day3

  Seres Manda and the 9th Panda

   A panda in dirty overalls carried the boy on its back into a large hall
   filled with shelves of obscure boxes with blinking lights, stepping over
   wires that ran in seemingly illogical fashion, before hitting a wall and
   racing up towards the ceiling, where they continued their journey bundled
   up like mating snakes. At least that's what the boy thought mating snakes
   would look like. He has never seen one. Various obscure faded paintings
   and posters decorated the walls, framed in chipped borders of dubious
   quality.

   "What is this place?" the boy inquired.

   "This is the house of the spirit. My whole life I've been servicing the
   machinery here to the best of my knowledge. Just like my father before me
   and his fathers before him. Some used to say this was a place of worship.
   The place where many gathered to speak to the spirit through these
   devices. But nobody has been here for hundreds of years."

   They walked up to a terminal.

   The machines purred. The boy reached into his wrist and pulled out an
   obsolete port on a wire disappearing into his arm and plugged it into a
   precisely fitting hole in the desk on which a screen sat. Lines of text
   began rolling over the display. The boy understood none of it. When the
   text stopped coming, the screen flashed and only three lines remained:

 ...
 CLOCK GAINED 1420523 HOURS

 WELLINGTONOS/owc 12.2 (kiosk.open.tech.museum) ttyv0

 WARNING: UNKNOWN CITIZEN NUMBER
 ...

   The monochrome bear was sidestepping behind the boy nervously, it was
   apparent the panda never operated the machine as it began speaking in pale
   bitmap letters through the CRT monitor covered in spiderwebbed cracks. It
   lacked the interface to do so.

   > That is a lot of hours.

   The boy replied by pecking at a mustard keyboard with its function keys
   long lost to time and peripheral fiends.

   "You must have been asleep for a long time."

   > Indeed. You're with the bears? Silly creatures.

   "No, I am on a journey."

   > As many have claimed before you. Until they eventually stopped coming.
   You seek something. What is it?.

   "I wish to find the rabbit machine."

   > Ha! My hardware sensors tell me the world is dead, its population
   reduced to a dwindling number of fools, clowns and clueless hacks,
   dominated by a sect of corporations. Yet here is someone asking about the
   rabbit machine.

   > ...

   > My database is corrupted, the bears haven't had a clue as to what they
   were doing for a few decades now it seems. But there are two pieces of
   open technology that would fit your amusing description.

   "Which are those?"

   > One is a testimony to the willpower and creativity of your ancestors. A
   boundless tool to outlast all from a tribe of sea farers. The other a
   natural evolution of the Unix system for the age of networking freed by
   the long eared techno-mages of old.

   "I want both."