...End Program

I started getting headaches, I put it down to my workload, all those hours working with computers. Hey!, the two problems go hand in hand don’t they, the company was looking for deadlines. They wanted to get their stuff out to a couple of schools for kids with disabilities, let them try the stuff for themselves and see how the real world would deal with it.

I didn't think anything else of the problem, I just soldiered on regardless, pretty dumb of me I know but by this time it was probably too late anyway. My work was still going well apart from one little thing, every time I put the headband back on which contained the interface between me and the computer, the computer would register that it was infected again.

I figured there had to be some kind of mistake, the computer was all on its own it wasn’t hooked up to anything. No phone lines or CD s, no floppy disks...zilch!

I went to the hardware guys and had them take a look at the headband. They said it checked out OK. But just to be on the safe side I got them to build me another one, I even watched as they put the finishing touches to it and handed it over to me.

I figured that would take care of the problem, I was wrong.

As soon as I linked up to the computer through my headset, the computer went nuts again. It was reinfected with the virus. I joked with the others and we laughed about how the only other common ingredient in this thing was me. Real funny, huh?

That joke must have struck a chord because I began dabbling with the software, I wanted to see if it could find out where the virus was coming from each time it entered my computer system. I spent days trying to figure out a way for the computer to try and map all the shit that was coming out of my brain every time we linked up.

Eventually I managed to set up a simple call monitor on my computer, it logged all the stuff that my brain threw out in any one session. I don’t think I’ve ever been as speechless as I was that day when I discovered the truth.

It seems that when the virus hit the computer it spread as it was designed to do to anything within its reach, it seems that my brain was as suitable as the hard drive of a PC for taking up residence. I don’t mind admitting I was scared, here was a problem that I knew how to solve but one which was living in an area outside my expertise.

To this day I don't know how a piece of software could make the leap from a piece of silicon to an organ of living tissue. All I know is it did, whether it was specifically written to target the kind of stuff we working on or not...again I don’t know. I can only guess that somewhere in the translation process where the software becomes thought, well the virus became thought too.

I didn't tell anyone what was going on, they would have thought I was nuts...wouldn’t you?. All I could do was try and figure out a way of getting rid of this thing that was in my head before something bad happened. I didn't know what it would do to me, if anything at all but I wasn’t prepared to take the chance.