Vox Mentis

Ok, well. It at least displays something. What about mouse or mic input, does it respond to anything at all or are you going to have to look at the computer brains?

Nothing's responding, just the blinking cursor up there mocking you.

Sub out hard drives until you get one that lets you have a functioning keyboard.

You start swapping out drives. Turns out some of them have problems in the BIOS and some have holes in the boot loader. By the time you get to one that doesn't, and you have an actual responsive command prompt, you have a sneaking suspicion of what you'll find next, which is then confirmed: all the useful commands are broken. You sigh deeply, hanging your head, and just about give up there, but you look up:



And you somehow find the strength to continue. You begin searching for bugs. There's one in each level. One deliberate flaw in each layer of software that lies between the screen and the ECHO command. There's so many layers - it's kind of crazy, how much code sits behind ECHO. You hadn't appreciated that before. There are scripts and libraries and modules and compilers and assembly code, one built on top of the other. Technically, none of it is essential; you can accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers do is distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.

Finally every bug in the commands are fixed. The keyboard is responding, the prompt is waiting for your input. What do you type?