One Friday night in the Digital Bean, like every other Friday night, a LAN party took place, where the guests played CounterStrike and ate pizza. They also swapped porn and warez, and smoked marijuana in the bathroom. Near the beginning of this party, however, three particularly hated jerks smeared their excrement all throughout the room. This stench, as well as the smoke from all the weed the partiers had smoked, filled the bedroom that the exhaust fan was venting into.
This incident was the straw that broke the camel's back. Claryssa had dealt with the stinky bedroom ever since she moved into the apartment, by using a box fan to remove the exhaust from the room. Tonight, though, this wasn't working. 30 Slyders and eight slices of pizza multiplied by three equaled one heck of a mess, a never-ending olfactory assault turning the bedroom into a virtual gas chamber. The marijuana smoke only made it worse. Revenge was now in order, and it was going to be hard-hitting.
Claryssa had written a network worm that changed one's wallpaper to one of five grotesque and disturbing pictures: The Stinger, The Bathtub Fountain, The Harlequin, Pain3 or Pain4. She had thought of using an earlier version as a senior prank near the end of the 2002-3 year, but decided against it, as she remembered getting Reginald and herself kicked out for the last week of the sixth grade by compiling a list of offensive words with him, causing the two to miss out on that school's graduation.
But tonight was a different story. The Digital Bean couldn't take away her diploma, and they'd just call Reginald over to remove the worm and not even suspect that anything was going on other than a random worm invasion, which was a regular occurrence at the Bean. The issue was settled, and the worm was sent out to everyone on Claryssa's little list of Digital Bean regulars.
Half an hour after the seeding, Lizzie checked her e-mail from the Apple POS in her room. In between the "5 INCHES LONGER GUARANTEED'' and "Lizzie, don't open beanse.cx.exe'' messages was an innocuous little message entitled, "Digital Bean Regulars: Please Read''. Lizzie opened the message, which essentially said to copy the attachment, "beanse.cx.exe'' and run it on one of the Digital Bean's machines, supposedly to fix some "connectivity problems''.
Lizzie, being somewhat of a dumb blonde, did as the e-mail said and put the attachment on her rubber ducky. Then she logged out of her mail, conveniently ignoring the message Gordo had sent her, and headed for the kitchen to get a snack.
Meanwhile, Gordo sat in front of his 20-inch flat panel display, his face frozen in horror at his new desktop picture. He knew that was not a steak being held in that man's hands. And the worst thing about it, besides the fact that the wallpaper control panel had been replaced with a "PWNED''-type message, was that he knew that attachment was going to be something bad, and yet he opened it anyway!
Miranda had also received the demonic attachment, and after unpacking the attachment and extracting its bitmap and textual resources, she was in pure shock. A red gaping hole. A "nacho cheese'' fountain. A most terrible birth defect. And two collages of these evil images and several even more terrifying and disgusting ones, enough to send pretty much anyone to the porcelain bus, if not the brink of insanity.
From the text, it was obvious that this worm had been written specifically to hit the Digital Bean. Phrases like "This retard palace is PWNED'' and "Your bathroom fan's exhaust is going into my bedroom'' made this targeting clear. Someone was getting back for what the Bean had done wrong.
Once Gordo and Miranda regained some sense of composure, they went to further warn Lizzie about the attachment, through more e-mails and even a phone call or two. But this was pretty much ignored by Lizzie, who was now fast asleep after eating at least twenty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Matt had received fifty bucks to shut him up about the Digital Bean worm, and their parents were taking in a show at the civic center several miles from home.
Around 10 o'clock, Reginald came over to Claryssa's apartment after getting the message about the worm. Once there, he sat down with her to talk about what was going on the following day.
"You're getting them to spread this worm through the Digital Bean?'' asked Reginald.
Claryssa handed him a sheet of paper with several scribbles on it and said, "At least one of them will fall for it. That paper tells you how to remove the worm.'' Reginald looked at the paper; among crude renditions of the LUE Trinity was a simple instruction: run the beangirl.bat script in the root directory and delete it.
"And you know I get paid $250 for this.''
"So it's a win-win thing.''
Reginald thought about the repercussions of such a thing, but, not wanting to disappoint his best friend, brought himself to say, "You're right. You win, I win, and as long as they don't find out, there's nothing to worry about.'' Yet he was worried, for if the Bean's owners found out, jailarity would ensue, and the two would receive the Dumbass tag on Fark.
"They won't find out, at least not in the foreseeable future, anyhow,'' said Claryssa. "And if they do, they'll be going down as well.''
"Going down? For what?''
"I'm sure there's some law against venting a bathroom exhaust fan into a bedroom, right?''
"I would think so. But that doesn't justify what you're doing, does it?''
"No, but at least it'll make me feel better.''
"True, true. I just hope this doesn't turn into something like when we did the swear word list.'' This inspired Claryssa to start a new list of offensive words, and Reginald stayed over to help.
When Lizzie's parents arrived from the show, Jo checked the answering machine, as she usually did when she came home. Mostly it was telemarketers and MCI calling, but the fifth and seventh messages came from Miranda and Gordo, respectively. Both messages were very much alike, with a tone of uneasiness and worry, as if Lizzie were going to accidentally walk off the Grand Canyon. And they had the same basic message: DON'T OPEN THAT ATTACHMENT.