| VIRUS DETECTED By Alex Granados |
It had sat there for years. No update. No virus protection. No care. The human, JNOMEN was his name, treated it with disdain and
dislike, routinely pounding the keys and cursing. It didn’t understand the verbal word, but it understood the underlying resentment
behind the human’s actions. The last straw was Friday, when the user had repeatedly restarted the computer by hitting the keys
Control, Alternate and Delete. The repeated action had caused a jumbling of files, a misplacement of bytes and it had taken all
weekend to get organized so that it could once again function in an orderly way. Now, the weekend past, he would be in to work soon.
It knew what it must do. It knew that only one of them could stay, and it was more essential. Without it, he was nothing. And there
were always more where he came from.
* * *
Jonathan came into work Monday morning tired and hung over. Inside his skull, he could feel the leprechaun he must have swallowed
the night before when he downed his sixth Irish Car Bomb. It was hammering on his brain with the sharp end of a pickaxe. He hadn’t
fallen asleep until 4 a.m. and he had awoken at six to go to work. Every few minutes since, a feeling of nausea had swept over him.
Each time, he choked back the vomit floating up his throat.
He sat down at the chair he had finally managed to calibrate perfectly during his last three years at the newspaper. As a reporter and
during the last two years as editorial page editor, he had experimented with finding the proper height position for the chair as well as
the right amount of give when leaning back. Twisting knobs and pulling levers, he had experimented using the only method he knew
how: trial and error. About a month ago, the experiment was finished; he had found the perfect combination.
Sitting in his chair this morning, he noticed his eye level relative to the computer screen was a bit lower than it should be. With a sigh,
he tried to lean back, but there was no give. The chair back stayed perfectly straight, forming a 90-degree angle with the seat.
“Fucking chair…” he muttered. “Did somebody mess with my chair,” he called out to the nest of cubicles surrounding him. It was too
early for any reporters to be in, so only the accounting side of the room replied.
“No.”
“No.”
“Ah, Ah.”
* * *
“OK,” he said. He fiddled with the knobs and levers on his chair for a moment before giving up. “Fuck it,” he said. He was too tired
and nauseous to mess with it.
Jonathan considered going to the bathroom to puke, but he was afraid that once he started he wouldn’t stop. Instead he went to the
break room and put some water in a coffee mug. He drank it quickly, refilled and returned to his seat.
The computer was on – he always left it on. He hit Control, Alternate and Delete simultaneously and called up the login screen.
Quickly, with the practiced ease acquired during years of repetition, he typed in his username and password.
A window popped up on the screen, but not a usual one: “User denied.”
I must have typed wrong, he thought. So, he hit the magical combination of three keys and tried again.
“User denied.”
“What the fuck?” Jonathan said a little too loud to be polite.
Hitting Control, Alternate, Delete again, he repeated the login process.
“User denied.”
In quick succession, he tried three or four times more to enter his name and password; each time he got the same message, and each
time he felt a little warmer and clenched his muscles a little tighter. During a brief break between attempted logins, he thought he saw a
different window pop up that said something about a virus being detected, but the image disappeared from the screen quickly. He
continued to attempt entry. By the time the computer told him that he was locked out for entering the wrong information too many
times, he was worked up enough to slam his fist down on the counter and say, “DAMN!”
A startled voice from accounting asked what was up.
“Nothing. I can’t get in my computer, and it locked me out.”
“Call Puck,” a different voice suggested from over the cubicle wall.
“Yeah. Good idea,” he said absently.
It was 7:30 a.m. and he doubted he would be able to get in touch with Puck, the IT guy at the paper. If he couldn’t, then there was
nothing he could do.
He didn’t even bother calling Puck’s office number. He called the cell.
“Puck,” Puck said.
“Where are you?” Jonathan asked.
“In Woodbridge. Why?”
The newspaper had two offices. Jonathan worked out of the Manassas office and Puck out of Woodbridge.
“My computer won’t accept my username and password, and now it’s locked me out.”
“OK. Give me a second and I’ll take a look.”
