2004-11-24 - 8:37 p.m.
Novelization of Anti-Virus
Cline stared blankly at the blinking prompt for more than a moment before giving a noticeable reaction. His eyes darted momentarily around the screen, and then he slapped himself on the side of the head. In truth, after being awake for so long even his thoughts were moving slowly at this point; however, even at his slowest Cline Micheals was able to perform an amazing amount of computations in such a short time.
As soon as the alert had appeared, he had already noticed that the message was from someone by the handle of Muriko417, and that her (he assumed) message consisted of a very simple request: "Please accept this message!" It didn't take him any time at all to check through his list of acquaintances (he had only a few, and even fewer friends), to conclude that he only knew of three Japanese people who might wish to speak with him and that none of them went by the name of "Muriko", online or offline for that matter.
He was obviously disturbed by the message, but not because of its unknown source. It wasn't uncommon for people to contact strangers out of the blue. He had often had encounters where computers were programmed to initiate such conversations automatically in order to promote some sort of business, usually of a sordid nature. But he knew all of this without thinking about it, and he had more pressing concerns.
It wasn't the content of the message that concerned him either. Certainly, the exclamation added to the message did give it a strange feel of urgency that moved him in ways only an exclamation point in a typed message can, but he didn't give much stock to feelings invoked by simple characters.
What really bothered him was that he was certain he remembered setting his messaging service to stealth, and it was inconceivable that anyone should be able to send him a message at that moment, save his friend who he was in the process of working with. Perhaps a hacker with the right information and enough time might be able to figure out how to bypass his security, but there were so many reasons that was impossible that he didn't know where to begin pointing out what was wrong with that scenario. He trusted the software he made too much to doubt it, so instead he decided to check his memory. Had he in fact set his computer to be invisible to the rest of the network?
His eye darted across the screen to determine that, yes, he had in fact done so, and everything appeared exactly as it should, except, of course, for the giant flashing prompt in front of him.
It was at this point that, realizing that he must in fact have fallen asleep at his computer and was probably dreaming, that he reached up to his head and gave himself a light hit on the side of his head. It certainly seemed real enough. He felt the his hand against his head, and his hair brushing past his index finger as he pulled it away. Just in case though, he took his finger to his mouth and bit into it slightly. No, he was definitely awake. But then, how?
Really, one should think about things like this with a little more prudence, but then, one of Cline Micheal's gifts was the ability to take quick actions, even if that meant not thinking every last possibility through. He knew that only someone of incredible knowledge and ability would have been able to send him a message like that, and that if they had malicious intents, even he might not be a match for them. Knowing this, and that months of irreplacable work were going to be at risk (he really should have backed up his data more often, especially since he was just a few more weeks away from finishing his master's thesis), he still didn't let that stop him. Perhaps it was rash, but then again, there really wasn't much choice involved. How could he live with himself if he denied himself the chance to chat with someone who could turn out to be the world's greatest hacker? He hit accept and waited to see what would happen next.
