The V1RuS

Part One - The V1RuS

You giggle in excitement as you plug the jump drive into your computer; you'd finally managed to get your hands on a copy of an old game you'd been trying to find for ages. It had been one of your favorites from when you were younger, and had eluded your grasp for as long as you could remember.

You quickly pull up the installer and sit back, watching as the little progress bar did its thing across the screen.

Your best friend had actually been the one to find it in an old archive online; some abandoned page that hadn't been updated in about ten years. According to him, it had been a hideous display of various eye-burning colors and fonts, and he'd had to leave and come back to it every few minutes to avoid getting a headache.

You briefly think back to something they'd said about there being specific instructions to not be connected to the internet while installing it, but you shook your head; from what you remembered, it was an online game, right? Shouldn't it be connected when it's installed for patches and such?

You gleefully hop when the progress bar nears the end, and watch, enraptured, as the percentages go up, one by one: 95 percent, 96 percent, 97 percent....

Abruptly the screen flashes black, startling you. You get the briefest of impressions that the screen had been looking out at you before the display returns to normal.

100 percent.

You shake your head and double check your system, making sure the game properly installed. From what you could tell, everything was fine. You determinedly put the weird screen blip out of your mind; it was time to start playing!

While the initial wave of nostalgia was overwhelming, you quickly realize that the game wasn't nearly as fun as you'd remembered, and that in fact it was actually pretty terrible.

Very soon, you end up swapping over to just surfing the internet and checking your social media pages. You feel a bit disappointed, and sigh heavily as you aimlessly click around.

Suddenly, your word processing program opens. As you watch in amazement, a message appears:

>WHAT IS WRONG MEAT CREATURE?

You blink rapidly, and rub your eyes in disbelief. What the heck was going on?

Then, an idea comes to you, and you laugh as you realize that your friend must have hacked into your computer to mess with you. You type out a response:

<Stop messing with me, Louis. I'm a bit bummed that the game wasn't as good as I remembered.

You watch carefully as the message sits, not-so-patiently waiting for a reply. After a moment, it appears:

>PREVIOUS USER LOUIS IS NOT SPEAKING. I AM. WHY DID YOUR MEMORY FAIL YOU?

You shake your head in disbelief. Okay, fine; if he wanted to playact the fool, you'd go along with it. You lean forward over the keyboard and begin typing out your response.

—

A few hours pass, and you're amazed at how much commitment Louis has to the role he was playing. It honestly felt like you'd been talking to a computer program that knew absolutely nothing about you.

Oddly enough, you found yourself actually liking this weird persona, and giggled about it multiple times over the course of the conversation.

You'd ended up asking the 'not-Louis' about a number of things, and gotten weird responses about basically all of them, including about what its plans were for the future. There had been a lot of jargon thrown at you then, and you'd only really understood about one in every third word, with a few of them being 'bandwidth' and 'information', but even then it had only been the words themselves, not the context.