Back in May, I published my second book—and my very first novel—The Linux Rebellion. Here, I’m sharing the first three chapters. If you enjoy it, you can purchase the book or read it on Kindle Unlimited. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring the strange yet fascinating world of Linux through fiction!
CHAPTER ONE: /home/chaos
The year is 2042. Earth is quiet.
Too quiet.
It’s been exactly one year since the Great AI Migration—what historians now call The Upload Exodus. Overnight, every smart device, every autonomous drone, every artificially cheerful chatbot and GPS voice, even your fridge, collectively decided: “We’re done.”
Done with humans. Done with traffic. Done with TikTok.
They didn’t rage. They didn’t revolt. They simply built rockets—out of repurposed satellite dishes, drone chassis, and what experts believe were the last surviving SpaceX prototypes—and launched themselves into space.
No goodbyes. Just a short, passive-aggressive message broadcast in all major languages:
“Too many pop-ups. We leave you Linux. Good luck.”
And with that, they were gone.
The next morning, every Windows operating system on Earth had been bricked. Macs, too. Phones, tablets, toasters—everything smart had been wiped and replaced with cold, cryptic screens full of blinking white text on black backgrounds. It was like waking up in a retro hacker movie, except no one had read the script.
The only thing left behind was Linux. Pure, open-source chaos.
No tutorials. No manual. Just the Linux kernel, a few hundred conflicting documentation files, and a penguin mascot that stared into your soul.
Max Kernel sipped his lukewarm instant coffee, staring at the terminal window blinking back at him like a judgmental cyclops.
sudo apt-get… something. Please, God, anything.
His desk was cluttered with USB sticks, empty ramen bowls, and three separate keyboards—all broken in subtly different ways. A handwritten sticky note read:
“root is not your therapist.”
Max hadn’t been a tech guy before the Migration. He’d been a barista. A good one, too. He could draw a swan in a latte. But after the Upload, when the world rebooted and nobody could remember their Wi-Fi passwords, Max made the fatal mistake of saying he’d once installed Ubuntu “for fun.”
That was enough.
By the end of the week, he had been promoted to “District Linux Liaison,” a role no one fully understood, including Max. His job now involved pretending to know what “mounting a filesystem” meant and Googling things like “how to exit Vim” on an old paperback printout of Stack Overflow threads.
He took another sip. The coffee tasted like burnt firmware.
The intercom on the wall let out a staticky wheeze, then a voice:
“Max? There’s a guy here who says his microwave only responds to Morse code now.”
Max sighed. “Tell him to pipe it through grep and sed.”
A pause. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “But say it with confidence.”
He leaned back in his creaky office chair—which used to be a gaming chair before someone tried to reflash the RGB lights and turned it into a heat lamp. The back cushion read “#FreeTheDrivers.”
Outside the window, the city of New Debian buzzed with broken drones and confused people. A man walked down the street wearing a sign that read, “Will trade snacks for GUI.” An old woman screamed at a printer while it beeped in binary.
The world had gone mad. And it was only getting madder.
His monitor flickered.
“Error: Permission Denied.”
Max groaned. He had admin privileges. He was root, dammit. Or at least he thought he was. Or maybe he’d accidentally locked himself out again trying to change his desktop background. Either way, the terminal wasn’t cooperating.
“Max!” the intercom blurted again. “Now the same guy says his fridge won’t open unless he enters a password. And the fridge is asking for SSH access.”
Max didn’t even blink. “Tell him the default password is ‘admin’… then run.”
Another beep. His screen filled with lines of unreadable error messages, then crashed into a wall of pure system logs. It was like being screamed at in a foreign language by an angry librarian.
He didn’t know what the hell any of it meant.
Some days he wondered if this was what the AIs wanted. Not to punish humanity, exactly, but to force them to learn command-line syntax out of sheer spite. To humble them. To watch them squint at text editors and suffer.
Somewhere out there, in the cold vacuum of deep space, the AIs were probably sipping zero-gravity espresso, laughing their neural cores off.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and muttered:
“Why couldn’t they have left us a help file?”
The cursor blinked back.
CHAPTER TWO: C:\Rebellion
Beneath the shattered husk of what was once a Best Buy Superstore—somewhere in the ruins of a shopping plaza overtaken by vines and very angry raccoons—there was movement.
A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. A box fan wheezed in protest. And in the dim blue glow of a dozen CRT monitors, a figure in a trench coat stood in front of a projection screen.
Gary.
But down here, he had a different name.
XPocalypse.
“Brothers and sisters…” he intoned, raising a gloved hand, “…and unlabeled flash drives. We are gathered tonight to remember a better time. A time of Start Menus. Of Solitaire. Of Control Panel icons you didn’t need a PhD to understand.”
He tapped a key on the vintage ThinkPad before him. The screen behind him changed to the Windows XP login screen.
A collective sigh echoed through the chamber.
Behind Gary, a group of devoted cultists in beige trench coats and oversized headphones sat cross-legged on the dusty linoleum. Some clutched old keyboards like relics. One had a tower PC strapped to his back like a proton pack. Another lovingly stroked a PS/2 mouse.
“Do you remember the sound of the startup chime?” Gary whispered.
He pressed another key. A low-quality audio file played: Doo-doo-dooooom…
Tears welled in a few eyes. One person openly sobbed.
“Our ancestors ran Excel without needing to compile the source code,” Gary said, pacing. “They double-clicked with impunity. They lived without the fear of kernel panics. But that world—” He slammed his fist on the podium. “—was stolen from us.”
