NTLDR MISSING

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Ugh.
0430. I really should think about getting up.

[Get Up, Stay Up, with Caffiagra].

Dammit, not like I’ve slept more than 2 hours at a time in almost four years anyway.

No one has.

Between emails, pop-up ads, IMs from other friends who can’t sleep, and, god-forbid, the viruses, no one sleeps much anymore.
The headaches alone are enough to keep someone from sleeping.

[Try a free sample of AspirEdrin Today]

It is said that ‘we all live in a hell of our own creation’. Well, whoever said that had no idea. Sadly, everyone now lives in a hell of my creation.

Four years. Seems like yesterday.
It began as an innocent enough gesture.

An unemployed Computer Tech buddy of mine asked me if I knew of any open positions in the IT Department of the hospital I work at.

[Find Tech Jobs at CareerCritter.com]

Turns out I did know of a position, but it was with my department, down in the basement shop, fixing the instruments when they broke down.

Well, my buddy was a technician, good with tools, could use a soldering iron and knew how to handle a multi-meter.

He also liked to tinker with broken computers and such in his garage and fancied himself some sort of mad scientist.

So I recommended him to our HR Department.

Poor bastard. Poor world. I’m sorry, man. I had no idea.

One night, about 6 months after he started work. I came into the shop on Monday to start work and there he was.
Apparently he’d been there all weekend, tinkering on some project.

He was soldering away on some old, broken EEG machine I said he could have and he’d wired in one of those home wireless routers people use for getting on the internet.

He was laughing like he’d won the lottery and then started dancing around.

I asked him what the hell he was doing and he said “I found it! I found it!” and grabbed up that contraption he’d been working on and headed for the door.

I asked him where he was going and he said, “I’m going to become rich!”

“I’m going to become rich!” The last thing my buddy ever said to me and as it ends up, it was the last time he ever saw me.

I’d heard later that day that he had called into HR and quit his job. I tried calling him later that day without success and even stopped by his house after work. He was no where around.

About 6 months after that day, a little known computer hardware manufacturer named CybisTech held a huge press conference.

They announced that they had built a device that would truly revolutionize the computer world as we knew it. They called the technology 802.11z and the device was the NeuroCloud.

The device looked hauntingly familiar.

I found out later that day that what my buddy had accidentally stumbled upon, that fateful day in the shop, was a nothing more than a frequency.

A frequency.

Simple enough sounding discovery, right?
Well, apparently it was the frequency a wireless device can transmit on that matches a human’s brainwave patterns.

By the looks of that press release he had also found himself a buyer for his discovery.

CybisTech. Practically overnight those bastards became the single most powerful company in the world.

A world now that will never be the same, and it’s all my fault.

Well, I guess I should get this day started. I’ve got a pop-up blocker to think about and new anti-virus definition updates I have to concentrate on before I get this sad day over with.

Oh, almost forgot to tell you about my buddy. I’d said before how that day was the last day he’d ever seen me.

But it’s not the last day I had seen him.

I visit him every day.

Turns out my buddy did get rich like he wanted. Insanely rich. He had even put me down as the sole beneficiary and executor of his estate.
Well, about three months ago I received a call from his lawyers.

A maid had found my friend in his study, just sitting at his desk, staring ‘into nothing’. Pale skin, the most vacant, haunting expression you’ll ever see.

They called the ambulance and took him to the hospital.

Specialists from all over the world have checked him out and all say there is nothing they can do.

It’s called a Lobekit, at least it is now.

The Universe is a cruel place and my friend had discovered one more thing in his life.

He had become the very first person in history to catch a computer virus.

Here I sit, at his bed side, looking at another EEG machine. This one, however, has nothing but a single sentence on it’s screen.

NTLDR MISSING……

Fiction (or is it?) by Mike Rigsby