So, after the fried gamer incident, things kinda just trudged along for another couple of weeks. There were lots of dying computers and a few more fires. Nothing too crazy. The company that put the game out was getting all kinds of reports from players at this point. Lots and lots of refund requests. So, they decided that they needed the money more. They sent out patch fixes and dropped the price of the game. Of course, the hype train had already saturated the world of PC gaming with this game. It was epic! Or so I was told. I never really got to play it. After all, I kind of chose food and lights over a game. Guess I wasn't much of a gamer after all. I guess it was around Christmas that it got really bad in a hurry.
Apparently, there was a young man in Florida who begged daddy for the game since it came out. Well, being a good dad, the man bought it for him and loaded it onto the family computer as a surprise. No one had yet figured out just how bad this code was then so it wasn't a thing yet. But it was about to be. Surprise, daddy worked for NASA. Yea. I see the look on your face. You can see where this went in a hurry. Dad did what a lot of other programmers that worked at NASA did. He tied his home computer to his work computer so he could work from home. You guessed it, my friend. It was the very same computer that his little brat was now playing the game of doom on. No, that's not the name of the game, but I just gave it one for shits and giggles. So, little junior brat runs the game on the home PC, it infects daddy's link to work. Next thing you know, it's creeping it's little ass through NASA's programming systems and all of its communications programs. I guess the damn thing was actually embedding itself in other written programs. So, from this point on, every program written for everything NASA was doing had this damn code in it.
Of course, this wasn't the only way this little shit got around. By now it had infected millions through the Cloud. This was an online game after all. Google was real good at spreading it. Mostly it messed with people's computers, laptops, internet porn, whatever they had going on in their lives online. So, computers continued to die, small fires continued to burn, but only on the higher end systems. I guess all that money didn't cover the cooling systems. Over the next month, it weaseled its way into all facets of online, including sliding into the big boy's systems. I'm talking the FBI, CIA, FAA and air traffic control. It even made its way into the missile launching systems and nuclear energy and hydraulic power systems. Yea, it set itself up real nice to show us just how utterly dependent on computer integration we really were.
First week of January 2018. I will never forget that one. I had snagged a part time job at a gas station just up from my home and got nailed to the third shift spot. Guess that's what happens to all the newbies. So, I guess its about 3 am and I'm outside having a smoke. Goddamn I miss those. What I wouldn't give for a smoke right now. You wouldn't happen to have one somewhere, would you? Nope, I guess you wouldn't. Anyway, I was outside smoking one up and the television over the coffee pots in the store just started flashing red. I started watching and it was an emergency broadcast from the local news crew. Seems one of the largest communications satellites we had up in orbit had decided it was homesick and had come back. Yea, just fell out of the damn sky like a ball of fire. Talk about unlucky. Damn thing managed to smack right into the great island of Oahu in Hawaii. Son of a bitch dropped right into the middle of Honolulu. Jeez that turned into a cluster fuck in a hurry. It hit the larger buildings in the center of the city and just exploded. It had just turned into a massive bomb. And it did the job. A quarter mile blast radius with damage spreading out for miles. This thing was huge and it was moving real fast and real hot when it hit. Folks didn't even see it coming. All told, I think the death toll on that surprise was around 250 people. It was a real tragedy. But its what was needed for the experts to take notice. Within forty-eight hours, computers geniuses were crawling through the wreck and sniffing at every chip and motherboard that thing had. At least the ones they could find.
By the time they got all their bits and pieces up and moved to some secret location to work on what happened, the world was already taking the shit slide to the bottom. Over the next ten days, four jumbo jets full of passengers just fell out of the sky. No warning, no cause that was obvious. I mean, it wasn't a hijacking or the damn ISIS or any suicide bombers. Damn things just shut off in mid flight and came crashing back down. After the fourth one smacked a high rise apartment building in some city in Japan, all the major airlines shut it all down. It came out in the news that the airlines had been having major issues with communications for weeks and they had been using hand held radios for the pilots and airports just to be able to talk to each other with any dependency.
After the airlines came clean on the news, we lowly society started getting more and more of the big picture. Turned out that a lot of folks were having real problems with cell phones. The service providers had tried real hard to band-aid the situation but eventually had to come clean. Their satellites were not talking anymore. Most of them were reduced to floating space junk. The only reason folks still had phones at all was because they had been pushed to the land based towers by the thousands and that system was overworked so, yea, Ma Bell was done for. They finally admitted that it was only a few more days and no one would be able to use cell phones. Their systems were crashing faster than a bunch of drunk rednecks at a Nascar race.
Thats about the time the missiles tried to launch. Oh yea, you aint heard nothing yet pal.
