Artificial Error

#2 Open Ports

ZACK

I checked my clock.

7:37 PM

More than 30 minutes had gone by and my screen was still frozen on "SYSTEM REBOOTING".

This was bad. Like, really bad.

What if that stupid flash drive had crashed my laptop? All that data lost for good. And the damn thing hadn't exactly been cheap.

More than once, I thought about just ejecting the drive. My fingers would curl around it, ready to yank it out. But then I'd slowly let it go and wait a couple more minutes.

What if it was almost done doing... whatever the hell it was supposed to do? Maybe I should wait a bit more.

So, I ended up staring blankly at my screen for what honestly felt like hours, at least enough that my eyes had started to water.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, letters overflowed the screen.

"SYSTEM REBOOT SEQUENCE COMPLETED"

"PANDORA-OS LOADED SUCCESSFULLY"

"FLASH DRIVE SELF-DELETE CODE INITIATED"

"Wait! What the hell?"

I clutched the screen of my laptop, staring at the messages with my mouth hanging open in complete awe.

The flash drive had somehow installed a new Operating System into my laptop without any prior information or permission. And now it was deleting its own content? Seriously?? What was it going to do next, self-destruct?

Exactly what kind of drive was this?!

Before I could calm down or do much of anything, a new text appeared on the screen.

"SELF-DELETE SEQUENCE COMPLETED"

"BOOTING PANDORA-OS..."

There was no way around it. I was now staring at a completely new desktop environment.

There were a few green icons labeled "File Manager", "Terminal", "Code Editor" and so on. I clicked on File Manager to analyze my disk and saw that my previous files were still intact. The installation of this unknown "PANDORA-OS" into my laptop hadn't tampered with my previous files or folders.

I breathed a sigh of relief at that. But then I noticed something odd.

There was a folder with no name. Curious, I opened it to check its content. It contained a bunch of files, each one with a weird, gibberish name. I opened them in Notepad, and to my amazement, those files contained encrypted codes.

Holy crap.

I'd never seen such complex encryption before. Every file had more than 10,000 lines of code and there were more than 100 files in that one folder. They'd obviously been copied into my disk through that flash drive. And looking at its encryption level ... Damn. No wonder why it had to self-delete.

These files had to be really important. Which begged the question. Why the hell would they be in a flash drive, inside a box under my bed?

And for that matter, why did the box start beeping all of a sudden? Was it a pre-programmed device that unlocked itself on a specific date or time? ... Or maybe it was unlocked remotely? But by whom?

The obvious suspects were my parents. Maybe this was just a nice gift from them. That or a test. Either way, they'd know something about this.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'd call them as soon as I get back from college. If they weren't too busy., that is.