PSYCHOPATHIC WORM: CODE NAME PSYCHODERM
They say every story needs a hook, don’t they. The more learned of them call this hook the engine of a story -- the need to know the ending. What better hook than the hookworm virus -- Sam took a crap at 4 A.M. At nine it was in the bowl -- a squirming snakehead fish-like worm about the thickness of ten strands of thread. What was it doing in the spic and span porcelain pot? It was swimming gyroscopically around, willing to twirl its slender thread around a stick that Sam found outside in front of his bungalow, looking for a place to sink its hook in, Sam thought.
True -- just a worm to many minds, albeit with a head that looked like a tiny snake head. True -- it had traveled through his maze of plumbing, twisting this way and that -- somehow in the end losing its grip on life. True -- it had enjoyed free meals like a thief on the beach.
The food Sam ate on Elephant Island, Thailand was in part going to feed a colony -- and true -- the worm could not have known what it had spawned in Sam’s excrement, an idea, a means, an instrument, and most insidiously of all the means to move data globally. Sure, you say, data can be moved globally and is -- every moment of now. But now the data being so transported is not the kind of data Sam saw when he looked down into the ceramic toilet and at the creature that came from within him. True -- the worm had most likely digested some of Sam’s DNA. Certainly, the twisting caricature of dance and imagination could not know that it spawned the plan for the death of four and a half billion people -- more stomachs than the worm and all of its cousins inhabited at any given point in history.
As Sam observed the worm, germination of the scheme initialized and zapped across the one or two neurons that, as in all men, attach the right side of the brain to the left. It was the left that commenced to calculate the number of deaths. Result: One WORM multiplied by a hundred million TV Video Tuner Capture USB units= 4.5 billion. It staggered him, more than the worms he imagined slithering in his plumbing, teeth sunk into the walls of his guts. You see, some would say Sam was nuts. Sam even named his PLAN and the worm, PLAN A, PSYCHORM. There are those remaining who say Sam was a psychopath. His lawyers say he held certain beliefs close to his heart, that Sam may have had some valid motivation for carrying out his plan, that he was not only evil, and may, in fact, have had some facet, some miniscule aspect, of good. This motivation, at this point is beyond the scope of the story. Good or evil ... each human, looking deep within his soul, searching, searching, having thoughts that cannot be spoken, for fear of being misunderstood in a PC world. Suffice to say here that Sam saw the balance of good and evil tilting more each day to evil ... tottering on the brink, on the edge.
The son of Sam, birthed by a generation z new-age computer engineer disgruntled at the disintegration of society, the blame placed squarely on the shoulders of the young ... it was not fair, this displaced blame ... this blame for things learned from generation baby boomers ... from things learnt and found like skeletons in all our family closets, this son of Sam would make its rounds on Christmas Eve.
The worm Sam created might not have been so dangerous if its creator had not been a psychopath; for, the worm had AI, and its artificial intelligence enabled, ensured it would learn, and as it progressed, spinning its ugly web of death via the Net, it spawned offspring with psychopathic tendencies of their own. These offspring had not respect for their creator, nor the switch Sam had inserted into the plan to allow him to turn it off, should he have some epiphany, some fundamental change of heart, should some fleeting tinge of hope in, and love of mankind grasp his soul, and make him change his mind. Sam wanted total control; but, in the end the worm had very much a mind of its own, and was no longer content to be controlled by the encoding factor; it now saw its code as its own. Unfortunately for many, Sam was in the dark in more ways than one on Christmas Eve 2XXX. This date, Sam told no one.
Sam is an unusual kind of psychopath -- he has a conscience. He knows right from wrong and will take no joy in the execution of his plan. In fact, in the dark recesses of his mind, he sees PLAN A as saving human life, as a type of life insurance for the insurance of man, and this is what makes him so dangerous, capable of killing two-thirds of humanity. He knew that what transpired in sand, more often than not, came back one day inscribed in granite -- that things written in sand dissipated with the tides, but that somewhere there was an Akashic record: a record of the actions of every member of the human compendium, cornucopia -- that actions taking place on the beach, even though washed away by morning, were thus transcribed in stone, and left monoliths of man.
