Jeffrey McMillan :: Old smart ass downloaded a suspicious virus

The hum of the television echoed across the first floor of the house. On the screen, blurring into a single flickering, unpleasantly colorful spot, figures in the colors of the Argentina and Spain national teams ran about. The commentator strained his voice as if the fate of humanity depended on the outcome of this match, but Jeffrey did not listen to a single word. He sat in his favorite worn-out armchair, wearing a loose sand-colored cotton t-shirt and old jeans. In his hand rested a frosted bottle of cheap beer.

Jeffrey exhaled loudly, setting the half-empty beer on the coffee table. The man forcefully rubbed his face with both palms, feeling the stiff stubble of his well-groomed but almost entirely gray beard under his fingers. This huge two-story house, which he had once bought with a crippling mortgage in an attempt to prove his worth as the head of the family to the whole world, now pressed down on him with its silence. Cornelia had been gone for a long time, Salvatore had grown up and was living his own life, and McMillan was left one-on-one with square meters of useless space and the deafening emptiness of early retirement.

His thoughts inevitably turned to the home office on the second floor. To the "gift." Salvatore, his only son and main source of pride, had dragged that damn machine in a couple of weeks ago. A computer. A huge, humming box with a transparent side panel, inside of which something glowed obnoxiously with neon light. His son had gone on and on for an hour, talking about the "sweet" hardware, the powerful graphics card, and how this device would save his father from loneliness.

But what was the point? This technological jalopy was now sitting in the cluttered office gathering dust. Jeffrey was afraid to approach it. The entire edge of the wide monitor had already grown a thick fringe of yellow sticky notes. On them, McMillan's uneven handwriting laid out lifesaving instructions: "HOW TO OPEN GOOGLE," "Do not click the red cross until you save," "EMAIL PASSWORD." It seemed to him that if he clicked the wrong thing, he would either launch a nuclear warhead toward Eastern Europe or delete the entire internet.

Yesterday he had made a fatal mistake by deciding to download some old Clint Eastwood movie all by himself. Something went wrong, about a dozen windows popped up, the computer let out a pitiful beep, and he retreated in panic, simply giving up on the whole thing. But leaving the machine turned on felt somewhat unsettling.

With a groan, the man got to his feet. His lower back immediately responded with a dull, pulling pain, a reminder of the times when he worked around the clock to feed his family. Out of habit, Jeffrey ignored the discomfort and ambled into the kitchen. Before going to battle with the machine, he needed a boost.

He brewed himself some coffee, just the way he liked it. This simple, understandable ritual calmed his nerves a little. Taking the steaming mug, McMillan headed for the stairs, taking tiny, scalding sips. Along the way, he mechanically pulled his glasses down from the top of his head and perched them right on the tip of his nose.

The office greeted him with twilight and the quiet, steady hum of the system unit. The computer had gone into sleep mode. Jeffrey sank heavily into the computer chair, placed his mug on a paper-free patch of the desk, and squinted at the dark screen. His massive hand rested hesitantly on the mouse. He jerked it to the side.

The monitor instantly flared with a harsh light, making the man wince in displeasure. But instead of the familiar desktop background featuring a photo of a smiling Salvatore in his graduation gown, the screen was flooded with something else. Right in the center, glowing in a bold, mockingly red font, was a message:

"YOU DOWNLOADED A VIRUS, MORON! YOUR SYSTEM IS TOAST :)"

Something sank in McMillan's chest.

"What the..." he exhaled, barely swallowing a colorful curse word. His thick eyebrows drew together at the bridge of his nose, forming a deep crease.

His heart began to beat faster, betraying genuine panic. Not this. Not a virus. He frantically started clicking the left mouse button on the screen, hoping that it was just another stupid ad that would disappear any second.

"Come on. Come on," he muttered through his teeth, furiously clicking the plastic mouse. "Close, damn it. Where's the little cross..."

But the red letters stayed in place, as if mocking his helplessness. All his efforts amounted to absolutely nothing. A wave of dull irritation mixed with a feeling of sheer inadequacy washed over him. In a fit of anger, Jeffrey snatched the glasses off the bridge of his nose and threw them blindly right into the creative mess on the desk. They landed with a clatter somewhere between old receipts and a stapler.

