Malware

malware-for-all-to-download

You know that awful sinking feeling you get when something truly nasty, truly noxious and toxic, something truly vile and unpleasant is determinedly installing itself on your hard-drive and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop it? When you know your laptop is well and truly banjaxed this time? Corrupted beyond repair? Well, that’s the feeling I had last night before I went to bed. Like some filthy disgusting thing was trying to download itself into my brain. A toxic download. A dirty download. Did you ever get a dirty download? Well I did last night, and it’s not a very nice feeling I can tell you…

 

OK I know in a way I was asking for it sitting there aimlessly like a moron flicking from one mindless Sky channel to another all night long, using up the last of my precious stash of Jimson weed, but I never thought it was possible to pick up something as downright nasty as this no matter much bad TV you watched. This was like the SARS of the satellite dish, the digital swine flu of the airways. It was a stinker. It was the bad dose. Something had sneaked into my brain unbeknownst to me and was scampering around my hippocampus, squealing with unholy delight.

 

And now as I lie here under my duvet at one minute past six on a Tuesday evening still trying to will myself get up and make myself a cup of tea I can feel the vile thing busy consolidating its hold on me, replicating itself millions of times per second, sending out its disgusting tendrils deep into every part of my brain. And the sick thing is that there is part of me that actually enjoys the feeling. It’s like part of me welcomes it.

 

Realizing this – seeing the pure undiluted horror of it – I recoil in revulsion, sickened to my very core. I feel that I am reduced to being the impotent spectator of my own insidious demise, the powerless witness of these fingers of corruption as they spread their sickness into every corner of my being. I should do something about it, I think, but at the same time I know that there’s nothing I can do. What’s done is done. I can’t go back now and undo it.

 

The pathetically despairing thought flashes though my mind – “I am infected!”

 

The thought then echoes nastily like a ball bearing dropped down an infinitely long steel pipe.

 

It echoes and goes on echoing.

 

It repeats like the stupid inane virus it is: I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected!

 

Soon there are lots of voices – hundreds if not thousands of them – joining in the mocking chorus, all slightly out of phase with each other, as if on a hideously bad Skype connection:

 

I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected! I am infected!

 

I shake my head to and fro under the duvet, trying to rid myself of all of these tiny jeering metallic-sounding virus voices echoing around in my hippocampus, my thalamus, my hypothalamus, my amygdala, my forebrain, my midbrain in their teeming millions.

 

And the whole time another part of me – the sick part, the infected part, the corrupted part – looks on and laughs, perversely welcoming what has happened to me…

 

 

 

 

 

 

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