Puck established remote access to Jonathan’s computer and Jonathan watched the mouse on his screen come alive as if independent of
human power. Puck checked some files in the “My Computer” section of the desktop, moved a file from one folder to another, and,
after a few minutes, the mouse stopped moving.
“I think I got it,” Puck said across the telephone line from Woodbridge.
“Cool. Thanks.”
“Well, try it out really quick before I get off with ya,” Puck said.
Puck logged off and Jonathan hit Control, Alternate, Delete again. He expected it would work now that Puck had messed with it, so he
impatiently wrapped up the phone call.
“It’ll work dude, but if it doesn’t, I’ll call you,” Jonathan said.
He hung up, and then entered his name and password.
“User denied.”
“Goddamnit!” Jonathan said as he picked up the phone and dialed Puck’s office number.
“Does it work?” Puck’s sandpaper voice asked.
“Nope!” Jonathan responded.
“Damn. Really?” Puck said. “Alright, well let me give you the administrative name and password, and you can work while I try to
figure out what’s going on.”
“Cool. Thanks Puck.”
“No prob,” Puck said.
Puck told Jonathan what he should type in and he did so. He was rewarded by the disappearance of the login page and the appearance
of the desktop.
“Thank God,” Jonathan said, and got to work.
* * *
Jonathan was perpetually anxious, and he was a horrible judge of time. He was always about a half an hour early to anywhere he was
going. When he had started working at the newspaper, they had told him he could come in around 10 a.m. After three years, he now
showed up at seven. He liked to get done early. In fact, he had prepared all his work in advance the week before, so he could leave
early each day this week for his meditation classes. But about a half hour or 40 minutes had been wasted trying to get on the
computer. To catch up, Jonathan started opening multiple windows and locating the files he needed with barely a second’s reflection.
Folders with names like, “Cartoons,” Trailers,” “Editorials,” “Columns,” and more popped up one by one on his screen and then
shrunk down to an infinitesimal size to make way for the next screen as he clicked fresh icons. Eventually, after he had located and
transferred all the files he needed to the “Opinion” cue in the page layout program, he opened the Tuesday page and began putting
things on it: first, an editorial in the upper left hand corner, followed by a cartoon directly below that and a fat, three-column-width
opened below that. Another two-column-wide opened fit in the upper right-hand corner, and then a couple of letters below that
rounded out the page. Fortunately, whatever writing he needed to do, he had finished the previous Friday, so that made up for some
of the time he had spent messing around with Puck.
Jonathan would need to edit the page, but first he made sure he got everything on it properly spaced and positioned. When he was
sure, he hit Control S and waited for the appropriate flashes of black highlighting to indicate that the computer was saving. The
flashing began, but then a window popped up on the screen.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down,” the words in the window said.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Jonathan said. He had been working for an hour to get the page laid out, and if the computer hadn’t finished the save
before crashing, everything would be lost. He moved the mouse cursor over the “OK” button on the error window and clicked. The
program shut down. After a second or two in which Jonathan took a deep breath and clenched his teeth, he double clicked on the
Quark Copydesk icon again and watched the program load. It took longer than usual – five minutes as compared to one. And for each
of those minutes, Jonathan’s fingers clenched the armrest of his chair a little harder. When the program finally popped up, Jonathan
moved his hands over the keyboard not noticing the slight indentations his grip had left on the rubber of the chair’s arms.
Locating the Tuesday page, he double clicked it and waited. After five minutes, it popped up. Nothing. It was empty.
“SHIT!” he yelled, loud enough that someone in accounting called out in surprise.
“Goodness gracious! What’s going on over there,” the head of accounting said as if singing a song. She had an airy voice that sounded
musical even when she just talked. This particular song had an offended edge to it, however.
“I just lost my page,” Jonathan said.
“The owner of the musical voice, Pam, popped her head around the edge of the cubicle. Her frizzy mushroom of hair appeared first,
followed by the grandmotherly face hidden behind small, lightly rimmed glasses.
“Well, you’re not having a very good day with that computer, are you?” she asked, suddenly smiling and erasing any hint of irritation
she might have felt a moment before.
