In the dark, abysmal depths, there dwell timeless alien horrors that once roamed the void of space in the ages before the earliest building blocks of life congealed within the primordial waters of our doomed planet. From far beyond the stars, they came to this world when it was young and forged mighty edifices in the inaccessible places where nothing else could exist, there to rest in dreamful torpor for endless aeons.

Though the presence of these Great Old Ones has long been obscured from humanity, we are surrounded by subtle signs and portents of the secret horrors that will one day awaken and rise from the depths to blot out our feeble existence. An artifact that prophesies their grim return has come into my possession: the dread Cthubuntu Linux distribution—an arcane relic of ineffable power that originated in a dark time beyond reckoning. The incomprehensible apparatus is an otherworldly chimaera forged by alchemical arts unknown to modern science.

It came into my possession after the sudden death of my mentor, an elderly UNIX system administrator who was wise in the ways of ancient lore. He was the head of the IT department at Miskatonic University and was regarded by many as an expert in the history of computer science. He was killed when a chair flung by an unseen assailant collided with his head; the mysterious circumstances of his sudden demise generated much speculation among his friends and colleagues. He had no children and no family, so I was called upon to oversee the execution of his will.

The horror in the cardboard box



His office was like an ancient reliquary, and every nook and cranny was occupied by the historical treasures that he had accumulated over the long years. He had always planned to start a museum with his sizable collection so that he could continue sharing his love of computer history with future generations. I traveled to Arkham and arrived at Miskatonic with the intention of seeing that goal fulfilled. Amid the temporal debris in his storage room, I discovered a PDP-4, an Apple Lisa, endless piles of punchcards, and what appears to be the original draft of Charles Babbage's 1857 study entitled The Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows.

My eyes wandered down the rows of shelves, past the piles of ADB cables, and fell upon an unassuming brown cardboard box in a dark corner. It exuded a sinister aura that filled the room with an oppressive weight. As I walked closer to it, I could see strange symbols emblazoned upon its surface. I opened the box and paused for a moment before reaching inside to withdraw its contents. What emerged from that box will haunt my dreams until the day that I draw my final breath. It was a black CD case decorated with a visage of unparalleled grotesqueness.

The image on the case depicts an inhuman beast whose most appalling characteristic is a twisted face covered with a multitude of worm-like tentacles. It had scaly wings, dark dead eyes, and monstrous claws. No description can adequately convey the horror and depravity of the wretched thing. I knew immediately that this timeless and unearthly evil was not the product of any human imagination. My hands began to shake and my stomach heaved. I felt a rush of warmth in my throat and thought bitterly to myself that I should never have had that second helping of squid casserole during lunch.

I hastily stuffed the horrific case back into the cardboard box and began to examine the rest of the box's contents. I pulled out a ream of burned and shredded papers that were covered with writing. The meticulous penmanship revealed that the papers had been written by the old UNIX administrator, but I could make out very little of what he had written. He had attempted to render the notes unreadable by shredding the pages by hand and setting the remnants on fire, but had done so in a great hurry.

He must have uncovered some great dark secret about the artifact that had terrified him so fully that he had become unwilling to continue his study or allow others to learn what he had discovered. I could make out words like "doom" and "annihilation." There was another word that I saw repeated regularly throughout the destroyed documents: "Cthubuntu."

Though I could not decipher its meaning or even conceive of the proper pronunciation, the word hung like a heavy weight upon my mind and filled me with apprehension and dread. One of the page fragments that had escaped destruction had a date written in the upper corner—the notes had been written less than a week before his death, which meant that this research had occupied his final days.

The madness of the lab assistant



I set out to find the old administrator's lab assistant, with the hope that he could shed some light on the mystery. I was astonished when I learned from others in the IT department that the lab assistant had gone mad and was currently in lockup at the Arkham Sanitarium. I visited the poor soul in his cell and tried in vain to coax a coherent story out of him.

When I confronted him about the damaged notes, he began to convulse. He slammed his body repeatedly against the padded walls and emitted an inhuman wail that caused my ears to ring and sent cold shivers down my spine. The sound was like a cross between a broken fax machine and the cacophonous scream of foul winds rising from the pits of hell. I was reminded of the Erinyes from Greek mythology: winged deities of vengeance who dwelt in the depths of Tartarus and drove damned souls to madness with their screeches. His eyes were glazed with unyielding terror and he bore the harrowed look of one whose mind has been broken by some ineffable trauma.

