Wipeout.com

Wipeout.com

Everybody wants to be famous for fifteen minutes don't they ? A quick
burst of exposure to swell the
ego, and preferably the bank balance as well. I wanted to be famous,
but what I wanted most of all, was
to be rich, the fame would be a bonus. Ambition, and what I thought was
a clever mind, at the time,
allowed me to be just what I wanted. And, at the moment it all
collapsed in ruins, everyone in the world
knew my name.
My fifteen minutes of fame preceded the complete breakdown of
civilisation as humanity knew it.

I left school without any idea of modern computers, and kind of fell
into the computing business by
accident. But once I was in, I saw that, in the latter years of the
20th century, this was the future, and it
was profitable. With the increasing popularity of the internet, came
the computer virus. And where there
was a virus, there was an anti-virus program. It was here that I
channelled my youthful energy, and went
to work for a large corporation who had the leading edge anti-virus
package, Wipeout. Progress was
slow, but I managed middle management within three years. However,
things were slowing down, rather
than speeding up, so I needed a boost to push me into the spotlight,
and up the corporate ladder.

It was then I had my brainwave, inspiration for the quick, and easy
path to promotion. If I could find a
virus that only my company could provide the cure for. A virus so
malignant, that everyone would want a
Wipeout package on their PC. One so devious, that no other package
could kill. That meant, I had to
have a unique cure, written into the virus. Which meant, I had to be
behind the thing in the first place.

I therefore began an eight month search for a virus writer, the enemy
of the internet, to create me the
virus I wanted. You'd be surprised where virus writers exist, who they
are, and why they create the chaos
they do. I mixed with some real nerds, some deviants, and devils,
before, I found, in the shape of a
balding telephone engineer, probably the most inventive mind ever to
unleash a virus on the world.

Gerald Paul Travis, 48, and painfully thin. He was introverted, meek
and a loner. He sat, hour after hour,
at his computer, surfing porn mostly. He also occupied his time writing
programs that annoyed, insulted,
and provoked people, for his own twisted amusement. His mundane job was
a telecom engineer, and he
hated it, and his work colleagues, with a vengeance. He had half
created a virus, for a devious purpose
he had yet to decide. I met him, and found his virus was a saleable
commodity, ?5000 worth of custom
created mayhem, a one off deal.

He called it the 2001 virus, after a film he doted upon. I had him
write a recognisable part of the
program that I could slip into our package to neutralise the virus, and
that would also make it immune to
any other package - something that took a further six months to do, but
the perverted genus managed
it. In this time the millennium, and it's bugs, had come and gone.
No-one was expecting trouble on New
Years Day 2001, but at 20:01pm, on Jan 1, 2001, Travis' virus was
downloaded from a hard core porn
site, into six million computers world-wide, including a bored clerk
for a multinational bank, and it
promptly wiped them out inside an hour. The bank crash was an
unexpected bonus, but the publicity
made everyone sit up and listen. The paranoia was intense, and the
anti-virus packages were stumped,
except for the New Year edition of Wipeout, which had acquired the key
to the 2001 virus, and instantly
became the best selling virus package on the market. The higher
echelons of Wipeout management saw
my name over the success story, and I was on my way.

Five years later I heard that Gerald Travis had died, of cancer. The
?5000 I paid him had been set aside
for his death, which he knew was coming. The 2001 virus was his legacy,
intended to wreak havoc on
the world as a channel for his anger at the disease that had killed
him. I thought at the time that it was a
small challenge for a creation like 2001, it could easily have caused
much more carnage than it was
allowed to. It never occurred to me that Travis had in fact not
undersold his baby, that there was much
more to come. I didn't really care, by then I was one step away from
the boardroom, after a meteoric rise
to power, and the money was flowing freely as Wipeout became the single
biggest anti-virus package in
the world, employed in 95\% of all computers. Used by every big
corporation on the face of the planet,
and sold with nearly every new computer on the market.

