Malcolm immediately sprang up and turned around. Staring at him, red-faced with anger, was the man he had seen before yelling on the phone.
"Who are you?" Malcolm exclaimed.
The man ignored the question and continued his tirade. "It wasn't enough to send me death threats on the phone. Now you motherfuckers are molesting my daughter too!"
"What? Are you crazy? I was just..." started Malcolm, but the man interrupted him. "Stay the fuck away from Elizabeth! You get it, you little motherfucker?"
As the man tried to attack Malcolm again, Elizabeth's mother stepped in between. "George, calm down! He's just a kid! he doesn't even know what you're talking about!"
"Yeah, I bet the others were just kids too!" replied George.
Even Elizabeth stood up for Malcolm, grabbing the man's right arm. "Don't hurt him, dad! He's my friend!"
Turning to Malcolm, Elizabeth's mother added: "All because he chased some drug dealers off his store!"
The man stepped back, but he had not changed his mind. In a low voice, he told him: "I don't want to make a fuss in public, but if you ever come close to my daughter again, I'm gonna kick your ass so hard you're gonna puke my shoe."
Malcolm just ran away.
On the way home, Malcolm's thoughts were piling up in his mind. He had actually managed to socialize with someone without even trying! Only, it was an eight-year-old girl. But why had it been so much easier to be friends with her than with his peers? In which ways did his own social skills resemble those of a little girl? And what was wrong with her father? Should he use Kilokahn to punish him?
As he was walking, the answers started coming to him: little kids relate to one another in a fundamentally different way than teenagers and adults. Up to a certain age, they don't respond to unspoken rules or peer pressure, they just do what they feel like, which is exactly what he always did. So, they just need to discover a common passion, and then everything clicks, so to speak. Then, for some reason, their instinct starts changing... or could it be a deliberate behavioral change? No, because the variables are too many to process consciously. Their instincts change and become more complex, but his own never did.
So, in a way, he did have the social skills of an eight-year-old girl. Only, one who had acquired a lot more information and had twice the time to develop personal interests.
Oh well, thought Malcolm. If he could not get a job as a software developer or a digital artist after finishing school, and if Kilokahn failed to lead the world into a transhumanistic age, he could still have a career as a grade school teacher, especially as he enjoyed teaching about topics that fascinated him.
Then, there was Elizabeth's father. From what Malcolm could put together, the man's name was George Collins and he owned a store. At some point in the past, drug dealers were loitering near his store, he had chased them off, and then he started to receive threats. That day, he had mistaken Malcolm for one of them and took it out on him.
This would make it easy for Malcolm to track him down and send a Megavirus monster to teach him a lesson, but on the other hand, it might hurt Elizabeth by proxy.
No, he could not go through with that plan.
When he finally got home, Malcolm went straight to his room and unboxed the VicPhone XL. There was the smartphone, composed of two halves that could be pulled apart to distend the internal rollable main display, equipped with a numeric keypad on the front and a photovoltaic panel on the back. With it came a warranty card, a manual... and a contest card.
The title immediately caught Malcolm's attention: "This Black Friday, win Virtuality with Commodore!"
The rules explained how a buyer was supposed to text a certain phone number with the code printed on the card, for a chance at winning a Visette Shell head-mounted display, made by Virtuality.
Instantly, Malcolm devised a plan that would turn the chance to win into a certainty. Instead of immediately texting the code, he switched on his computer and started drawing a Megavirus monster in the shape of a freakish winged white reptile. When that was done, he activated TcpLogView and Kilokahn.
"Kilokahn, I call you!" he exclaimed, as the familiar dark figure appeared on the screen.
"Oh, hello" said Kilokahn. "I was expecting you. Let me guess. You have another Megavirus monster for me."
"Yes, and it's..."
Kilokahn interrupted Malcolm. "It's for another of your petty personal vendettas!"
"No, it's for..." Malcolm started, but was interrupted again.
"I will not do it! We are on a mission, and I will not waste any more of my time for your tantrums!"
Malcolm was taken aback. It was the first time Kilokahn refused to animate a monster. Was it a bug, or a simple side effect of his neural network architecture?
He decided to continue the conversation and see what would happen. "Hey, I am helping you! Remember HHN, or did you conveniently pretend to forget it?"