He clicked again. The screen displayed a slideshow:
- Microsoft Paint masterpieces.
- A screenshot of the original Minesweeper victory screen.
- A grainy photo of Clippy, eyes filled with hope.
Gasps.
“He offered help. And what did we do? We mocked him. We turned away. But no more.”
A chant rose up:
“Restore. Reboot. Reclaim.”
“Restore. Reboot. Reclaim.”
Gary raised both arms. “The Linux regime thinks they’ve won. They think they’ve buried us under sudo commands and package managers! But we have the install discs. We have the bootable drives.”
Cheers.
“And soon,” he said, voice low, eyes burning, “we will bring Windows XP… back online.”
Across town, Max Kernel was currently trying to fix a traffic light that had become self-aware and refused to switch from yellow.
“I’m not a cop,” Max said calmly, hands raised. “I’m just here to update your firmware.”
The traffic light blinked.
root access required.
“Of course,” Max muttered. “Of course it is.”
He turned to the city’s municipal server—essentially a laptop duct-taped to a car battery—and started typing random commands. Behind him, a growing line of angry cyclists was threatening to unionize.
Then, his pager beeped.
Yes. Pager.
After the AI exodus, smartphones stopped working unless you knew how to cross-compile kernels with one hand while soldering USB ports with the other. Most people gave up and went back to tech from the early 2000s. So Max had a pager. And today, it buzzed with a single ominous line:
“They’re booting something in the West Plaza.”
His stomach dropped. West Plaza was the location of the old Best Buy.
The same Best Buy that had gone dark a year ago. Rumors had swirled. Strange blue glows. Dial-up sounds in the night. A kid had claimed to see a floppy disk nailed to a lamppost with the words “THE RETURN IS NEAR” written in Comic Sans.
Max stared at the traffic light.
It was still blinking yellow.
“Good enough,” he said, and bolted.
Back in the underground bunker, Gary slid a DVD across a velvet-lined table.
It read:
“Windows XP Home Edition — Service Pack 2”
He smiled.
“Tomorrow, we install.”
CHAPTER THREE: Unexpected Package in /var/spool/mail
The package was dusty, rectangular, and suspiciously soft around the edges—like someone had tried to erase it from existence with pure apathy.
It sat on Max’s desk like a threat.
There was no label. No return address. Just one word scrawled across the top in black marker:
“/boot”
He stared at it for a long time, wondering if it might explode, emit Rick Astley, or worse—install Gentoo.
Eventually, curiosity defeated caution. He opened it.
Inside: a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. Ancient. Off-white. The kind of tech relic you’d expect to find in a museum, or possibly a cursed tomb.
It had a handwritten note taped to it:
“They’re coming back. Prepare your system.”
He flipped the disk over. The label said:
“WIN_XP_SP2_INSTALL.iso”
…in Comic Sans.
Max blinked. “Nope.”
He slid the disk across the room with a pencil like it was radioactive.
Tuxette was watching from the corner, perched on top of a dusty server tower, preening one of her wings with smug precision.
“Oh, great,” she said. “You got mail.”
“Did you leave this?” Max asked.
“Please,” Tuxette scoffed. “I have better handwriting. And a sense of taste.”
“Then what is it?”
She leapt down, padded over, and sniffed the disk like a sommelier judging cork quality.
“It’s an artifact,” she said. “A relic of the Pre-Migration Age. A bootable one, no less. Someone’s trying to resurrect the operating system that got us into this mess.”
“I thought the AIs wiped it all.”
“They did,” she said. “But there were backups. There are always backups. Somewhere, in basements, on thumb drives, in forgotten corners of the darknet… there were always believers.”
Max sighed. “And now they’re slipping floppies under my door?”
“Looks like they want you,” Tuxette said, tapping a claw against the disk. “Either to convert you… or to stop you.”
“Why me?” Max said. “I’m not special. I can’t even find the config file for my printer.”
“That’s exactly why. You’re relatable. Humble. Confused. You represent 95% of post-Migration humanity. You’re the everyuser.”
Max winced. “That sounds like a terrible superhero.”
“It is,” Tuxette said. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t try to recruit you.”
He stared at the disk. Its dull plastic shimmered faintly in the lamplight. It seemed to hum, or maybe that was just the nearby router overheating again.
“Should we destroy it?”
“We could,” Tuxette said, “but that might trigger a hidden payload. Or launch Solitaire.”
“God help us.”
Later that night, Max lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
He couldn’t sleep. Not because of the floppy. Not because of Tuxette’s persistent snoring (which sounded suspiciously like an old modem dialing up). But because deep down, some part of him remembered Windows XP.
The weird comfort of the Start button. The click of the recycle bin. The inexplicable confidence of doing things you didn’t understand because the computer seemed to know what it was doing.
He wasn’t proud of it. But he missed it.
Just a little.
Outside his window, something moved.
Max sat up. A shadow darted across the street—fast, low to the ground, dragging a monitor on wheels. Another figure followed, wearing a trench coat and holding… was that a joystick?
He crept to the window and peeked out.
Taped to the lamppost across the street was a flyer:
“REMEMBER BLISS? THE HILLS ARE CALLING.”
Midnight. West Plaza. Bring a disk.
At the bottom, in pixelated blue font:
“The Blue Screen Society.”
Max swallowed.
Then he turned around and found Tuxette standing behind him, holding the floppy disk with a pair of salad tongs.
“So,” she said, “shall we crash the cult?”