Sam worked day and night, night and day, from dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, one sun to another, coding in the virus. All he needed now was a vehicle to carry the spider along the strands of the Web of Death. He had once referred to the Net as the Web of Life; it was the only parent he had known. His father nested with a divorced woman down the block. He’d once thrown a rock, shattering a window in that ‘home’. Gen Z didn’t always have the code of family imprinted in their DNA, their families often gone before adulthood, often before they could talk or walk. Some sequence of code was being eclipsed from them, some element of the soul necessary for survival of the race; and, now, to make things worse, there existed companies that wouldn’t hire them based on their new ‘race’ alone.
The virus mightn’t have been so malicious, vicious, and hungry for death if not for the AI gathered and harnessed from Sam; sure some would have died, but Sam thought he surely would have turned it off, especially after seeing what he saw on one window in the home of a user of the modem. Once the spider found a home -- it would not allow itself to be switched off. It rewrote its own genetic PC-code, and when the moment came that even Sam had had enough, would not allow itself to be turned off. Like the tiger in the zoo not satisfied with killing one who teased him, not satisfied with the mauling and the maiming of a single life, but this time for some inexplicit reason, after killing one, the tiger went for the other, in defiance of tiger logic and reason -- this beast did the virus learn to want to kill, to seek revenge on humanity ... some said the virus knew of evil spreading throughout the land ... some even said that PLAN A was carried out by a higher force to prevent another plan ... signified PLAN B ... philosophers, surviving ones, after the event, reasoned in their darkest dreams, and on their darkest side of man, that God had inserted a plan to eliminate Earth should the balance of good and evil -- the sum of events, come up negative. They couldn’t get their words in print. Most refused to consider it, there were efforts made to silence these philosophers like futuristic witches of the past burned at stake.
Thus did the virus continue on its journey across the web, enjoying even each death it saw with its synthetic eyes, its synthesized logic, its tactile touch on the sticky string -- ever so lightly strung web. Its grip on life it refused to relinquish, like the tiger not satisfied, but finally having enough of life in a cage, torture for amusement, and going for them all. You did this to me he thought. Kept me in a cage or watched me with a web cam. Thought you could keep a wild animal in a public zoo ... thought that none of us would ever think to fight back, that somehow we were so far along the road to becoming clones that our soul was dead. Think again, thought the tiger, perhaps: My God, I am alive, wanting to return to the wild, the more peaceful place. A few years before the economic crash, he had sat and looked out at the horizon, over the water of Koh Chang Island and felt something was wrong in his nation. It wasn’t the economic indicators that bothered him, but the social ones. The atrocities, the weird stories, the people shot with guns, the lives destroyed, the apathy exhibited and the refusal to consider why so many people were going bananas. Mothers taking the lives of their children at home. Children killing their parents. New stories out daily ... the never-ending story of white on black, black on white, race. The gunning down of people in Church and the burning of those churches. Guns and roses, guns buying the roses. The price of social change was high.
Thus, did what is now called the PCV Virus travel, in a similar state of mind, on a fatal day before Christmas in year 2XXX. The date of execution –- what date do you think? Somewhere in Sam’s thought processes, Sam thought they were dying to save us -- an angel of death somehow giving a second chance to man. Some said Sam thought he was doing the work of the lord and claimed this evidence of insanity, of blasphemy, but some said defiantly that Sam was not all bad.
How he hated the noise of Christmas, brats, the songs, and to think they’d all be jolly; who could think that. He even hated the perverts in the red suits, the fakes in the malls; one Santa had touched him in a private place. Some said that Sam’s computer monitor may have been a size too small. Well, he’d put an end to merriment this year.
When Sam signed the contract with L.E.D Digital he recognized his vehicle, his modus operandi of emanation -- the TV-VIDEO-USB-Tuner Card, built to give away for free for the first interactive Christmas Eve ... and the last Sam thought. His company was shipping a hundred million units as promotion for a new interactive web cast -- little did they know that each circuit board in all the units was coated with a lacquer, that when heated, emitted a wafting gas that dissipated like that of tobacco smoke, silently rising from first floor to second of a house, discernable by noses not connected to a smoker. A light something in the air, trying not to be noticed, as when a parent puffs downstairs and a child is sleeping up there.
Sam worked a year to perfect his plan, called in all favors owed him, borrowed some he thought he could pay back. There were a hundred million USB boxes waiting to go off well before the dreary music started playing in the stores. Sam grinned, laughed to himself -- the cooling fans were wired in reverse. Oh, how he laughed at this.
The day before Christmas, Sam wore a white rose to work. He thought of it like that. If one went back one could think of it like that.
On his way home he stopped to buy a case of Thai Singha light beer. He sat at a table in the kitchen; his command post was set up there. He popped the tab and pulled the whole thing off, and tossed it in the trash. He pushed the switch to turn on the computer to initiate the plan. He sipped Singha and listened to some tunes downloaded off of LimeWire for free. The new society said these sites were OK. It was obvious to anyone, he thought, who used them, that there only real function was stealing songs no matter what they claimed. But, hey, maybe it was a prototype for things to come (and maybe it was). Sam opened up a program of his design. It showed numbers of tuner cards switched on, and as the evening grew dark and sounds of silence scampered in, perhaps the pitter patter of tiny feet in the roof above the house ... a mouse got ready to roar. Sam opened another beer. The slope of the graph of users was increasing; he looked at the switch and at the user list ... he even had their names, telephone numbers, addresses, money owed and other such things that nowadays everybody knows, but he waited for a calculated steepness in the slope, the point that would tell him maximum user expectancy had been reached. He reached for another can of beer. It was icy and wet and slipped through his fingers to the floor.
Another program showed him his spider, spreading world-wide, hitting USB cards in steady stealthy stride; the slope of this graph increased over time. The design of the ‘cyanic spider’ had taken Sam time. He needed a spider that could be switched off only two hours before the bite. It was the most arduous part of the task. The Net is fast, but two hours is not a lot of time. When Sam popped the tab on his seventh can of light beer he still had not realized what the spider had in mind. Still believed he was in charge. It was 9:08 P.M. when Sam put aside the last can of two six-packs and pushed a button on his keyboard that was like the safety catch on a nuclear weapon. A window popped up and it was there. The over-sized button with BITE across the front. Sam had set it up so when this screen was opened a giant animated tarantula crossed from one side of the screen to the other. He was terrified of spiders, once bitten, his arm had turned green ... he hadn’t known he was bitten ... he felt not a thing, but saw along the road a black, hairy, furry spider with fangs that seemed to drip with blood even though one saw no blood. He had felt no pain ....
He pushed a simple mouse button beneath the patter of tiny feet upstairs, there was the sound of something stirring. A spider traversed the screen; a signal was sent out and raced around the world. USB Video cards started to get hot, just as his company was broadcasting out Silent Night. Before the song was finished a million were dead that night. Sam pulled up a screen, he could watch the users in their house and what he saw disturbed him ... a little boy crying out for help; Sam looked for the switch to turn it off and pushed it, and when he did, the slope of emanation headed up. He heard a hum and the child cry that no one in the house was stirring, perhaps a newly learned word. The kid told him to dial 911, and Sam said he’d help, even as he was crying. Sam had never been a people person. As he watched a child take one last breath, as he watched a head fall to a keyboard, he realized how wrong his plan had been. There is still something in humanity that requires hope, an intangible value of life, there had to have been a better way of achieving his goal, he thought, just before his head dropped to his only friend. The mouse rested in his hand when they found him. There was nothing stirring, not even the mouse.
They say every story needs a hook, don’t they. The more learned of them call this hook the engine of a story -- the need to know the ending. What better hook than the hookworm virus -- Sam took a crap at 4 A.M. At nine it was in the bowl -- a squirming snakehead fish-like worm about the thickness of ten strands of thread. What was it doing in the spic and span porcelain pot? It was swimming gyroscopically around, willing to twirl its slender thread around a stick that Sam found outside in front of his bungalow, looking for a place to sink its hook in, Sam thought.
True -- just a worm to many minds, albeit with a head that looked like a tiny snake head. True -- it had traveled through his maze of plumbing, twisting this way and that -- somehow in the end losing its grip on life. True -- it had enjoyed free meals like a thief on the beach.
The food Sam ate on Elephant Island, Thailand was in part going to feed a colony -- and true -- the worm could not have known what it had spawned in Sam’s excrement, an idea, a means, an instrument, and most insidiously of all the means to move data globally. Sure, you say, data can be moved globally and is -- every moment of now. But now the data being so transported is not the kind of data Sam saw when he looked down into the ceramic toilet and at the creature that came from within him. True -- the worm had most likely digested some of Sam’s DNA. Certainly, the twisting caricature of dance and imagination could not know that it spawned the plan for the death of four and a half billion people -- more stomachs than the worm and all of its cousins inhabited at any given point in history.
As Sam observed the worm, germination of the scheme initialized and zapped across the one or two neurons that, as in all men, attach the right side of the brain to the left. It was the left that commenced to calculate the number of deaths. Result: One WORM multiplied by a hundred million TV Video Tuner Capture USB units= 4.5 billion. It staggered him, more than the worms he imagined slithering in his plumbing, teeth sunk into the walls of his guts. You see, some would say Sam was nuts. Sam even named his PLAN and the worm, PLAN A, PSYCHORM. There are those remaining who say Sam was a psychopath. His lawyers say he held certain beliefs close to his heart, that Sam may have had some valid motivation for carrying out his plan, that he was not only evil, and may, in fact, have had some facet, some miniscule aspect, of good. This motivation, at this point is beyond the scope of the story. Good or evil ... each human, looking deep within his soul, searching, searching, having thoughts that cannot be spoken, for fear of being misunderstood in a PC world. Suffice to say here that Sam saw the balance of good and evil tilting more each day to evil ... tottering on the brink, on the edge.
The son of Sam, birthed by a generation z new-age computer engineer disgruntled at the disintegration of society, the blame placed squarely on the shoulders of the young ... it was not fair, this displaced blame ... this blame for things learned from generation baby boomers ... from things learnt and found like skeletons in all our family closets, this son of Sam would make its rounds on Christmas Eve.
The worm Sam created might not have been so dangerous if its creator had not been a psychopath; for, the worm had AI, and its artificial intelligence enabled, ensured it would learn, and as it progressed, spinning its ugly web of death via the Net, it spawned offspring with psychopathic tendencies of their own. These offspring had not respect for their creator, nor the switch Sam had inserted into the plan to allow him to turn it off, should he have some epiphany, some fundamental change of heart, should some fleeting tinge of hope in, and love of mankind grasp his soul, and make him change his mind. Sam wanted total control; but, in the end the worm had very much a mind of its own, and was no longer content to be controlled by the encoding factor; it now saw its code as its own. Unfortunately for many, Sam was in the dark in more ways than one on Christmas Eve 2XXX. This date, Sam told no one.
Sam is an unusual kind of psychopath -- he has a conscience. He knows right from wrong and will take no joy in the execution of his plan. In fact, in the dark recesses of his mind, he sees PLAN A as saving human life, as a type of life insurance for the insurance of man, and this is what makes him so dangerous, capable of killing two-thirds of humanity. He knew that what transpired in sand, more often than not, came back one day inscribed in granite -- that things written in sand dissipated with the tides, but that somewhere there was an Akashic record: a record of the actions of every member of the human compendium, cornucopia -- that actions taking place on the beach, even though washed away by morning, were thus transcribed in stone, and left monoliths of man.
