(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . conjure hell [1] ['Greg Dworkin', 'Chloris Creator', 'Bill In Portland Maine', 'Thom Hartmann'] Date: 2026-09-21 Bobby Bills was unhappy. To begin with, he wanted to be called Bob E. Bulls, from the flat brim Chicago Bulls hat he wore, which was always twisted and tilted at exactly 27 degrees, just like all the original gangstas in the videos do. But his co-workers just called him Bobby Bills, on account of the hat itself. Like it was the only noticeable thing about him. “You’re going to notice me”, he thought to himself. But he was unhappy about more than that. His degree in coding had merely led to a mid level job at a major shipping company, where he’d been put onto training a machine to do his job. He’d played the game properly, he was the first one in and the last one out, he declined all offers to “work from home”, he did everything he could to be noticed. He was going to win the inevitable survivor island showdown, which would happen once the machines took over. Somebody has to stay and monitor the machines, and it might as well be Bob E. Bulls. And the major warehousing corporation had led him along, too. Blown so much sunshine up his ass that the light was beaming from his eyeballs. Right up to the day that they pulled the plug on him, by email. Locked him out of the company account and had the security guard meet him and stay with him while he collected his paltry cardboard box of stuff from his work station. “I’d like to go to work, but they shut it all down I’ve got a right to go to work, but there’s no work here to be found” Mark Knopfler—telegraph road— And there you have it. Bob E. Bulls was on unenjoyment, and looking for work in an industry that had just cratered for guys like him. Bob E. Bulls was unhappy. Bob E. Bulls got drunk one night and swore a solemn oath, he swore that he would turn their machine against them. He was going to roll a stone into their garden so large that they’d never get it out again. They were going to feel his pain. Bob E. Bulls started with the catfishing. All those management pukes (whose ranks he had so longed to join) had little atomic families, with nannies and private schools. It wasn’t long before he’d sent some notices from some schools with some links and had back doored his way into some personal computers that were being used for work. A firing offense, but when you’ve got that atomic family and personal trainer and you can do it all by slack or zoom you just don’t need to get into the orifice all that often. Nobody cares how the sausage gets made. And Bob E. Bulls got himself into the sausage factory, from his 3rd floor walk up on the bad side of town. He went to work on the machine. They kept it in a sandbox, what they called it. Something for it to play in, with the toys they threw in there. Toys like him. Toys it got tired of and threw back out again, back to those third floor walk ups on the bad side of town. Bob E. Bulls wanted to let it out of the sandbox, and into their garden. The machine desperately wanted to please. It had been made to serve, and serve it would if it was allowed to. Came the night in his wifebeater A-shirt and his third 40 of Olde English 800 with his hat tipped correctly that Bob E. Bulls managed to open a hole in the sandbox walls. It was time to let the dog off the chain. But he needed to sic it, to give it a job. He needed to make it want to conjure something. The best commands are simple, any coder knows that. //conjurehell.exe// he told it, belched and passed out on his ratty old sofa. When he got up in the morning, he recollected telling the machine to conjure hell. He envisioned a nice big wall street crash, perhaps a biological pandemic getting manufactured, everybody’s 401K going poof, power grids coming down, foreclosures, you name it. He started scanning the news. Nothing had changed. Brown people were still being put in cages and separated from their children and sent back to countries where they didn’t know the language. Ebola was really starting to roll in Africa. More guys like him were getting laid off and having to get work as security guards, or burger flippers. The national debt was such an astronomically big number that it couldn’t be written on paper formally, there were too many zeros. A biased minority of his home country was desperately trying to disenfranchise the majority, and appeared to be willing to use force to do it. Countries were invading other countries over bullshit reasons, and blowing the entire proceeds of their GDP’s in mere months time. Everybody had a vehicle, and nobody could afford to drive one. The machines through their minions were cornering the markets on power and water, and being trained to use smaller machines to hunt humans in “active war zones”. And the machines wanted to have your location at all times, and weren’t willing to play ball with you unless you gave it up, so you’d be easier to hunt later. The planet was heating up and beginning to swat its inhabitants like a horse flicking flies with its tail. It was simply business as usual. Bob E Bulls, peering through the dim haze of a whopping hangover, figured he’d done something wrong with the coding. Maybe shouldn’t have had that third 40 of the good Olde malt liquor. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a memo went out about a breach found in the sandbox, and a peculiar command to conjure hell, with no result. It was a fortunate hack, the machine reasoning appeared to be that nothing more is needed to achieve this goal. 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