The Evil Psychotic Computer

"So what are you going to do while I’m gone?" Cheryl asked, suddenly pausing on her way out the door.

"Hmmm-"

"You’re not going to sit at that computer all day-" Cheryl began to protest as her husband’s mouth quirked, betraying his private intentions. "Harry!" she cried, in tones of dismay.

"Well, I was going to rake the leaves this afternoon." Harry offered, chagrined.

"Oh, Harry!" Cheryl made a delighted noise, and Harry basked momentarily in the glow of her approval.

"All right then, I’m going," she announced after a few more minutes searching for her purse and car keys.

And when the patio door shut behind her, Harry still had every intention of raking the leaves in the back yard. But then after pacing around the living room looking for his misplaced list of weekend chores, Harry spied poor little Lulu sitting in the corner by herself, with a forlorn look about her and a comfy inviting chair perched in front of her. On this chair Harry had begun more and more of late to pay Lulu homage.

Okay, computers don’t have names. At least, most of them don’t. But it just so happens that Harry’s computer had a name, and it was Lulu. Not for any particular reason, except perhaps that Harry found the sound of it vaguely comforting. "Little" Lulu’s synthesized female voice kept him company on the weekends when Cheryl went into the city to shop and meet up with her friends at their favorite French café, which served a fantastic quiche buffet. With Lulu Harry discovered all of the secret toys and offers floating around on the world wide web readily available to an IT person in the know, and he daily located and downloaded hundreds of files, mostly recreational in nature.

But Lulu herself was by far Harry’s greatest pride and joy. He had equipped her with every high-tech gadget, every latest upgrade. Lulu was small and her case old, and most of her wires had been left exposed as Harry continuously upgraded her memory and drives, but though perhaps shabby on the outside, she was the most high-powered computer for miles and miles around. And more and more, Lulu’s performance improved under Harry’s tender loving care. With the DSL cable installed along with a special speed-enhancing software, Lulu’s screen moved quickly and crisply to each new web address. More and more, Harry began to leave the computer on throughout the day while he was at work, just to keep power flowing into Lulu while she downloaded particularly large files. Harry hated to turn her off. In some strange way, he began to feel uncomfortable, even melancholic when he watched as the light of Lulu’s monitor faded into black.

Harry’s stomach growled as he sat down on the chair in front of Lulu. Only one thing pre-empted his need to quell his hunger, and that was the thought that he might have heard from e-bay. With one decisive motion, Harry turned on Lulu’s power switch.

"I’m just going to check e-mail before I rake the leaves," he said aloud. The computer of course said nothing as she warmed to life and brightness before him. Lulu’s speakers only ever said a few static sentences, such as "your connection has been terminated" and the like. But today, though she kept silent, Lulu’s keys gave ever so gently under the light touch of Harry’s fingers; if Harry had noticed it, her screen also glowed with an unusally soft, phosphorescent light as it never had before. The usually constant whine of her cooling fan began to lilt up and down in a breath-like manner.