Genesys: EULA For The Universe

Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.

Genesys: EULA For The Universe

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Software and hardware He created them. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the garbled video display. The Spirit of God was moving over the waters, searching for the power switch, so He could reboot the Universe in Safe Mode, get to the desktop, and reconfigure the screen resolution.

Then God declared some global environmental variables by saying, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God assigned the value of “good” to the light; and in binomial fashion God partitioned the light from the darkness. God called the light Day (let light = Day = 1), and the darkness he called Night (let darkness = Night = 0). And there was Evening (0) + Morning (1) = Day (1).

And God said, “Let there be a FIRMAMENT in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

Now, in the beginning, the Universe was not plug and play, so when God tried to install the new firmament device the “Found New Hardware Wizard” appeared and told God to insert any media (such as compact discs) that may have been provided by the manufacturer.

God created a CD-ROM with the appropriate device drivers and inserted the disk in the proper drive, but the “Found New Hardware Wizard” refused to install the new firmament device drivers because God was not logged on as an administrator or as a member of the Administrators Group.

God rebooted the Universe, logged on as an Administrator and attempted to manually install the device drivers necessary to operate the new firmament hardware. Another Wizard appeared and informed God that Non-Plug and Play devices are installed using the “Add Hardware Wizard” in Control Panel: “If you want to manually install device drivers, you must use the Device Manager. Before manually installing device drivers, you should consult the device documentation provided by the manufacturer.”

“I AM the goddamned manufacturer,” shouted God, displaying his first episode of WRATH, which later (in the Dark Ages) would be called “Dies Irae” and would also be set to a catchy tune bearing the same name and chanted by cowled monks, centuries before the I-POD era.

According to Genesys, God manually installed the device drivers necessary to operate the new firmament hardware on the Second Day. Given what we know about the evolution of the Earth’s operating system through the carbon dating of fossilized computer components and peripherals, it is ludicrous to imagine a device as complex and as intelligently designed as the firmament being manually installed in a single, twenty-four-hour calendar day. Indeed, cosmologists assure us that the “Days” in the Bible’s account of Creation actually represent Epochs spanning millions if not billions of years, which would explain how God had time to read the necessary documentation at the Help & Support Center, visit the Software Solutions Center, download and update the firmament 1.1 drivers, perform the necessary workarounds to circumvent the auto-installer, copy DLL files from the installation CD, reboot, phone Bangalore thrice for 24/7 tech support, reboot again, reinstall the operating system to eliminate Spyware, do a system-wide virus scan, reattach the new firmament hardware, then plug and pray. Most authorities agree that it is poetic license on the part of the authors of the Pentateuch to call this vast stretch of computer maintenance time One Day.

And God saw that it wasn’t very Good, but He also saw that the glitches and bloated code could probably be overcome by aggressive marketing.

And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.”

And it was so. Furthermore, instead of selling his creations outright or giving them away, God created EULA (the End User Licensing Agreement), giving mankind the right to install, use, access, display and run only ONE (1) copy of His Products, and then limited the license rights to the first THIRTY (30) days, after which mankind would be required to perform Mandatory Activation, thereby preventing unlicensed or illegal uses of God’s creations.

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.

And God saw that it was Good, because now He had a 90% installed base, meaning any other Deities with competing products would have to make their creations backward compatible with God’s operating system. Hah!

And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and lights and icons on the taskbars, toolbars, and desktops, and little yellow icons shaped like a shield that light up when it is time for you to perform a security update.”

Then God made swarms of living creatures, birds, sea monsters, beasts of the field. And everything that creeps upon the ground, and dancing paper clips and little animated puppies who pop up and ask you what you’d like to do today. And each of God’s creatures was tagged with a field programmable microchip tracking device so that God could keep track of all the good things He had made and charge people who wanted to license them.

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply (according to the terms of the EULA) and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth,” and also sternly warned them that they might need to reactivate their products if they modified them in any way.

Then God said, “Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness; and let him have administrator privileges over certain parts of the operating system, access to hidden files, and even power to edit the Registry as long as he is careful to make a backup first.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God likewise created male and female connectors, components, and peripherals so that mankind could think about sex whenever he plugged cables into ports, inserted prong A in socket B, or connected devices to his system.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply (according to the terms of the EULA), and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth, including the dancing paper clips and animated puppies, which you can configure by accessing Tools/Options/Customize, then click on the ‘Puppy’ tab.”

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being in front of his own flat panel monitor. And the LORD God made a new operating system called “Garden of Eden 1.0,” with wallpaper for Mankind’s desktop, where he put the man whom he had formed.

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “I hereby assign you Power User privileges and permissions so that you may freely access every icon and object on the desktop and view the code for all of the programs I have given you, but the Source Code of Good and Evil you shall NOT view, for the day you view it you shall DIE.”

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone with nothing but porn sites and stock portfolios and pop-up ads. I will make a New User, a helper fit for him.”

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man while he was at the keyboard, and while he slept, God took one of Man’s passwords and added a New User Account to Man’s system with its own desktop, documents and settings and password–all made into a User ID He called WOMAN and brought her to man.

Therefore a man leaves his father and his motherboard and cleaves to his wife, and they become one User.

And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed, even though they were unprotected by firewalls, antispyware or antivirus software.

Now the MyDoom Serpent (a pernicious type of virus, also known as a “worm”) was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not open any attached file on the Garden of Eden desktop’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may open any object and view any attached file but God said, ‘You shall not view the Source Code of Good and Evil which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you view the Source Code your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

So when the woman opened the file and viewed it; and she also gave some to her husband, and he viewed it. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked and unprotected against viruses; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves firewalls with Wi-Fi Protected Access and PGP encryption technology..

The LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”

And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden chat rooms, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you read the Source Code of the files which I commanded you not to view?”

The man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me the Source Code, and I read it.”

Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The MyDoom Serpent beguiled me, and I opened the attached files containing the Source Code.”

Now God was extremely pissed off and cursed the worm for infecting the users and His operating system.

Furthermore God said that he would put enmity between users and programmers, vendors and support personnel. To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing and in installing any new program; in pain you shall bring forth any new documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations; yet your desire shall be for new programs, and their glitches shall rule over you.”

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have viewed the Code of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not view it,’ corrupted are the sectors of your hard disk because of you; in toil you shall deal with computer malfunctions all the days of your life; viruses and Trojan Horses, spam and spyware it shall bring forth to you.

By the sweat of your brow, you shall install updates, reboot, read bad Code and pop-up ads for Propecia and Levitra till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are a dust of 1s and 0s, and to dust you shall return.”

The man called his wife’s name Eve 1.0, because she was the motherboard and Source Code of all living things.

Therefore the LORD God sent them forth from the Garden of Eden 1.0, to till the ground and work the desktop from which he was taken.

He drove out the man; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword and strong passwords and hardware firewalls which turned every way, to guard the entrance.

Only later did Man discover that “God” was not really a deity, but was only a Microsoft executive, a false god laboring under the delusion that he was the Supreme Being of Software. As luck would have it, the one true God runs the Universe on Unix, which is why the IT Archangels refer to it as “the Unixverse.”

For centuries, Man labored on the earth until he was liberated by the Messiah, Linus Torvalds, the Linux operating system, and the Open Source software movement.

Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling