...End Program

It turns out the company had been working on their own variation of a theme, although they had been working a lot harder than most. By the time I got involved the company had made their own version of the helmet . It was a lot smaller and lighter and fitted a lot more like a headband than an actual headpiece.

The device was designed to transmit signals back and forth from the brain and allow the user to work a computer without touching a keyboard or using a mouse. Hell, with that thing working right you wouldn't even have to use your voice.

I was blown away, I couldn't help thinking how this would revolutionise the industry, in fact it had the potential to revolutionise any industry. Could you imagine a surgeon who can access the case files for a medical procedure during an operation, without once leaving the theatre?. A driver who can access any route in the world without having to take his hands off the wheel?

It seemed impossible to believe that something like that was waiting to be born and I was there as one of the instruments that could make that happen. That’s when I came in, the company had the hardware almost down to pat. All the components worked fine, they interacted with the brain just like they wanted, what they wanted was someone who could write the software to drive this thing.

That s when the late hours and lost weekends started, and for that I am and always will be truly sorry. I always figured that time was something I could catch up with later, I realise now that’s a race I will never win.

Working with the device was easy, It was almost like the job I was born to do. I began writing the programs for the device and within a couple of months I had a couple of bits and pieces ready for use on a home computer. Can you imagine thinking about your Emil and then watching it arrive...in your head if you wanted.

I got careless I began to work harder without thinking about the ramifications of what could go wrong and that's where the problems started. You might remember me telling you about the stuff in the press about computer viruses. I know you weren't really bothered at the time but bear with me on this one because it’s important.

Some guy wrote a virus and the way viruses work is by moving from one computer to another when those two computers interact. It’s almost like a real disease, for me I guess it is. I never figured that anyone outside the lab where we working had any idea what we were doing but I was naive.

It seems plenty of people in the internet community knew, one guy in particular knew too much because he took a copy of the software I had already written and began tampering with it. He wrote a simple virus like all the others, it was designed to replicate itself over and over again until it filled up whatever space it could find on the infected computer.

Only trouble is when the virus struck home back in the lab, the computer that got infected was hooked up to another one. I never dreamt that the virus would spread like it did, yet when the machine went down I was working with it using one of the headsets I had been working with.

Our security team took care of the problem, they’re pretty hot when it comes to that kind of stuff. They wrote some software of their own which killed the virus and made the system secure. I was concerned about the security aspect sure, but I didn't think about the matter any further.

At least not for a few days anyway...