Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? by Theo Cage Page A

They were a different generation from him; they worked here to get exposure to new technology, but there was no loyalty. No obvious love for country. Sure, they brought their sleeping bags into work and never left their keyboards except to guzzle Red Bull. But that didn’t make them patriots.
    So after the third blow up, this one involving a monitor he had thrown at one kids pimply head after he had made an ignorant comment about Ronald Reagan, they made him a manager. A manager of no one. They gave him the smallest office on the floor so they could hide him away from the others. He was an embarrassment; an ugly right-winger wasn’t fashionable in the muddy new world of twenty-first century geopolitics. Maybe he knew too much for them to let him go. They certainly didn’t want him around other staff. He made them uncomfortable, and that wasn’t good for productivity.
    At the time of the ‘promotion’, he was living with his mother in a small tumbledown house in Benning Heights. His father, the big shot, had deserted them years before because he couldn’t be bothered caring for a wife diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then the city issued an expropriation notice. They were widening the highway to build a new onramp. The shock of losing her home killed the old lady. The day after the funeral he learned that she had willed all of her assets to a local end-of-days fringe church called the Holy Soldiers of The Revelations . She left him nothing. Not even a stick of furniture. He smashed every framed picture in her small house that afternoon, then hauled her other possessions out on the street in the rain. Then he just walked away.
    The next morning, his head about to explode with frustration, he had signed onto Universe Two and went on a global killing rampage. He ruthlessly hacked and killed dozens of other players, burned buildings, destroyed whole villages. No one was able to challenge the god-like powers he had manufactured. At one point, he even considered the ultimate hack, where he would nuke the entire planet, maybe destroy the whole universe. Wouldn’t that wake up all those millennium generation self-absorbed computer nerds?
    The next day, nursing a massive caffeine-induced migraine, he found himself locked out of Universe Two . He wasn’t surprised. Luckily, he had masked all of his entry into the game. They couldn’t track his whereabouts, and he had never used his real identity to register. Still a ghost.
    That day he decided to create a new identity for himself. This was a significant event and he needed a name to match. He was filled with nervous energy when he first scribbled it out on a memo pad by his monitor. Buzzworm . He stared at the letters. The word seemed to jump out at him like it came unbidden from some powerful place in his unconsciousness. And that seemed only fitting.
    He also liked the dark edginess of it. He had opened a new book now. He felt bolder. More committed this time. There was difficult and dangerous work ahead of him — he could sense that. But he was back in the game. And yes, he had exceptional powers again, but it wasn’t as easy this time. The people who ran Universe Two had plugged some of the holes in the game play. Their security was tighter. That’s how it worked. Weaknesses you exploited could become traps. Never go after the same chink in the armor. There was always another one anyway. That was the real game.
    BW, that’s what he thought of himself when he wasn’t gaming, had been sitting there, impossibly bored, when another blurry shadow passed his window. Who was that silhouette? He could only guess but he had easily recognized the pointy breasts and the perky bottom. He didn’t know her name, all he knew was she was a staffer who routinely ignored him in the halls. What if he wanted to reach out to Ms. Blur? Like he did in the virtual world? Buzzworm could feel blood rushing into his head, his heartbeat in his ears. The CIA after all, was like any other quirky