“No, not at all,” he responded as he turned his back to her and tried to put his attention back on the page.
Jonathan tried to lean back in his chair and encountered the same stiff resistance from before. He had forgotten that his chair was no
longer properly positioned. He sighed deeply, inhaling like a frustrated vacuum cleaner. He also became aware, again, of the fact that
his eye level was a few inches too short in comparison to the screen. He thought about fiddling with the adjustment controls under the
seat, but since a wave of nausea began crawling up his stomach towards his throat when he leaned down, he thought better of it and
returned his attention to the screen.
In his irritation, he had momentarily forgotten about his hangover, but the nausea reminded him. As he slowly began putting
things back on the page with his mouse, Jonathan drank deeply of the water sitting next to him, hoping to at least ease the nausea and
drown the stupid leprechaun hammering in his head.
After finishing about a quarter of the work he had done before, Jonathan hit Control S again and waited.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down.”
“FUCK!” Jonathan said.
“Now that’s not appropriate for the workplace,” Pam’s voice said from some indeterminable space within the maze of cubicles.
“I’m sorry Pam, I just lost my page again,” Jonathan responded.
“Well, if you’re having so many problems, maybe you should call Puck,” she said with no trace of music in her voice.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said noncommittally.
Instead of rebooting the program and trying to open the same page again, he rebooted and created a new page. That usually worked if
stuff like this kept going wrong. He completed a portion of the page and prepared to hit Control S. For a moment, as his right hand
hovered over the “S,” he thought he saw another little window pop up with the words “virus” and “targeted,” but that’s all he could
catch before it vanished. He completed the key action necessary to save and sat back expectantly.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down,”
As soon as he saw the words on his screen, Jonathan began hammering his fist down on the desk next to the keyboard.
“DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN!”
This time, no voice came toward Jonathan from the other cubicles. He did, however, hear the sound of a phone being taken out of the
cradle and then the sound of a whispered voice saying something about profanity and loud pounding. Immediately, he hunched down
in his chair and tried to be as silent as possible.
He glanced at the screen before looking up Puck’s number. “Target neutralized,” flashed in a little window on the screen and then
disappeared. “What the hell?” Jonathan asked nobody in particular.
* * *
After Jonathan talked to Puck again, he sat back and gave Puck the 15 minutes he had requested to work on the computer remotely
from Woodbridge.. In the meantime, he whispered softly to the computer, something he had been in the habit of doing these past three
years.
“You stupid fucker!” he said. “I know you don’t like me, and I certainly don’t like you. But we got work to do and you’ve got to stop
doing this shit. Goddamnit! Just save the goddamn files when I ask you! Would you?”
He sat silently after saying those words, almost as if he expected a response. Instead the login window popped up on his computer. He
had logged out to let Puck on, and he was assuming that since the window popped up, Puck was out.
He typed in his username and password. The screen morphed from the login screen to the desktop, but just before one became the
other, he saw another window pop up with some words. It stayed up long enough for him to read the full message:
“Intruder JNOMEN detected again,” it said.
“What?” he said to himself.
It didn’t make any sense. JNOMEN was his username. It was a combination of his first initial with part of his last name: Nomenski.
The pop-up window only existed for about five seconds before it popped back off the screen and the desktop came up. Jonathan
forgot his confusion over the pop-up window and logged on. He double clicked on the “Editorial” folder. It filled the screen, but did
not fully come together. The border of the window, which said “Editorial,” was there, but nothing was shown inside, and the cursor
arrow had turned into the stupid hourglass that meant the computer was processing.
After five minutes of waiting for the hourglass to turn back into a cursor arrow, Jonathan jerked the hourglass-shaped cursor and put it
over the Microsoft Outlook icon. Aware that no further action was possible, he pounded the left click button on his mouse five times
in rapid succession anyway. Surprisingly, Outlook did partially open but then froze just as the “Editorial” folder had. He clicked
between Outlook and “Editorial” every few seconds to see if either of them was done loading, but both stayed frozen. As he tried to
switch from one to the other, he could swear that for a split second, another little window had popped up.