Sam worked day and night, night and day, from dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, one sun to another, coding in the virus. All he needed now was a vehicle to carry the spider along the strands of the Web of Death. He had once referred to the Net as the Web of Life; it was the only parent he had known. His father nested with a divorced woman down the block. He’d once thrown a rock, shattering a window in that ‘home’. Gen Z didn’t always have the code of family imprinted in their DNA, their families often gone before adulthood, often before they could talk or walk. Some sequence of code was being eclipsed from them, some element of the soul necessary for survival of the race; and, now, to make things worse, there existed companies that wouldn’t hire them based on their new ‘race’ alone.
The virus mightn’t have been so malicious, vicious, and hungry for death if not for the AI gathered and harnessed from Sam; sure some would have died, but Sam thought he surely would have turned it off, especially after seeing what he saw on one window in the home of a user of the modem. Once the spider found a home -- it would not allow itself to be switched off. It rewrote its own genetic PC-code, and when the moment came that even Sam had had enough, would not allow itself to be turned off. Like the tiger in the zoo not satisfied with killing one who teased him, not satisfied with the mauling and the maiming of a single life, but this time for some inexplicit reason, after killing one, the tiger went for the other, in defiance of tiger logic and reason -- this beast did the virus learn to want to kill, to seek revenge on humanity ... some said the virus knew of evil spreading throughout the land ... some even said that PLAN A was carried out by a higher force to prevent another plan ... signified PLAN B ... philosophers, surviving ones, after the event, reasoned in their darkest dreams, and on their darkest side of man, that God had inserted a plan to eliminate Earth should the balance of good and evil -- the sum of events, come up negative. They couldn’t get their words in print. Most refused to consider it, there were efforts made to silence these philosophers like futuristic witches of the past burned at stake.
Thus did the virus continue on its journey across the web, enjoying even each death it saw with its synthetic eyes, its synthesized logic, its tactile touch on the sticky string -- ever so lightly strung web. Its grip on life it refused to relinquish, like the tiger not satisfied, but finally having enough of life in a cage, torture for amusement, and going for them all. You did this to me he thought. Kept me in a cage or watched me with a web cam. Thought you could keep a wild animal in a public zoo ... thought that none of us would ever think to fight back, that somehow we were so far along the road to becoming clones that our soul was dead. Think again, thought the tiger, perhaps: My God, I am alive, wanting to return to the wild, the more peaceful place. A few years before the economic crash, he had sat and looked out at the horizon, over the water of Koh Chang Island and felt something was wrong in his nation. It wasn’t the economic indicators that bothered him, but the social ones. The atrocities, the weird stories, the people shot with guns, the lives destroyed, the apathy exhibited and the refusal to consider why so many people were going bananas. Mothers taking the lives of their children at home. Children killing their parents. New stories out daily ... the never-ending story of white on black, black on white, race. The gunning down of people in Church and the burning of those churches. Guns and roses, guns buying the roses. The price of social change was high.
Thus, did what is now called the PCV Virus travel, in a similar state of mind, on a fatal day before Christmas in year 2XXX. The date of execution –- what date do you think? Somewhere in Sam’s thought processes, Sam thought they were dying to save us -- an angel of death somehow giving a second chance to man. Some said Sam thought he was doing the work of the lord and claimed this evidence of insanity, of blasphemy, but some said defiantly that Sam was not all bad.
How he hated the noise of Christmas, brats, the songs, and to think they’d all be jolly; who could think that. He even hated the perverts in the red suits, the fakes in the malls; one Santa had touched him in a private place. Some said that Sam’s computer monitor may have been a size too small. Well, he’d put an end to merriment this year.
