1. Oh beautiful hack job of zero's and ones hiding in deep spaces and hidden pockets you run your mayhem and I'm fighting you, fighting you; but the code keeps evolving every virus wants to stay alive.
It would be obvious to say it stays alive by replication, but W32.blaster.worm is a new kind of disease. I've fought these things before- you find them duplicating until you have nothing left, a slow obsession kind of infection; where the whole memory becomes overwhelmed with noise, and all data gets lost in the miasma of corruption.
W32.blaster.worm, you are more like me. You put a piece of your illness into multiple folders; you hide behind the other spaces, and you change, like passive aggression and pent up hostilities coming through in acts of alleged kindness.
You're not kind. You're a virus.
Notepad is supposed to open, but notepad is not opening. Task Manager is supposed to open, and task manager is not opening. I crushed you before by going back with windows xp system restore you took memories of our own pristine computation, and you infected the past as well; W32.Blaster.Worm, you are a time traveler, crashing the system. I'm supposed to be composing a list of resentments and regrets.
2. Let's look again at how you work. It all starts with an RPC overload. Someone outside wants to get in; and we know they want to do bad things; so we shut down.
When we come up again, we say, "The threat has been avoided, everything is fine, no one wants to get inside of us anymore." But, something has already come in, in our shutting down, and it's waiting.
The actions we're supposed to take amount to little else from then on but a way to perpetuate it; when we go about the daily routine- the email; the talking with friends; the writing of poems, diary entries, there is something behind it all, working, eating, stealing, corrupting.
I try everything I am supposed to do to track you down, to get at the root of the problem, but you're not the only corrupted engine with me up to now.
The dog is biting random feet put down to gas chambers, the girl has disappeared into thin air, the car takes on speed like fish would climb a waterfall; the music into static and crackles; the cats are in the kitchen, Mars, as close as it has been in 60,000 years the virus that comes from nowhere is upon the digital landscape, interrupting the list of regrets and resentments:
The Remote Procedure Call service terminated, unexpectedly.
3. It was only him. In every list I have been constructing in my head; it's just him, in the dream he was there, when the car broke down.
4. The RPC crashes because it senses something trying to break through. It crashes because staying open to such a breach could be far more devastating than a mere breakdown and restart.
Once inside, a virus could take full control over the administration of the machine; gets beneath the skin and it can stay there.
But the virus gets through. That's the glitch, the chink in the armor. The virus gets through keeps shutting down, pretending to protect us. It shuts down to protect itself from infection from a disease it already has.
And are you ready, lovers of metaphor?
You can't even begin to find the viral executable until you turn all the protections off.
And no one has any idea how.
5. I found out how.
First there is self awareness: the task manager; the list of all running processes, where you look at every computation to shut them down when they start to look suspicious.
But the virus keeps it closed. You get glimpses. Shutdown after 5 seconds of insight.
So I renamed it, and opened up a copy. This is sort of like religion, or case histories. You find the dangerous process and then you shut it down.
You'll have doubts about what's safe to shut down; you won't know what's essential but just start to shut them all down: Windows will not terminate critical applications.
6. Then you have to open it all up. The computer has a dream life, a well of data, lying dormant waiting to be orchestrated by the system administrator into some elaborate narrative. But really, its all just sleeping in sectors. But it is there. And there can be a great number of gorgeous data there. The files that we thought we'd lost; the pictures of people I never see, the short moments of inspiration jotted in notepad at 5AM closed and gone before I wake up and forget I even wrote them.
But there's the darkness, too; a sickness of cyclical processing eating away, corrupting anything it touches.
7. You find it and you are happy. It's hidden. You search through rooms and rooms, data piled to the sky, programs and exe's and memories, music you forgot and there it is, cleverly disguised.
You press delete, but it stays.
Other applications depend on this program. Shut down those applications before deleting this file.
The system spawns other systems: a virus. It reproduces, makes you dependent; and the whole structure of you and me, built up on a diseased thought that managed to replicate until it ate the foundation and seeped into it, erasing the memories with the exception of random access; pretty soon the system sees that it only knows how to operate with the virus, and not without it.
8. W32.Blaster.Worm; I am excited.
I got you, anyway.
I tracked you down, and I found you;
and I found every file you touched;
and you have been wiped clean.
You don't know what this means to me, W32.Blaster.Worm.
It's something on par with knowing I can be in love again.
-e.
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