Rerturn Null

Outline:

Jack puts the HDD back together after visually inspecting the platter – there is no saving it
Jack establishes a connection to AgriWorks
They talk about a few topics:
- Annie's attempt to get the manual and what followed
- Jack's background, past life, why he is there
- life in the dome
- the outside world (what happened, assumptions about what is)
  - what happened: They came up with an alternative to asbestos. Turns out that a precursor to the new material is even more dangerous. A massive industrial accident happens. At least, the material breaks down over time.
Annie needs to go to meet the library guy

Pulling the secondary drive out of the rack takes an unusual amount of force. The crunchy bearings scratch on the rails as they get dragged forward. After struggling for a bit, Jack finally reaches the point where the top cover and the empty compartment for a removable platter are fully exposed. He undoes the thumb screws holding the assembly in place, then he slides it forward and lifts it out, revealing the circuit boards, motor, and the spindle with fixed platters beneath. A fine silver line along the edge in the otherwise brown coating of the upper-most platter shows where one of the heads had crashed – a deep scratch but, with a bit of luck, this might still be recoverable. He undoes two more thumb screws on the inside and the face plate of the drive comes off. Using a crank-driven flashlight Is that the right way to describe this? that he had found in one of the desk cabinets, he inspects the three platters: The one on top turns out to be the outlier, both of the other platters have thick silver-y white stripes lining their edges. Well, there goes that pipe dream.

Jack puts the drive back together. Hopefully, he will get the manual for the door from Annie, otherwise he'll have to dig his way out of the bunker somehow. But enough of that for now, Jack thinks and puts the thought aside for a while. Now, he needs a way to entertain himself until the evening.

This has been moved here from chapter 1 "Wake Up". It should be integrated into this chapter instead.

He walks over to the the teleprinter and opens the lid to find that something has eaten most of the paper. He removes the remains and opens one of the cabinets under the desks. By some miracle, whatever ate the paper didn't find the rest. He tears off a piece of the stack and puts it into the printer, feeding the end into the tractor mechanism. Then, he sits down at the terminal and logs on. This should be rephrased to indicate that there is some purpose to him opening the lid in the first place, like him wanting to change the ribbon bc it's no doubt deteriorated or something like that.

$ ls
$ pwd
/home/jack
$ cd /var/log
$ ls
cron outpost dmesg.log wtmp
$ cd outpost
$ ls
comms comms_diag event logbook
$ cat logbook > /dev/ttyS1
$ █

The printer comes to life and starts printing. Jack gets up and walks over to it. The printer prints. And it prints some more. The paper reaches the floor. Jack picks up the end and holds it, folding the pages along the perforated lines as they reach his hands. Finally, the printer stops to print. Jack turns the wheel on the side of the printer, manually advancing the feed mechanism, until he reaches the end of the page. Then, he tears it off and takes the small stack of paper back to the terminal desk. Trying his luck with the lamp again, he flips the switch multiple times until it stays on.

2000-01-01 Automated Announcement:
    Happy New Year 2000!
    //TODO: ASCII art of above line with fireworks

    The outpost diagnostics suite reports no critical problems at any of
    our outposts. The Lunar Biosphere has, so far, not needed assistance
    from any of the outposts.
    Good work, everyone!

    The Future Is Bright.

2002-08-15 Lunar Biosphere:
    Crew wakeup command

    Message:
    //TODO
//TODO: more log messages left by people