I did, in fact, literally say hypothesis, silly.  But the thing is, it feels right.  At least right enough to see if there's a local dryad who would like to help with botany experiments.  Solar-powered fruit magic, anyone?

...Anyway.  Maybe some shell scripting would help with some of the things that have been annoying me.  Or at least the metaphor thereof.  Hmm.  The annoying part is that I'm still going to have driver-related problems, isn't it.  Or ABI problems.  One of those things.  Because where I keep tripping over my own two metaphorical feet, is in the bit where I actually translate most of my thoughts into effected actions, so if I just.  Make that a shell invocation instead...

I mean, I was already thinking about AR.

But dammit, I should not be having this much trouble with light sources.

It's kind of ironic, really.

A pause.

Regardless.  Yes, I think I could use shell scripts to great effect.  Or, uh, pseudocode in the same general language family.  Which for some reason had slipped my mind.  So!  Thanks for reminding me!

...I am now trying to remember if I've ever had a clue how networking works.  And wishing I'd read the rest of whatshisname's series where someone with bare-metal sorts of experience in the field gets dropped into wizard-land and reinvents compilers.  But mostly I am trying to figure out how the hell to -

Well, I suppose I could always run the thing headless.

...Though that has too many wrong associations, damn it.

Anyway.  Time to try echo.

It's a bizarre sort of mental twist to make, but it's at least one that she knows to believe in, now.  She hadn't, before - and apparently that made all the difference, in whether it worked.

$ echo "This is a test; this is only a test."

What, without defining any sort of operating system, encoding, or anything else? No hardware to run the command? Just demanding into open air?

...Nothing seems to happen.

The Linux-alike CLI is implicit in the invocation; can't you see the $?

Magic says: Fine.

This is a test; this is only a test.

It's clearly anchored to Alex- Running on the same hardware as the Foundation-ward, as it were.

Interesting.

$ ls -la

...This is either a great idea, or a horrible one.

$ cd /

$ ls -la

Because, well.

Breaking out of the virtualization to the root hardware oughtn't be quite as simple as starting from root and going

$ cd ../

But.  There's no reason it shouldn't be that simple, because it's not like magic has been gone over by security engineers.

So what happens when she attempts to move the shell to a working directory outside of herself?

Directory not found

...It's right.  There.  Upwards and outwards from the root of herself.  So go.  Up!  Pop off the top of this tree into the heap that holds it, or whatever!  There's ambient magic!  You can run on it just fine!

(...Don't make her start fiddling with environment variables.  You won't like her when she has to start fiddling with environment variables, no sir.)

So.  Is she going to have to start fiddling with environment variables, or attempt to understand whatever the fuck Docker is, or whatever, you [expletive expletive expletive] shell program?  Or are you gonna WORK AS SHE DAMN WELL INTENDED!

$

But it's only there for a moment before it vanishes.

...Right.  The thing where mana she's not in close contact with seems to vanish from her senses.  That's really quite annoying.

Now.  She has an open shell on the universe machine.  What she has lost is the connection to that shell.  So what is she going to do about that...

Well.  Re-establish the connection, obviously.  But the question is how that is best accomplished.

SSH requires...

Oh, bother, she really ought to go kill that shell if it isn't encrypted.

But first:

$ ping alexshell.universemachine

Is it even alive?

Destination host unreachable.

...Yeah, she was kind of expecting that.

What if she tries...

$ ping universemachine:Alex'sshellprompt

?

It'd make more sense for it to be a port, anyway.

...

$ ping universemachine

, dammit, that is definitely there.

Oh fuck you.

$ ping 127.0.0.1

?

Response received in < 1 ms

Well, at least the problem isn't there.

$ ping 192.168.0.1

?

...So there is something like enough to a router, based on her assumption thereof, that she could quite likely poke.  Interesting.

$ ssh 192.168.0.1

Assuming really hard, don't fail her now.

Connected.

She feels something fuzzy at the edge of her senses.

!

$ pwd

(Which, for clarity's sake, stands for Print Working Directory.)

Noosphere

There's an extra slow, steady drain on her mana coming from this connection.

...Well, if that's what that feels like, then she can be pretty confident there's not an open shell just floating around - if it requires extra mana to realize something like this, then when the connection dropped it would promptly have run out.

...Right?

Aaaaanyway.

She's gonna just.  Check.  Real quick.  After some Googling of CLI stuff.

$ arp-scan --localnet timeout = 1

1 light-millisecond of scanning should probably not -- she remembers the 500-mile emails just in time and doesn't actually start the process.

$ arp-scan --localnet timeout = 20ns

Specifying units differently from the default of milliseconds will likely require more effort to pull together, but not poking every magic-sensitive in the country if not the continent is probably worth the effort to establish.  (As it happens, light-nanoseconds are curiously close to US feet, and the shell can't have gone very far from her no matter what distance this unltimately measures.  (For all she knows, with it being the noösphere, she should've denominated it in cuils.)  But there's mana in physical space that she wants to query, so physical units she'll use.)