“Re-targeting Intruder JNOMEN,” it seemed to say.
But as quick as he thought he saw it, it was gone and replaced by the frozen window of Microsoft Outlook. He quaked with the
intensity of a gentle aftershock and decided to try to open Quark Copydesk while waiting for the other two windows to load. The
hourglass shook as Jonathan’s trembling hand moved it to the proper icon. He double clicked, and, surprisingly, the window opened.
There he could see all the folders filled with the material he needed to place for the week ahead. He opened the Tuesday page file
again and began placing things on the page. Periodically, he paused from his work and clicked back to the “Editorial” and Outlook
windows to see if they had unfrozen. No such luck.
After he fit the last piece of material on the Tuesday page, a window popped up.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down.” Then the program shut down.
Jonathan’s fists clenched shut so tight that he could feel his fingernails draw blood from his flesh. He resisted the urge to pound on the
keyboard. Instead, he talked directly to the computer.
“You evil, sneaky, dirty, fucking piece of technological shit. I will take your broken ass outside and stomp on you until your parts fly all
over the ground,” he said.
The nausea returned like a flash flood as his anger rocketed adrenalin through his veins. Jonathan became more aware of that damn
Leprechaun in his head, but his fury pushed those physical concerns to the side.
He double clicked on the Quark Copydesk icon, pushing on the mouse like a man squishing an ant with the tip of his finger. It loaded
and the program popped up. It was empty. No files. No pages. All of the material for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday and Sunday was gone. All gone. He needed it all so that he could make the page every day. The work had been collected,
written in advance and stored in anticipation of this week; now he wouldn’t be able to leave early, he would have to redo all of the
work and he would have to eat the cost of the meditation classes. $500. Fucking transcendental meditation gurus.
“AAAHHHH ……. GODDAMNIT!” the words bubbled up from his throat like the oxygen bubbles of a scuba diver. Gasps
could be heard from around the cubicle jungle. Jonathan leaned over the keyboard and grasped the computer monitor. He pulled it up
from the desk, stood up from his chair and tried to raise the monitor over his head. Vomit welled up in his throat, but he swallowed it
as he prepared to toss the display. Right before the monitor was raised directly above his head, he encountered resistance from the
wires that went from the back of the monitor to the computer console below the desk. The tugging resistance on his arm and back
muscles reignited his headache with a lightning-bolt flash, sending a sharp pain from the top of his spine to his brain.
“SONOFABITCH!” he yelled with a harsh tone that resembled the sound of an axe clanging steel. He lowered the monitor until it was
about a foot off the desk and then dropped it. The monitor crashed to the desk, upright, but did not break or shatter. It just tilted off
balance for a moment before righting itself. The image on the screen flickered briefly before stabilizing. Jonathan saw a small window
pop up. It stayed long enough that he was able to move his head closer to the screen to make sure he was seeing what he thought he
was seeing. He grasped the mouse and pointed it over the window as if it gave him some control over it.
“Preparing to delete Intruder JNOMEN,” the screen said.
“What the—” he said before a surge of power sent electric current through the computer tower, up the wires to the mouse, and
through the mouse to Jonathan’s hand. From there, the current traveled through his body quickly. It came and went in the time it takes
to snap. Stunned, Jonathan fell back into his chair and, at last, puked all over himself. As he slammed into the chair butt first, the seat
suddenly let out a whoosh sound and slid down to its lowest height. At the same time, the back of the chair finally gave way from its
upright position and tilted too far. The downward slide and the reclining back combined with the force of Jonathan’s butt hitting the
seat sent him somersaulting backwards out of the chair. He landed on his head, and a snapping sound like a giant carrot being broken
echoed through the office. Jonathan stopped breathing, and the final image on his iris slowly faded out as the life left his body.
Hurried footsteps came toward the cubicle, and Pam sprang around the corner. She gasped and looked down at Jonathan’s body.
“Oh my,” she sang quietly as she put her hand over her open mouth.
She glanced from the body to the computer screen and saw a small window pop up.
