The schools in Crisco County were all linked
together in their own little WAN, with a small connection to the big
expanse outside of the network. The WAN was used for videoconferencing,
sharing information, and now, spreading one of a thousand of those
damned Windows worms. By the end of the school day, almost every
computer in every school in the county, except for South Haven, which
patched their systems religiously, and Covert, which was still using
Windows 98 and therefore amazingly immune to this particular worm, was
displaying the Trinity and Pains, changing backdrops every 90 seconds.
Indeed, the worm had pushed the incident in Trinity Middle School's
library out of the spotlight, for this was directly -- and disgustingly
-- affecting most of the other schools in the area. Many elementary
school students, and a not-insignificant number of middle- and
high-schoolers, would be having nightmares about the Pains, those two
collages of the Trinity, mutilations, and infections. The Trinity by
itself led to bathrooms and classrooms splattered with puke. Innocent
little LCD and DLP projectors became weapons of mass nauseation.
In one elementary school class, two kids were going to present their
social studies project, done in FrontPage, with tons of IE-only
animations and a neato VBScript that made the page "sparkle". They came
up to the super-podium in the front of the classroom and put the screen
down with the push of a button. The first thing the rest of the class
saw on the screen was the Harlequin Fetus, with its cracked and
bleeding armor plating, solid red eyeballs, and big red "smile". And
when one of the kids fired up Internet Explorer, the home page revealed
the suspension notice for the original Goatse site. Though the class
had been spared from one of the atrocities, the crying and scared kids
were proof that the Trinity had made its mark on their fragile eggshell
minds.
Since he had heard about it on the news, Reginald closely followed the
spread of the worm through a hastily-developed site hosted by the
Crisco County Intermediate School District. To see whether this worm
was like the one he had removed from the Digital Bean's machines,
Reginald read the CCISD's description of the worm twice, and then
again. After the last reading, he was certain that Claryssa's
Trinity-and-Pains worm had somehow gotten into the ISD's network.
At the CCISD administrative offices, the three MCSE's, Quasimodo the
hunchback, John Watson the PC Tech teacher, and a Ron Jeremy lookalike,
examined a few of the infected computers in the student lab, and found
out that by running a batch file called "asshat.bat", located in the
root directory of the system drive, the worm would uninstall itself and
leave another file in the root directory, the contents of which read:
"Y helo thar! This file marks this machine as off-limits to the Goatse
worm.".
A solution had been found to the worm, but it would be a monstrous
task, fortunately made simpler by an idea the trio had formulated:
anyone who got onto a computer was to run the batch file.
"OMG its the b3st3st 1d34 3v32!" ejaculated Quasimodo.
"It's so simple, even an AOL user could do it!" said Watson.
"(LUEshi)," said the Ron Jeremy lookalike.
"(LUEshi), indeed," replied Watson. The trio soon left for the nearby
Mexican restaurant for a victory feast, including plenty of tequila.
At this time, Reginald was at Claryssa's apartment to talk about the
recent infection. He was clearly not pleased, about like Limecat when
they put the lime on his head.
"So where did the dropper come from?" asked Reginald.
"I don't know where the dropper came from," said Claryssa. "Maybe that dum-dum from the Digital Bean brought it in."
"Didn't you have those thumb drives taped under the bottom shelf in your locker?"
"I took those out after we graduated... except that one, but that was an 8-meg anyhow..."
"And that one just happened to have the dropper on it."
"I think it did have the dropper on it, and the names and addresses of every student of every school in the county."
"Hopefully they don't find out that you grabbed those files in the first place."
"It was their fault, they put those files where any nosy student could get to them."
"ZOMG!!!"
Meanwhile, having discovered the files on the forgotten thumb drive,
Larry plugged an old phone into the other jack on his modem and
disconnected from AOL so that he could make obscene phone calls to the
houses where the middle-school girls lived. He eventually got to the
principal's daughter's record, and when he dialed the phone number in,
an answering machine picked up.
The message consisted of an invitation for oral sex, and before Larry
was through with his obscenity, the principal picked up and threatened
to cut off Larry's legs, and then to kill him. All the while, Larry
asked the principal if he would pleasure him. Needless to say, tomorrow
was going to be an interesting day at school.
