Hardware

Before too long, you'll find a kite in red and green and blue and white. Answer the phone with much delight and you may be shown a lofty height to which you will go one starry night. Please be careful, Frag. I love you. Here are the addresses; 243, 654, 002, 762."

Scroll sat looking confused. He rubbed at the five o'clock shadow forming on his chin, waited for a while, scratched his infantile head and ignored the whole thing.

He needed a coffee. He made a really strong one. He made it so sweet that anyone would be forgiven for asking if he wanted some coffee with his sugar.

Looking again at the decoded message, he noticed a few well hidden key words. Ten, bus, flight, kite, red, green, blue, white, phone, starry night and addresses. At least three of those words could be related to computer jargon; bus, phone and addresses. The other words, made no sense at all, so he decided to sleep on it.

It was obviously an encrypted e-mail message so he thought he should get back to Frag's house and look at all the incoming mail from the last month or so. When he found it, there was no evidence of a sender address.

"Hmmm, an anonymous ID, huh?" Scroll mumbled.

When he looked again at her e-mail, he noticed a new message had arrived, so he read it.

"Frag, wake up, you're too slow. How come you haven't mailed me lately? I get lonely. If you're teasing me, then it's not very funny.

Again, Scroll noticed there was no sender address.

"This is beginning to get interesting," he murmured.

He decided to reply to this message by using the computer's own default reply option.

"Dearest PC, I am here again," wrote Scroll. "Sorry, for not writing sooner. It's been a bad week. How are things with you? Send my love to CP as well.

"That message you sent me the other day, the scrambled one, I was trying to decipher it. Sorry. I thought you had sent it to me. Mind you, I didn't crack it anyway.

"I'll speak with you later.

"Frag."

And then, he clicked on "send" and the message was sent.

A few moments later, there was a reply.

"Scroll, hello. Why are you pretending to be Frag? I know you have cracked the encryption because you copied it onto a floppy and took it home and then painstakingly deciphered the layers of code. You're a clever kid.

Scroll was somewhat inquisitive about this PC character, whoever he or she or they or it may be. He began to type a reply when the computer crashed.