The internet, and computer age was truly here, by 2009 every single
activity in the modern lifestyle was
controlled, aided or completed by the computer. Nothing happened,
anywhere in civilised society,
without input from the computer. Life, depended on them. And one thing
certain, was that Wipeout was
100\% infallible in protecting the computers from crashing, as a virus
would prove catastrophic. So good
was our product, that viruses were pointless exercises, as they could
never crack the wipeout armour.

The cancer that killed Travis, ate him from within, and his final gift
to humanity, was a cancer that did the
same to Wipeout.

You see, Travis was a huge sci-fi buff, hence the fascination with the
film 2001. And the film had a
sequel, 2010. On New Years day, 2010, at 20:10pm, Travis ultimate
creation struck at the worlds
computers. He had programmed a dormant virus into the cure for 2001, an
integral part of the Wipeout
application. Which put his virus on nearly every computer in the world.
And at 20:10pm, it posted my
name on every screen, billboard, and TV screen it could, 90\% of the
world as it happened, for fifteen
minutes, detailing my motives, the price paid, and then systematically
shut them all down.

Everything.

Banks, hospitals, power suppliers, water suppliers, gas, everything.
Inside fifteen minutes, 2010 crippled
every civilised society with an irreversible strike, making the
computers behind the planets life little more
than scrap plastic and wires. The computer controlled generation was
plunged into mass hysteria, panic
fuelled by being unable to do anything at all.

There were riots, complete and utter confusion. No order, no civility,
no solution. Governments were
useless, leaders were ignored, the armies and police were in the same
boat as the people they
protected, helpless, and they fought for survival as hard as anyone
else. The planet was plunged back
into the dark ages, and it was some time before any kind of order was
established again, and a
systematic rebuilding began. Small communities grew up, as people
worked to build primitive dwellings
and tried to establish some way of living again.

But for those who set out to rebuild, there were those who returned to
the land as savages. And so this
is the way of life now. Savage tribes rule the wastelands of each
continent, killing and consuming all that
they come across. There are those who have some order and intelligence,
and they dominate. There are
small pockets who are uncontrolled aggressives that spare nothing and
no-one. Perhaps if, after my
exile from the community I had hidden among after the initial collapse,
I had been found by the savages,
I would have suffered no more.

But, my greed and ambition, which ultimately created this new world,
although I was the vehicle by which
Travis instigated the growth, has set me up for suffering until they
kill me. Remorse, hindsight, guilt, I
have been through them all, since the collapse, and every dark day
afterwards. But it won't ever change
a thing, it won't change the circumstances I now find myself in.

Or the pit which is now my home.
I roamed for a while after my exile, someone with a long memory
realised who I was, and they sent me
into the wilds as some punishment for destroying civilisation. So I
roamed, and was happened upon by
an intelligent tribe, intelligent enough to make use of the man they
found outside the boundaries of the
community. They cast me into this pit, and are slowly using me to
sustain their existence.
I call them intelligent, as rather than kill me outright, they began
with my ankles, and lower legs. They
cooked them while they were still attached, living flesh apparently
tastes better than dead flesh. It wasn't
until the limbs were cooked that they cut them from my body. In irony,
a rather ugly young boy offered
me a bite of my own shin whilst I lay there screaming. I screamed until
they cut out my tongue to quiet
me down. The stumps had begun to putrefy and rot when they cast me into
the pit, so I couldn't crawl off
and die presumably. I had just got accustomed to the pain, when they
dragged me out and cooked my
left arm in the same way. They also severed my testicles and penis for
a delicacy, which they fought over.

I'm back in the pit now, drifting in and out of consciousness. I have
with me a pad of paper I found
buried down here, and I'm writing these words whilst I still have my
right arm, and the will to do so. It's
hard to write with a broken tooth, and dipping the tooth into the
bloodied stump of my arm is painful,
and frequent, but I'm managing. I want to leave something of me, buried
here, for no reason but to
justify my existence, before they return for my other arm. I don't
thing my ruined body will survive
another cooking, I'm amazed I've lived this long.

I can hear the fire crackling again. I'd best bury this deep down. I
won't be able to do it afterwards even
if I live through the night.