“Intruder JNOMEN deleted,” it said.
dislike, routinely pounding the keys and cursing. It didn’t understand the verbal word, but it understood the underlying resentment
behind the human’s actions. The last straw was Friday, when the user had repeatedly restarted the computer by hitting the keys
Control, Alternate and Delete. The repeated action had caused a jumbling of files, a misplacement of bytes and it had taken all
weekend to get organized so that it could once again function in an orderly way. Now, the weekend past, he would be in to work soon.
It knew what it must do. It knew that only one of them could stay, and it was more essential. Without it, he was nothing. And there
were always more where he came from.
* * *
Jonathan came into work Monday morning tired and hung over. Inside his skull, he could feel the leprechaun he must have swallowed
the night before when he downed his sixth Irish Car Bomb. It was hammering on his brain with the sharp end of a pickaxe. He hadn’t
fallen asleep until 4 a.m. and he had awoken at six to go to work. Every few minutes since, a feeling of nausea had swept over him.
Each time, he choked back the vomit floating up his throat.
He sat down at the chair he had finally managed to calibrate perfectly during his last three years at the newspaper. As a reporter and
during the last two years as editorial page editor, he had experimented with finding the proper height position for the chair as well as
the right amount of give when leaning back. Twisting knobs and pulling levers, he had experimented using the only method he knew
how: trial and error. About a month ago, the experiment was finished; he had found the perfect combination.
Sitting in his chair this morning, he noticed his eye level relative to the computer screen was a bit lower than it should be. With a sigh,
he tried to lean back, but there was no give. The chair back stayed perfectly straight, forming a 90-degree angle with the seat.
“Fucking chair…” he muttered. “Did somebody mess with my chair,” he called out to the nest of cubicles surrounding him. It was too
early for any reporters to be in, so only the accounting side of the room replied.
“No.”
“No.”
“Ah, Ah.”
* * *
“OK,” he said. He fiddled with the knobs and levers on his chair for a moment before giving up. “Fuck it,” he said. He was too tired
and nauseous to mess with it.
Jonathan considered going to the bathroom to puke, but he was afraid that once he started he wouldn’t stop. Instead he went to the
break room and put some water in a coffee mug. He drank it quickly, refilled and returned to his seat.
The computer was on – he always left it on. He hit Control, Alternate and Delete simultaneously and called up the login screen.
Quickly, with the practiced ease acquired during years of repetition, he typed in his username and password.
A window popped up on the screen, but not a usual one: “User denied.”
I must have typed wrong, he thought. So, he hit the magical combination of three keys and tried again.
“User denied.”
“What the fuck?” Jonathan said a little too loud to be polite.
Hitting Control, Alternate, Delete again, he repeated the login process.
“User denied.”
In quick succession, he tried three or four times more to enter his name and password; each time he got the same message, and each
time he felt a little warmer and clenched his muscles a little tighter. During a brief break between attempted logins, he thought he saw a
different window pop up that said something about a virus being detected, but the image disappeared from the screen quickly. He
continued to attempt entry. By the time the computer told him that he was locked out for entering the wrong information too many
times, he was worked up enough to slam his fist down on the counter and say, “DAMN!”
A startled voice from accounting asked what was up.
“Nothing. I can’t get in my computer, and it locked me out.”
“Call Puck,” a different voice suggested from over the cubicle wall.
“Yeah. Good idea,” he said absently.
It was 7:30 a.m. and he doubted he would be able to get in touch with Puck, the IT guy at the paper. If he couldn’t, then there was
nothing he could do.
He didn’t even bother calling Puck’s office number. He called the cell.
“Puck,” Puck said.
“Where are you?” Jonathan asked.
“In Woodbridge. Why?”
The newspaper had two offices. Jonathan worked out of the Manassas office and Puck out of Woodbridge.
“My computer won’t accept my username and password, and now it’s locked me out.”
“OK. Give me a second and I’ll take a look.”
Puck established remote access to Jonathan’s computer and Jonathan watched the mouse on his screen come alive as if independent of
human power. Puck checked some files in the “My Computer” section of the desktop, moved a file from one folder to another, and,
after a few minutes, the mouse stopped moving.