His howl transformed into maniacal laughter and then became a rhythmic chant. He recited the entire manual page for the UNIX sed command and then slumped to the floor, completely exhausted by the ordeal. I was shaken by his outburst, but it did not extinguish my desire to learn what he and my mentor had discovered. I grasped his arm and pulled him into an upright position so he could rest his back against the wall. With further coaxing, he began to whisper and told me some of the secrets that I had come to discover. He spoke in riddles and punctuated his sentences with mad laughter, but I was able to assemble the pieces and draw a cogent thread of narrative from his obfuscated rambling.

He told a tale of antediluvian horrors and an ancient cosmic war that transpired long before the dawn of humanity. The tale is so wild and disturbing that I dare not dwell long upon the details. Even recounting mere fragments of the story fills me with dark trepidation. What follows is a portion of what I learned.

Two opposing alien races fought for dominion of earth until both were gravely weakened. Their final battle culminated in a terrible flood that submerged their cities. Both sides retreated into the depths but continued to fight a proxy war against each other by manipulating humanity. The mad lab assistant insisted that the true names of each faction were unpronounceable. One side he referred to as the Nephilim and the other side he called the Star-spawn. The Nephilim had created an insidious fortress deep within the bowels of the earth beneath a place that is known today as Redmond. The Star-spawn took up residence in the sunken city of R'lyeh where their master—the monstrous figure that adorned the CD case—lay sleeping.

As the centuries passed, the Nephilim used subtle trickery to corrupt humanity. They amassed enormous power over the economic markets and gained control over the dominant technology used by humanity. The Star-spawn moved more slowly, but soon began to fight back by supplying their human minions with new technology that liberated them from their servitude to the Nephilim. The CD in that hideous case is one such tool. It is the Cthubuntu Linux distribution, a powerful artifact passed down through the generations and wielded by the followers of the Star-spawn.

After learning this new information, I departed from the Sanitarium and returned to my hotel. My dreams that night were haunted by soul-crushing images of demonic figures locked in eternal battle. I saw monstrous Cyclopean cities and vast armies comprised of beings that defy description. I felt feverish when I awoke the next day and I found that my will to continue investigating was slowly crumbling beneath the weight of asphyxiating terror. I returned to the Sanitarium to continue questioning the lab assistant, but I found him dead in his cell. He had slashed his wrists and used his own blood to scrawl several lines of highly obfuscated Perl code on the walls of the cell before expiring.

The cell reeked with the stench of his corpse, which was embarking upon the earliest stages of putrification. I nearly gagged as I transcribed the Perl code into my PDA and I fled from the room after doing so. I hurried back to my mentor's lab at Miskatonic and used his computer to execute the deviant script. I do not understand the mechanics of the program, but upon running, it emitted the following text in the command terminal:

"P'nguin mglw'nafh Cthubuntu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

It was then that I decided to take my inquiry to the next level. I had to try extracting the CD from the horrifying case and boot a computer using it. What folly and hubris could compel a sane man to pursue such unwholesome mysteries? When confronted with the unknowable, I was beguiled by scientific curiosity and an overwhelming need to unravel the truth.

Booting Cthubuntu Linux



I shuddered at the prospect of touching that CD case again and seeing the image on its surface, but I eventually worked up the courage. I extracted the CD, inserted it into the drive, and booted the computer. The whole room was suddenly filled with an eerie, green glow as the screen was illuminated. The tentacled beast appeared on the display amidst a field of swirling stars. My horror grew as the system finished booting and the user interface was drawn. It resembled a conventional Linux distribution but with disturbing aberrations that reflected its otherworldly origin.

I have blocked from my mind much of what I saw, but there are a few details that I cannot purge from my memory. The cursor was a writhing tentacle and the misshapen windows, with non-euclidean geometry, oozed grotesquely across the screen as I dragged them. Instead of a trash can or a recycle bin for disposing of files, the desktop had a blood-stained sacrificial altar. I loaded a presentation program from a suite of applications called OpenOrifice and felt my sanity slip away as the slides in the program flashed before my eyes. It was the Star-spawn's plan for defiling earth, defeating the Nephilim, and subverting humanity.

This nightmarish revelation by itself was not enough to turn me into a gibbering lunatic like the poor lab assistant, but what I saw on the last slide pushed me to the very brink. Allies of the Star-spawn would soon reach earth in massive ships and begin implementing the plan. Many questions are still unanswered, but the final slide imparted to me an inescapable truth so secret and terrible that it had cost the life of my mentor and stolen the sanity of his assistant. I now disclose that truth to you even though there is no hope of stopping the onslaught: they are coming.

You can join me today in a microblogging reenactment of the War of the Worlds. To participate in the invasion, follow wotw2 on Twitter or Identi.ca and post updates about what you are seeing and experiencing as the world is destroyed by evil aliens. Don't forget to include the #wotw2 tag in your messages!