The man leaned heavily on his elbows against the wooden desktop and buried his face in his broad palms. An oppressive silence hung in the office, broken only by the quiet rustle of the cooling fans.

God, how stupid. A grown man who had lived half a century, yet he couldn't handle a piece of plastic and metal. Jeffrey was already mentally calculating how he was going to look his son in the eyes. Salvatore had spent his savings on this contraption, picked it out, set it up, and his ungrateful old man of a father had ruined everything in just a couple of weeks.

How was he going to say it?

"Oh, listen, Sal... here's the thing, I clicked somewhere I shouldn't have, downloaded some virus, and your whole highly praised system is totally toast."

Or maybe it would be better to be more direct?

"I wrecked your gift, son. Apparently, even this piece of junk didn't want to disturb my loneliness, so it decided to kill itself."

It felt like he sat there for an eternity, running various excuses through his head, feeling a bitter resentment growing inside toward himself and this whole damn modern world that had run far ahead, leaving him floundering on the sidelines.

Suddenly, a crisp, melodic sound came from the speakers. Ding.

Jeffrey flinched. Without removing his hands from his face, he only slightly spread his fingers, parting his pinky and ring finger from his middle and index finger, and peered through the resulting gap at the monitor with immense exhaustion and suspicion.

The scary red text hadn't gone anywhere. But as he watched it through his fingers, the letters suddenly trembled, crumbled into tiny squares, and smoothly flowed into a completely different text, this time typed in a soft, calm font:

"Okay, I'm kidding. Meet your loyal assistant."

McMillan froze. The error and virus warnings vanished without a trace, revealing the familiar desktop wallpaper. And then... Jeffrey was ready to swear on his pension and his grandfather's ashes that he was having stress-induced hallucinations. Out of a document folder located in the bottom left corner, some little creature jumped right onto the screen. At first, it was no bigger than a gnat, but then it rapidly grew until it was about the size of his pinky finger.

By the looks of it, it was a... person? A boy? But its edges were somewhat blocky, made up of tiny colored squares. What had Salvatore called this style when he showed him old games? Right. Pixelated.

The tiny figure unceremoniously stomped around right on top of the taskbar, as if the screen were a real, physical space to it.

"I..." Jeffrey slowly moved his hands away from his face, as if afraid to scare away the apparition.

He fumbled around the desk with his hand, found the frames of his glasses, and pulled them back onto the bridge of his nose. Realizing the lenses were sitting crooked, the man grumpily adjusted them, then leaned forward, putting his whole upper body onto the desk, almost pressing his nose against the monitor. His green eyes squinted in disbelief, examining the oddity.

The pixelated little guy stood there, paying absolutely no attention to the heavy gaze of the homeowner. McMillan swallowed hard. Instinct told him to pull the plug from the socket, but curiosity and some strange, irrational feeling that this was not just a virus kept him glued to the spot.

"What are you?" Jeffrey said aloud, addressing the monitor directly. He leaned back in his chair, crossing his massive arms over his chest, and added, staring at the screen with unwavering stubbornness, "I hope you can hear me through this thing. Because I am not going to... type questions for you. Got it? Don't even ask. Yeah."

The sound of Salvatore's departing car was still ringing in his ears when the front door slammed shut, cutting the house off from the outside world. Jeffrey was left alone in the spacious hallway. Silence instantly filled the first floor, but today it somehow felt worse than usual. The faint scent of his son's expensive cologne and the trail of his boundless energy still lingered in the air. Salvatore had burst in here like a hurricane a couple of hours ago, dragging along a huge cardboard box, a pile of wires, and enough enthusiasm to light up a small town.

"This is so you don't get so lonely, Dad," his son's voice echoed in his memory. McMillan rubbed his face with his broad, calloused palms. He genuinely appreciated the gesture, he really did. Sal was his pride and joy, the only bright spot in a blur of endless work shifts and mortgage payments that had eaten up his youth. But this gift...

The man tread heavily up the wooden stairs, heading to the second floor. He was wearing his usual linen pants and a loose beige t-shirt, soft from frequent washing. Reaching the home office, Jeffrey stopped in the doorway and crossed his arms over his chest, frowning at the new addition.