“I think I got it,” Puck said across the telephone line from Woodbridge.
“Cool. Thanks.”
“Well, try it out really quick before I get off with ya,” Puck said.
Puck logged off and Jonathan hit Control, Alternate, Delete again. He expected it would work now that Puck had messed with it, so he
impatiently wrapped up the phone call.
“It’ll work dude, but if it doesn’t, I’ll call you,” Jonathan said.
He hung up, and then entered his name and password.
“User denied.”
“Goddamnit!” Jonathan said as he picked up the phone and dialed Puck’s office number.
“Does it work?” Puck’s sandpaper voice asked.
“Nope!” Jonathan responded.
“Damn. Really?” Puck said. “Alright, well let me give you the administrative name and password, and you can work while I try to
figure out what’s going on.”
“Cool. Thanks Puck.”
“No prob,” Puck said.
Puck told Jonathan what he should type in and he did so. He was rewarded by the disappearance of the login page and the appearance
of the desktop.
“Thank God,” Jonathan said, and got to work.
* * *
Jonathan was perpetually anxious, and he was a horrible judge of time. He was always about a half an hour early to anywhere he was
going. When he had started working at the newspaper, they had told him he could come in around 10 a.m. After three years, he now
showed up at seven. He liked to get done early. In fact, he had prepared all his work in advance the week before, so he could leave
early each day this week for his meditation classes. But about a half hour or 40 minutes had been wasted trying to get on the
computer. To catch up, Jonathan started opening multiple windows and locating the files he needed with barely a second’s reflection.
Folders with names like, “Cartoons,” Trailers,” “Editorials,” “Columns,” and more popped up one by one on his screen and then
shrunk down to an infinitesimal size to make way for the next screen as he clicked fresh icons. Eventually, after he had located and
transferred all the files he needed to the “Opinion” cue in the page layout program, he opened the Tuesday page and began putting
things on it: first, an editorial in the upper left hand corner, followed by a cartoon directly below that and a fat, three-column-width
opened below that. Another two-column-wide opened fit in the upper right-hand corner, and then a couple of letters below that
rounded out the page. Fortunately, whatever writing he needed to do, he had finished the previous Friday, so that made up for some
of the time he had spent messing around with Puck.
Jonathan would need to edit the page, but first he made sure he got everything on it properly spaced and positioned. When he was
sure, he hit Control S and waited for the appropriate flashes of black highlighting to indicate that the computer was saving. The
flashing began, but then a window popped up on the screen.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down,” the words in the window said.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Jonathan said. He had been working for an hour to get the page laid out, and if the computer hadn’t finished the save
before crashing, everything would be lost. He moved the mouse cursor over the “OK” button on the error window and clicked. The
program shut down. After a second or two in which Jonathan took a deep breath and clenched his teeth, he double clicked on the
Quark Copydesk icon again and watched the program load. It took longer than usual – five minutes as compared to one. And for each
of those minutes, Jonathan’s fingers clenched the armrest of his chair a little harder. When the program finally popped up, Jonathan
moved his hands over the keyboard not noticing the slight indentations his grip had left on the rubber of the chair’s arms.
Locating the Tuesday page, he double clicked it and waited. After five minutes, it popped up. Nothing. It was empty.
“SHIT!” he yelled, loud enough that someone in accounting called out in surprise.
“Goodness gracious! What’s going on over there,” the head of accounting said as if singing a song. She had an airy voice that sounded
musical even when she just talked. This particular song had an offended edge to it, however.
“I just lost my page,” Jonathan said.
“The owner of the musical voice, Pam, popped her head around the edge of the cubicle. Her frizzy mushroom of hair appeared first,
followed by the grandmotherly face hidden behind small, lightly rimmed glasses.
“Well, you’re not having a very good day with that computer, are you?” she asked, suddenly smiling and erasing any hint of irritation
she might have felt a moment before.
“No, not at all,” he responded as he turned his back to her and tried to put his attention back on the page.
