WIP Wednesday... Sort Of

I'm cheating this Wednesday. I had expected my novel edits to be here by now, but alas, they are not, so I really have no WIPs that are short enough for you to tolerate. SO! To my cheating.

I present to you a short story I wrote last year off of a prompt in English class. Keep in mind that I wrote this in ten minutes and haven't glanced at it since March of 2009. Enjoy.


Prompt #282: Write from the point of view of a virus about to infect an important document.
She can’t see me, lurking inside her hard drive, but she will soon be horribly aware of my presence. I have had my eye on her thesis paper since the beginning, when I was only a small glitch in her system. I have grown and accumulated power since then- if only she hadn’t ignored all of those warning pop-ups her computer gave her. Thank you, little girl, for giving me such a delicious opportunity to completely ruin your day… or, if I’m lucky, your semester.

I poise myself for attack and watch her typing merrily away, a little smile of satisfaction on her face; she knows the paper will be done soon. How I love to watch those smiles fade quickly into horror and distress. I get myself into position, and when she stops to think of a synonym for “exaltation”, I strike.

Her computer screen suddenly goes berserk, then goes black. I watch as her mouth falls open and she begins to frantically punch some keys, begging her computer to reboot. Sorry, little girl-that “save” icon is on the top of your screen for a reason (though I can even get past that sometimes.) You’ll have to start from scratch… but not before you can have it fixed by IT, and by that point, I’ll have eaten everything in your hard-drive. That short story you were particularly proud of? Gone. The pictures of Adam’s eighth birthday party? Gone.

How can I live with myself, you ask? It’s simple: I have no conscience. In fact, I do not actually have a mind. How can I tell you this then, you ask? Well, there must be only one explanation, mustn’t there: your hard drive is next.