On his massive oak desk, which was usually kept in perfect order with stacks of receipts neatly aligned and a pen perfectly parallel to the edge of a notepad, it now sat. The computer. The system unit hummed quietly, shimmering with some completely out-of-place blue lighting, and the huge monitor stared back at the homeowner as a black, glossy rectangle. Salvatore had spent a solid hour crawling under the desk, plugging in wires, then typing rapidly, clicking, and explaining about browsers, downloads, and the cloud. McMillan had just nodded at the time, even though he had no idea how a cloud could store photos if it was made of water vapor.

Jeffrey sighed and stepped further into the room. His chair creaked familiarly as it took his weight. The man reached for the mouse. It felt too light and fragile in his large hand. One clumsy movement, and the screen flared with a blindingly bright light, making him squint in displeasure.

"Alright," he muttered under his breath. "What do we have here?"

His son had left only a few icons on the desktop so as not to scare his father, but to Jeffrey it still looked like the control panel of a space shuttle. He pulled his glasses down from the top of his head and perched them right on the tip of his nose. Salvatore had said that you could find anything on the internet. Any old movie. Any newspaper.

The man hovered the cursor over the compass icon that his son had called the internet and double-clicked. A white window popped up with a bar in the middle. McMillan hovered over the keyboard, sticking his two index fingers out. He typed slowly, pressing down hard on each key.

O L D C R O S S W O R D S

A loud clack of the Enter key echoed. Dozens of lines appeared on the screen. Jeffrey leaned closer, reading into the blue links. He poked at the first one he saw. The website turned out to be flashy, with pictures blinking from all sides, offering either to lose weight in three days or win a million bucks. McMillan clicked his tongue in annoyance but stubbornly scrolled down the page, where he saw a large green button that read DOWNLOAD COLLECTION.

"Well, download then," he threw grumpily at the screen and clicked the button.

Instead of a crossword puzzle, a black window with scrolling white text appeared for a split second and instantly vanished. The computer let out a short beep. And that was it. Nothing else happened. No crosswords, no notifications.

Jeffrey leaned back in his chair. His thick eyebrows drew together. He did everything right, didn't he? Clicked where he was supposed to. Modern technology, damn it all. No reliability whatsoever. A paper newspaper was a whole different story. You buy it, open it, and solve it. But here, you just sit and guess whether this two thousand dollar contraption is broken or just mocking an old fool.

The man was already reaching out to just turn the machine off and be done with it, when suddenly his eye caught a strange movement.

He froze, his hand hanging in the air over the mouse. At the very top of the monitor, right by the plastic edge, something had changed. There, inside the screen, right on top of the open browser and the flashy ad banners, a top of a head appeared.

Jeffrey blinked. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with his fingers, and put them back on. The top of the head didn't disappear. What's more, it rose higher.

A face peeked cautiously from behind the upper edge of the screen. It was a little man. Tiny, no bigger than a finger, and somewhat uneven. Made up of small square pixels, like a character from those ancient console games Salvatore used to play in his childhood. The little guy turned his head, looking around the desktop, as if assessing the scale of the upcoming work or just studying the new terrain.

McMillan even stopped breathing, feeling absolutely ridiculous. He was sitting in his own house, staring at someone living their own life inside a piece of plastic.

Meanwhile, the pixelated guy had apparently finished his scouting. Two blocky hands grabbed onto the invisible edge of the monitor's top border. The little man swung his body over the edge and hung there, swaying like a gymnast on a high bar. Jeffrey leaned forward, almost pressing his nose against the screen.

A second passed, and the tiny fingers let go.

The figure plummeted, flying across the entire screen, crossing the white browser window, and landed softly right on the bottom taskbar, where the shortcuts stood in an even row. The landing was realistic. The little guy crouched slightly to absorb the impact, and the neighboring folder icon twitched slightly from the vibration.

The pixelated guest straightened up. He calmly dusted off his blocky pants, patted his chest to knock off nonexistent digital dust, and finally raised his head, staring right at Jeffrey on the other side of the glass.

Jeffrey looked at the creature. The creature looked at Jeffrey.

His lips twitched. He cast a glance around the empty room, as if looking for witnesses to this madness, and then stared back at the bottom panel of the monitor.

"If you," the man started slowly, addressing the tiny creature, "are that Trojan horse my son has been talking my ear off about, you should know there is nothing to steal here except my ex-wife's pie recipes. And even those are lousy."

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