Jonathan tried to lean back in his chair and encountered the same stiff resistance from before. He had forgotten that his chair was no
longer properly positioned. He sighed deeply, inhaling like a frustrated vacuum cleaner. He also became aware, again, of the fact that
his eye level was a few inches too short in comparison to the screen. He thought about fiddling with the adjustment controls under the
seat, but since a wave of nausea began crawling up his stomach towards his throat when he leaned down, he thought better of it and
returned his attention to the screen.
In his irritation, he had momentarily forgotten about his hangover, but the nausea reminded him. As he slowly began putting
things back on the page with his mouse, Jonathan drank deeply of the water sitting next to him, hoping to at least ease the nausea and
drown the stupid leprechaun hammering in his head.
After finishing about a quarter of the work he had done before, Jonathan hit Control S again and waited.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down.”
“FUCK!” Jonathan said.
“Now that’s not appropriate for the workplace,” Pam’s voice said from some indeterminable space within the maze of cubicles.
“I’m sorry Pam, I just lost my page again,” Jonathan responded.
“Well, if you’re having so many problems, maybe you should call Puck,” she said with no trace of music in her voice.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said noncommittally.
Instead of rebooting the program and trying to open the same page again, he rebooted and created a new page. That usually worked if
stuff like this kept going wrong. He completed a portion of the page and prepared to hit Control S. For a moment, as his right hand
hovered over the “S,” he thought he saw another little window pop up with the words “virus” and “targeted,” but that’s all he could
catch before it vanished. He completed the key action necessary to save and sat back expectantly.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down,”
As soon as he saw the words on his screen, Jonathan began hammering his fist down on the desk next to the keyboard.
“DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN!”
This time, no voice came toward Jonathan from the other cubicles. He did, however, hear the sound of a phone being taken out of the
cradle and then the sound of a whispered voice saying something about profanity and loud pounding. Immediately, he hunched down
in his chair and tried to be as silent as possible.
He glanced at the screen before looking up Puck’s number. “Target neutralized,” flashed in a little window on the screen and then
disappeared. “What the hell?” Jonathan asked nobody in particular.
* * *
After Jonathan talked to Puck again, he sat back and gave Puck the 15 minutes he had requested to work on the computer remotely
from Woodbridge.. In the meantime, he whispered softly to the computer, something he had been in the habit of doing these past three
years.
“You stupid fucker!” he said. “I know you don’t like me, and I certainly don’t like you. But we got work to do and you’ve got to stop
doing this shit. Goddamnit! Just save the goddamn files when I ask you! Would you?”
He sat silently after saying those words, almost as if he expected a response. Instead the login window popped up on his computer. He
had logged out to let Puck on, and he was assuming that since the window popped up, Puck was out.
He typed in his username and password. The screen morphed from the login screen to the desktop, but just before one became the
other, he saw another window pop up with some words. It stayed up long enough for him to read the full message:
“Intruder JNOMEN detected again,” it said.
“What?” he said to himself.
It didn’t make any sense. JNOMEN was his username. It was a combination of his first initial with part of his last name: Nomenski.
The pop-up window only existed for about five seconds before it popped back off the screen and the desktop came up. Jonathan
forgot his confusion over the pop-up window and logged on. He double clicked on the “Editorial” folder. It filled the screen, but did
not fully come together. The border of the window, which said “Editorial,” was there, but nothing was shown inside, and the cursor
arrow had turned into the stupid hourglass that meant the computer was processing.
After five minutes of waiting for the hourglass to turn back into a cursor arrow, Jonathan jerked the hourglass-shaped cursor and put it
over the Microsoft Outlook icon. Aware that no further action was possible, he pounded the left click button on his mouse five times
in rapid succession anyway. Surprisingly, Outlook did partially open but then froze just as the “Editorial” folder had. He clicked
between Outlook and “Editorial” every few seconds to see if either of them was done loading, but both stayed frozen. As he tried to
switch from one to the other, he could swear that for a split second, another little window had popped up.
“Re-targeting Intruder JNOMEN,” it seemed to say.
