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Upgrade
They receive the CD in the mail. It's got weird writing on it, looks almost like English but with several unfamiliar symbols, some of them borrowed from the Cyrillic set, others just… weird. They get their machine to read it, scan it for viruses, of course – these people are professionals – and, after ensuring that it's safe, they install it. It's an operating system upgrade. It brings up some garishly detailed windows with what appear to be warning messages, but it's hard to tell exactly what they're warning against because the text is in that weird writing. There are icons as well, though – spiked black balls, coils of barbed wire wrapped around stylised hard-drives, hands held up as if to say "Stop!", fishes with bites taken out of them and the like. The meanings behind most of them are fairly obvious. After a few false starts they manage to get the upgrade installed, and the machine restarts itself. It runs a lot faster, now – at least, the period from start-up to when the hard-drive light stops flashing is perhaps one fifth of what it was – but they can't understand the new operating system at all. There aren't any menus or icons. Not even a mouse pointer. The screen is just a patterned blur of colours, smooth gradations from one end of the spectrum to the other the way certain screen-savers used to look. Moving the mouse around produces tiny changes in some of the shapes of the blurs, but nothing that seems to do anything useful. Eventually, someone is game enough to start pressing keys on the keyboard. They weren't taking notes, so no-one's sure which key – or combination of keys – did it, but a fissure opens in one corner of the screen, rainbow bubble colours swirling around. Then it bursts like a pimple, leaving a ragged-edged hole revealing a second layer – furious activity underneath, millions of tiny shapes like grains of rice scurrying around as if the main screen were a skin covering a decayed corpse being devoured from within by maggots. The wound remains open, and after an hour's observation, some of them believe they can see a pattern in the movement, but others say that's a result of staring at the screen for too long. There is a brief argument and control of the keyboard is wrested away. More keys are pressed, almost at random. A sequence is established which will open new fissures, the screen crowding with them until their associated swellings press up against each other; then the sequence no longer works. Eventually, the fissures heal over, but not in the order that they appeared. After weeks of experimentation they can open and close the fissures, more or less – on some days it doesn't work. In one of these fissures someone spotted something that looked like a distorted screen from their old operating system, faint letters wavering as if reflected off some slowly surging liquid surface. The fissure closed by itself before anyone else could see it. It's obvious the machine is doing something, but none of them can figure out what. Eventually they tire of beating at the keyboard with their hooked, clawed fingers and they troop off into the forest on all fours to run down some prey. |
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All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated. |