A dorky genius, struggling financially and under his little wifey's thumb, goes for a quick trip to space with his best friend the knuckle-headed linebacker. They take a prototype spaceplane out for a spin. Their plans for a three hour tour are interrupted when the navigational computer gets the Blue Tickertape of Death.They're hopelessly stranded. Worse, the jock ate too many beans. At least the nerd is nowhere near his greedy creditors and especially his control freak wife. Then he discovers the horrifying reason why he hasn't made a plug nickel from his super duper invention.
In this thrillingly cheesy tale, they must not fail, they must not falter, and especially they must not be late for supper. Other than that, space pirates - enough said!
Albert reached to the console, and noticed that a piece of ticker tape was hanging out of a slot on the console. It was blue with black edges; this was not a good sign. He ripped it off, looked at it, and frowned.
"You can read them weird computer dots?"
"Of course. It says STOP 0x00000041 (0x00001000, 0x0000adfe, 0x00004000, 0x0004678f)."
"Wuzzat? Huh? Huh?"
The nerd sighed, reached under his chair, and retrieved a volume that rivaled the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. He thumbed through the error reference guide. "MUST_SUCCEED_POOL_EMPTY - the parameters are the size of the request that coughed up a hairball, number of pages used from nonpaged pool, number of requests big enough to make it blow chunks, and the number of pages available. We got gremlins in one of the kernel space drivers, and since it runs in Ring 0, the whole computer bugchecks, just because somebody wrote lousy code."
"You know I don't speak Swahili."
"It means we're up the crick without a paddle."