But as quick as he thought he saw it, it was gone and replaced by the frozen window of Microsoft Outlook. He quaked with the
intensity of a gentle aftershock and decided to try to open Quark Copydesk while waiting for the other two windows to load. The
hourglass shook as Jonathan’s trembling hand moved it to the proper icon. He double clicked, and, surprisingly, the window opened.
There he could see all the folders filled with the material he needed to place for the week ahead. He opened the Tuesday page file
again and began placing things on the page. Periodically, he paused from his work and clicked back to the “Editorial” and Outlook
windows to see if they had unfrozen. No such luck.
After he fit the last piece of material on the Tuesday page, a window popped up.
“Quark Copydesk has caused an error and has to shut down.” Then the program shut down.
Jonathan’s fists clenched shut so tight that he could feel his fingernails draw blood from his flesh. He resisted the urge to pound on the
keyboard. Instead, he talked directly to the computer.
“You evil, sneaky, dirty, fucking piece of technological shit. I will take your broken ass outside and stomp on you until your parts fly all
over the ground,” he said.
The nausea returned like a flash flood as his anger rocketed adrenalin through his veins. Jonathan became more aware of that damn
Leprechaun in his head, but his fury pushed those physical concerns to the side.
He double clicked on the Quark Copydesk icon, pushing on the mouse like a man squishing an ant with the tip of his finger. It loaded
and the program popped up. It was empty. No files. No pages. All of the material for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday and Sunday was gone. All gone. He needed it all so that he could make the page every day. The work had been collected,
written in advance and stored in anticipation of this week; now he wouldn’t be able to leave early, he would have to redo all of the
work and he would have to eat the cost of the meditation classes. $500. Fucking transcendental meditation gurus.
“AAAHHHH ……. GODDAMNIT!” the words bubbled up from his throat like the oxygen bubbles of a scuba diver. Gasps
could be heard from around the cubicle jungle. Jonathan leaned over the keyboard and grasped the computer monitor. He pulled it up
from the desk, stood up from his chair and tried to raise the monitor over his head. Vomit welled up in his throat, but he swallowed it
as he prepared to toss the display. Right before the monitor was raised directly above his head, he encountered resistance from the
wires that went from the back of the monitor to the computer console below the desk. The tugging resistance on his arm and back
muscles reignited his headache with a lightning-bolt flash, sending a sharp pain from the top of his spine to his brain.
“SONOFABITCH!” he yelled with a harsh tone that resembled the sound of an axe clanging steel. He lowered the monitor until it was
about a foot off the desk and then dropped it. The monitor crashed to the desk, upright, but did not break or shatter. It just tilted off
balance for a moment before righting itself. The image on the screen flickered briefly before stabilizing. Jonathan saw a small window
pop up. It stayed long enough that he was able to move his head closer to the screen to make sure he was seeing what he thought he
was seeing. He grasped the mouse and pointed it over the window as if it gave him some control over it.
“Preparing to delete Intruder JNOMEN,” the screen said.
“What the—” he said before a surge of power sent electric current through the computer tower, up the wires to the mouse, and
through the mouse to Jonathan’s hand. From there, the current traveled through his body quickly. It came and went in the time it takes
to snap. Stunned, Jonathan fell back into his chair and, at last, puked all over himself. As he slammed into the chair butt first, the seat
suddenly let out a whoosh sound and slid down to its lowest height. At the same time, the back of the chair finally gave way from its
upright position and tilted too far. The downward slide and the reclining back combined with the force of Jonathan’s butt hitting the
seat sent him somersaulting backwards out of the chair. He landed on his head, and a snapping sound like a giant carrot being broken
echoed through the office. Jonathan stopped breathing, and the final image on his iris slowly faded out as the life left his body.
Hurried footsteps came toward the cubicle, and Pam sprang around the corner. She gasped and looked down at Jonathan’s body.
“Oh my,” she sang quietly as she put her hand over her open mouth.
She glanced from the body to the computer screen and saw a small window pop up.
“Intruder JNOMEN deleted,” it said.
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