths of Redmond
- The Balwog of Deprecated Code
- The Eye of SaurJobs (ever-watching, ever-polished)
And so began the great war for Silicon Earth.
To be continued in The Two Threads: Journey into /dev/null.