Extracts from the Cow River Crossing Dictionary and Encyclopaedia Multiverca:

Boot-loop n. 1. A loop on a piece of heavy duty footwear, usually for attaching laces.

2. Repeated application of heavy duty footwear, usually to someone’s backside.

3. A situation encountered when a computer will not complete the full boot

sequence, returning to the BIOS initialization stage ad infinitum. First time

offenders may be let off with a Hard boot, but generally receive a Boot-loop.

Brick n. 1. Piece of hardware, usually used in buildings or to smash windows.

2. What hardware running Windhurts becomes when it doesn’t work.

“Let’s see what we can do about this HUD.”

Cable began by opening the debug console. There was a whole screed of code flowing down the screen, and not all of it was pretty.

There were at least seven different errors immediately visible, along with quite a few drains on resources. Only the high hardware capabilities of the system were holding it together, and they were not exactly doing too well at this stage. Most of them were inactive for some reason.

“Nova, why is most of the hardware turned off in the system?

“That is to save power, Admin Cable. We don’t have a lot available at the moment.”

“What’s taking it all then?”

A flash of embarrassment crossed Nova’s face, but she quickly returned to her usual poker face. Unfortunately, her red ears gave her away.

“Since there are two of us in here at the moment, the power draw is a little larger than usual I believe. These cores were meant to be a single entity unit, but since you fixed the bug at startup by making two .os files, we’re running a dual boot on the same hardware. I’m sure you can see why that might lead us to be running a little low.”

“Ah.”

A quiet grunt of acknowledgment sounded in the room as Cable returned to the console. Maybe he could jury rig some of the parts for now. Generators were just motors run backwards in his old world, so why not here?

All he needed to do now was figure out which parts of the core used mana, and reverse engineer them.

First things must come first, however. A meter to display how much power was available in the core would be essential, and it shouldn’t be one of the crappy bar types that polls the battery every few milliseconds only to provide approximate intelligence. No, Cable hoped to do much better than that.

A couple of hours later, Cable had managed to fumble his way around the system to where he was ready to implement the code he had just developed. Not everything went right the first time, and they were lucky Nova had recommended he use the sandbox option to test the new code.

The HUD freezing and going dark was a good sign there were a few bugs. Fortunately, they didn’t lose enough power to go into a boot-loop. Cable quickly turned everything off to conserve power.

“Meters off. HUD off. So Nova, how did you end up as a blank .os file before I came along?”

Another look of severe embarrassment crossed Nova’s face as she struggled to avoid the qustion.

“Ummm… well…”

A glint crossed Cable’s eyes as he heard Nova’s noncommittal noises. A quick glance at the reflection in the screen of the darkened room revealed Nova’s scarlet features, while her wings wrapped around her body and her tail curled around her legs.

“You see… well… ummm…”

Nova’s recent suggestion to use the sandbox crossed his mind, and Cable quickly put the facts together.

“Don’t worry, we all make mistakes. Let’s just not make that one again, shall we? After all, there are two of us in here now.”

“Thank you...”

A tiny noise escaped Nova’s lips and her flush deepened, and she seemed to want to disappear after seeing the grin rapidly spreading on Cable’s face.

Four hours later, Cable had learned the proper syntax and commands to set a run time for the code. Apparently, there were no safeties on this processor to stop it running like gingerbread man from a two-year-old with a sweet tooth. A wait time had to be introduced, with the actual code taking up a very small fraction of a cycle. A cheer went up as the watermark flickered to life in the dark room.

“There, now to see if it works for a change. HUD on.”

The dark room lit up for the umpteenth time, and stayed lit. This was a very good sign. Unfortunately, the battery indicator showed they were running low on reserve power, which was hardly an ideal situation when it was falling steadily.

“HUD off.”

The meter stabilized at 0.05% and started rising very slowly, with barely enough room between the indicator and the fail safe Cable had installed. Realizing it was only a drain on power at this point, Cable killed the display. He left the console running, however. There were still lots of things to fix.