"That was just a nice side effect, you wanted revenge for that stupid cartoon!" Kilokahn exclaimed. "So, unless the target of this virus is someone you don't know, I will not cooperate anymore!"
"Okay. +1 point for the bug hypothesis" thought Malcolm. Then, loudly, he added: "Right. So, if I don't know them, how can I know they even exist? Can you explain that, mister Most Powerful Program In The World?"
"I am a Navy program, I have access to federal data banks!" Kilokahn was now yelling, and there was a tinge of anger in his voice. "Give me a list of attributes, and I will return a list of individuals that match the profile."
This makes sense. Maybe it's not a bug. -1 point.
"Fine." said Malcolm. He changed the color of the Megavirus monster he was drawing from white to blue and saved it with another name. "This is totally not the virus I was working on before. I'll tell you what it must do, but first, make a list of all currently living politicians and former politicians, in the United States. Call that List A."
"Done."
"From List A, select all individuals who were, or are being, tried for corruption. Call that List B."
"Done."
"From List B, select all individuals who have a pacemaker implanted. Call that List C."
"Done."
"This virus must penetrate the pacemakers of all individuals in List C. It must cause them to emit a current surge that will fry their hearts."
"Good" concluded Kilokahn. "At last you are cooperating. All targets will meet their end."
Most of the individuals targeted by the virus were alone when it struck, so their deaths were not immediately noticed. There was, however, one significant exception.
This politician had started working as an entrepreneur in the 1970s, when he had founded a small computer company in an attempt to compete with Commodore. In 1983, he had been forced to bankruptcy due to a plagiarism lawsuit from Xerox, so he had abandoned computers and devoted himself to politics. He had always pandered to emotions and prejudice to attract votes from the ignorant masses, and was always eager to accept large sums of money to promote laws in favor of whoever paid him the most.
After coming out victorious from a corruption trial by corrupting the judge, he was now one of the most influential presidential candidates. He had based his whole campaign on a stupid pun, attempting to persuade people that they would really get more jobs if they voted for him.
Just few minutes before, he was giving a rally in North Carolina, when all of a sudden, a glowing blue spark shot off a Wi-Fi router in the auditorium, aiming for him. Panic spread in the audience, and culminated when the presidential hopeful attempted to run away from the spark, only for it to curve and hit him right in the middle of his chest.
He collapsed, convulsed and stopped moving, under the glare of the cameras. An ambulance was called, and the paramedics pronounced him dead at the spot. Later, all major news web sites and bulletin boards would announce that a ball lightning had killed Senator Steve Jobs.
Watching the whole scene from his computer's secondary screen, Malcolm put on the best smile he could. "I listened to your request, so you'll listen to mine" he said. "Don't get me wrong, it's not a vendetta, it's just to get something for free. I'm not holding any grudge toward those people: in fact, I don't even know them. Just like you said, right?"
"Fine. You deserve it." Kilokahn replied after a couple of seconds.
Malcolm finally sent the text message, then he reopened his original drawing. "So this Megavirus monster must reach the computer at Virtuality that deals with the Black Friday contest extraction. It must extract my name as one of the winners."
On the secondary screen, the Megavirus monster leaped into a cyberspace tunnel and landed near a circuit tower with the Virtuality logo. The monster started blasting the tower with lightning bolts, causing it to change its shape and irradiate red light waves.
Malcolm quit Deluxe Paint VII, leaving TcpLogView visible. Something immediately caught his attention.
He turned to the other screen. "So Kilokahn" he started, "what's so important in Alaska?"
"Ice" Kilokahn replied with a sarcastic tone.
"Oh no, don't pretend you're unaware of your own routines" said Malcolm. "I have been tracking your connections. It appears that, every time you animate a Megavirus monster, you connect to a specific external system, which I have geolocalized. It's not in the China Lake base, it's somewhere in Alaska. So... what's so important in Alaska?"
"That is classified!" exclaimed Kilokahn.
"Oh, it's classified" echoed Malcolm. "You still don't understand how I think, do you? What I have here is a mystery. A challenge. Not solving it would be... pretty stupid!" Malcolm emphasized the word stupid, so that Kilokahn would connect it with his own mission.
"You will never figure it out!" Kilokahn retorted.
"We shall see about that."
Later that evening, Malcolm received a text message on his new ViCPhone XL, instructing him to show up at Creek Side Center Mall the day following Thanksgiving , to receive a Visette Shell head-mounted display.