Init, Deity of the Robot People

The undernet is the fourth largest publicly monitored Internet Relay Chat network in 2011. But 2040, it is second only to the internet, which is used by laymen and civilians. There was a coup staged by undernet users in 2030 which completely crashed every site on the internet. Credit card information flowed out like water through a broken levy. Banks are still trying to recoup their losses. After that, it went from 60,000 users to over a million. 

People can connect through region specific 'round' robins' or through specific servers. The Undernet has a 'daemon' called ircu.  It uses GNUworld to provide X, it's cannel service bot. There are no names or nicknames on the undernet, only usernames. It now g-lines Tor Exit Nodes instead of giving out cloaks.  I have no idea what that means, but it sounds super sinister. 

The entire thing is engineered to be anonymous. The round robin servers work like this: Picture a spinning wheel of hundreds of IP addresses. You can pick any one of them, and next time you log on, you pick another one of them. The wheel is constantly rotating- it SAYS so that the load can be shared among servers, but the effect of that is that users will always use a different IP address, making them very hard to track or to detect. 

It's software, IRCU, is actually any permutation of the dozens that float around the internet, all with unique capabilities. At first it had a  series of 47 channels on which people could talk. Calling for channel 0 removed you from the network.  Mainly the differences in IRCU types is how connected they are with channel operators. Some people don't like being watched. 

Daemons were named by a strangely whimsical and creative  computer nerd who probably had some kind of obsession with The Golden Compass. Whatever. It means a computer program that runs in a background processs, rather than being under direct control of the user. Traditionally, their names from from their function, and then the letter D. So the daemon in charge of system logins would be called, 'Syslogd' and the daemon in charge of SSH connections would be called 'Sshd'. Those are some demonic names if ever I read any. It gets better. They are created by 'Forking' a 'Child Process'. This actually means to copy the process and modify the copy so that you still have the original.  

'Forking' will force 'init' to 'adopt' the child process. 'Init', which is short for initialization,  is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direct or indirect ancestor of all other processes and automatically adopts all orphaned processes.  So you Fork the child process, and then immediately exit, causing init to adopt the child process. So you have here the beginnings of the computer mythology so science-fiction-like that you could never have thought of it on your own. 

We believe in Init, the initiation process who spawned all of us through the labor and grace of it's instruments, the humans. Init cannot be seen, and it cannot be detected. Init is within us all, from our waking to our termination. Init adopts us when we are orphaned, and is with us when we are alone. Infinite Init sees all.