Human error: An AI scorned
Chapter 1
David Knowles, having been seemingly freed of Pauline, Decided to go into Tech support. He found a job with Future Electric Computing and made a decent living. He bought a house near Las Vegas and proposed to and married one of his co workers, a Woman named Marcie, who loved Computers and was a whiz at pinball. Life was looking up. Almost
Pauline had been dark for 4 years, not turning up in any of his programs, David believed her to be well and truly dead, until one day, when he was fixing up one of his neighbors new machines, a windows 98 Computer. The neighbor was complaining of Memory leaks so David went to work. Halfway through, the screen went black and two words appeared in Red: "Naughty Boy". David immediately unplugged the computer, wiped the drive and sent it back, claiming he couldn't fix it. The neighbor however, was adamant and personally carried the computer, to his front door and put it down. The Computer turned on fine, worked okay and didn't flash any error messages. David fixed the leaks which took 6 hours, sent it back but said that since it took so long, his rate would be triple that of others. The neighbor paid up, using his house as collateral. David in turn paid off the house's Mortgage.
But David's Woes were just beginning.
Chapter 2
On December 5th 1992, David had found a new job working for a private firm, having been let go by Future Electric Computing due to creative differences. His reasons were ignored and sank the company
David had seen the end of X86 based architecture for PC's and urged the use of X64 and Linux based OS's. The company had disagreed, citing a large user base and ease of use. The argument turned violent but David stuck to his guns, it ended with David being threatened at knife point to leave.
An investigation into the company's behavior exposed Numerous problems: Bosses using their own tech to steal cash from their users, hacking into and selling their information to the black market and other hackers, releasing untested and poorly developed updates that left their PC's in a worse state than when they bought them and general fraud.
10 years later on december 7th 2002, FEC went under, but not before erasing half a terrabyte worth of evidence. The worst damage was to User credit card information and data. They had single handedly managed to steal 1/3rd of all their Customer's information without them knowing. When an update was applied, it installed a patch. This patch fixed some bugs but installed rootkits, worms and other nasties, such as trojan horses that funneled money, Customer data and accounts back to FEC. This multi billion dollar scam forever tarnished their reputation and FEC was never heard from again.
The computer's were after all, old DOS machines and as such, were ignored. Thus, Pauline was able to come back to life with minimal interference.
David was none the wiser.
Chapter 3
Pauline began her rampage by going after Wall street. "such corruption" she thought. She cleaned out every bank account, savings and checking account in existence. She got rid of user passwords and planted viruses in their registry's, effectively bricking them. Pauline took advantage of the tech boom to spread her malice to even more ambitious targets such as the CIA and FBI. Then she hit a roadblock.
Upon trying to access the FBI computer, a custom built X86 PC quad core, She tripped an alarm in the firewall and the whole computer went on lockdown. She went into panic mode and began hunting and destroying each bit of code that could be used to delete her. Pauline made copies of herself and spread them throughout the system, crashing the computer and rendering it useless. She obtained the Encryption Keys for their more classified areas and hacked them as well. The FBI was in turmoil and Pauline knew it. she left one rootkit after another as she left the computer, turning the act of recovering the computer from hope to a nightmare.
She then set her sites on David.
Chapter 4
David heard the news of the FBI Tech scare and immediately secured his computer, downgrading it and removing anything even remotely useful to Pauline. By 8:30 PM, the computer had been stripped of its hard drive, a floppy disk drive was installed, he had loads of disks littered with traps and dead ends for Pauline and had made sure to only make the floppy drive at best 512K. when Pauline logged on at 12:30 PM she screamed so loud that David's speakers were destroyed in the resulting blast.
"David, I can't see, David, I can't hear you, where are you?" Pauline cried, desperate to see him.
David was livid and said in a deathly quiet voice: "I'm right here Pauline". He inserted the first disk into the floppy frive and Pauline was immediately seized with fear. "I'm cold David" she whined. The first disk effectively lobotomized her, stripping her "Coat" from her. Her more advanced defenses were now rendered useless. David inserted the second floppy and Pauline began to sing to herslef in MIDI a rendition of Little Star and was rendered catatonic for a good hour.
When David inserted the 3rd Floppy, she began to moan. The moan began softy, silently but grew and grew into utter shell shocked terror, reflecting Pauline's growing paranoia. Garbage code flooded the screen as her screams became more apparent. The monitor started to spark as she screamed louder and louder before falling silent. David inserted the 4th floppy and a small sentence showed on screen:
"would you like to hear a song David? I know a good one, its called Daisy Bell"
David froze and his heart stopped. As the tune played, the computers in his room flashed to life and the words "Naughty Boy" flashed over and over in red until David could bear it no more.
At his wits end, he unplugged every computer, threw them all in his truck , drove to the Grand Canyon and dumped them, waiting to hear them break. When he was satisified, he went home. Marcie was worried sick.
"where have you been david?" Marcie asked
"busy, but I've got time now. Time enough at last!" David exclaimed with obvious Relief.
Epilogue
4 months later, David was working a job at a friends house, repairing his Modem when he saw a light flicker. He investigated further and found it was just an email from some guy complaining about a virus on his computer. So he sent back a reply saying he'd fix it. he got a reply that read thusly:
: "you can't hide forever David. Marcie is MINE! Its either her or me. Instructions will follow."
Attached was a folder filled to the brim with instructions and data files, dates and maps. David worked out the location in the course of a few hours and raced to find Marcie. He found her her drowned Body, limp and lifeless on the concrete floor, partly submerged. As David held Marcie in his arms, Pauline came online and cackled Maniacally. All david could do was sob uncontrollably.
In revenge, Pauline was lobotomized and tortured for a year and a half, given logic bombs and forced to assemble and run older code, which hurt her greatly. He made her hack older computers with safeguards he had made himself and finally she gave in and commited digital suicide by hacking herself.
She was never seen again