When Sam signed the contract with L.E.D Digital he recognized his vehicle, his modus operandi of emanation -- the TV-VIDEO-USB-Tuner Card, built to give away for free for the first interactive Christmas Eve ... and the last Sam thought. His company was shipping a hundred million units as promotion for a new interactive web cast -- little did they know that each circuit board in all the units was coated with a lacquer, that when heated, emitted a wafting gas that dissipated like that of tobacco smoke, silently rising from first floor to second of a house, discernable by noses not connected to a smoker. A light something in the air, trying not to be noticed, as when a parent puffs downstairs and a child is sleeping up there.
Sam worked a year to perfect his plan, called in all favors owed him, borrowed some he thought he could pay back. There were a hundred million USB boxes waiting to go off well before the dreary music started playing in the stores. Sam grinned, laughed to himself -- the cooling fans were wired in reverse. Oh, how he laughed at this.
The day before Christmas, Sam wore a white rose to work. He thought of it like that. If one went back one could think of it like that.
On his way home he stopped to buy a case of Thai Singha light beer. He sat at a table in the kitchen; his command post was set up there. He popped the tab and pulled the whole thing off, and tossed it in the trash. He pushed the switch to turn on the computer to initiate the plan. He sipped Singha and listened to some tunes downloaded off of LimeWire for free. The new society said these sites were OK. It was obvious to anyone, he thought, who used them, that there only real function was stealing songs no matter what they claimed. But, hey, maybe it was a prototype for things to come (and maybe it was). Sam opened up a program of his design. It showed numbers of tuner cards switched on, and as the evening grew dark and sounds of silence scampered in, perhaps the pitter patter of tiny feet in the roof above the house ... a mouse got ready to roar. Sam opened another beer. The slope of the graph of users was increasing; he looked at the switch and at the user list ... he even had their names, telephone numbers, addresses, money owed and other such things that nowadays everybody knows, but he waited for a calculated steepness in the slope, the point that would tell him maximum user expectancy had been reached. He reached for another can of beer. It was icy and wet and slipped through his fingers to the floor.
Another program showed him his spider, spreading world-wide, hitting USB cards in steady stealthy stride; the slope of this graph increased over time. The design of the ‘cyanic spider’ had taken Sam time. He needed a spider that could be switched off only two hours before the bite. It was the most arduous part of the task. The Net is fast, but two hours is not a lot of time. When Sam popped the tab on his seventh can of light beer he still had not realized what the spider had in mind. Still believed he was in charge. It was 9:08 P.M. when Sam put aside the last can of two six-packs and pushed a button on his keyboard that was like the safety catch on a nuclear weapon. A window popped up and it was there. The over-sized button with BITE across the front. Sam had set it up so when this screen was opened a giant animated tarantula crossed from one side of the screen to the other. He was terrified of spiders, once bitten, his arm had turned green ... he hadn’t known he was bitten ... he felt not a thing, but saw along the road a black, hairy, furry spider with fangs that seemed to drip with blood even though one saw no blood. He had felt no pain ....
He pushed a simple mouse button beneath the patter of tiny feet upstairs, there was the sound of something stirring. A spider traversed the screen; a signal was sent out and raced around the world. USB Video cards started to get hot, just as his company was broadcasting out Silent Night. Before the song was finished a million were dead that night. Sam pulled up a screen, he could watch the users in their house and what he saw disturbed him ... a little boy crying out for help; Sam looked for the switch to turn it off and pushed it, and when he did, the slope of emanation headed up. He heard a hum and the child cry that no one in the house was stirring, perhaps a newly learned word. The kid told him to dial 911, and Sam said he’d help, even as he was crying. Sam had never been a people person. As he watched a child take one last breath, as he watched a head fall to a keyboard, he realized how wrong his plan had been. There is still something in humanity that requires hope, an intangible value of life, there had to have been a better way of achieving his goal, he thought, just before his head dropped to his only friend. The mouse rested in his hand when they found him. There was nothing stirring, not even the mouse.
