Malware (Part 1)

Upgrade your antivirus protection regularly

May 24, 2024

On the day I was born, the process of installing the Malware began. Various upgrades were required all throughout my childhood, but by the time I started adult life, the Malware was fully operative and self-actualizing with its own native-origin upgrades.

I walk through the woods as the sun goes down. This contact with growing things, except for that entity that grows in my brain and crowds out my own thoughts, is unusual for me. In fact I can't remember the last time I touched a tree.

Maybe never, and this knobby beech tree is the first time I caress the bark of a living growing thing that's rooted in the world. I feel nothing. My Malware registers nothing, so I pass on.

My cellphone blings. A new profile of me, sent by the hack at the New York Times who assembled it. I'm curious so I settle on a tree stump to swipe through it. I might not get another chance to read it, the bars on my cellphone are diminishing and there's precious little coverage where I'm going. So I pull it up.

Padgett N. Jolyon is the world's most gifted person. His IQ charts off the scale on testing, estimated anywhere between 1095 to 2804, though he himself states that it is 'n x 64 over 3 where n is any whole number chosen at random' which we suspect is just his little joke. He has won the Nobel Prize three times, is the current chess Grandmaster and Go champion, and holds an enormous number of patents. No mean feat for a young man of 26.

His solar power stations orbit the Earth, beaming safe and renewable power to the surface. His Peace Ray, distributed as open source technology to all governments in the world, nullifies the explosive potential of both nuclear and conventional warheads. He has saved the planet in at least three or four different ways. As a result, no man is so widely hated and reviled as a 'jumped-up prick' than P.N. Jolyon, a grossly unfair judgement in this writer's opinion.

This much is true. I hate and revile myself too. Though that's not strictly true: what I loathe, what I really fear, is my daddy's Malware. However, the NYT's standard grovelling tone when dealing with successful persons is beginning to grate, and I'm wondering if I can stand to read through much more of this trite bollocks, exaggerated with the carelessness of a carnival barker. Quickly I scan through all the lickspittle paragraphs that set the scene and get to the nub.

I spoke to him in his cardboard box shelter in a street in Auckland, New Zealand, where he has lived for the last several years. He of course was born into immense wealth as the fifteenth child of entrepreneur Ethon Mallais, now serving a life sentence under medical and psychiatric supervision after the tragic Munich Incident. The collapse of his business empire triggered worldwide vibereal crisis, while Padgett renounced the easy life, changed his name and chose instead to squat in a box, doing so in a succession of global locations from Dakar to Dakka.

But did I do any of that? Where was my agency, because I don't recall deciding it. Or was it decided for me by the Malware?

His father a successful and - as we now know - dangerously psychotic sexual and existential pervert, his mother an indentured servant subjected against her will to experimental "foetus-enhancing" treatments, he was born in a secure bunker in Roswell, New Mexico and named Hydrogenic Bejeesury k-3 Mallais, a name he later rejected out of disgust and shame at his father's tainted legacy. "My Dad was a tremendous asshole", is the only known pronouncement made on the subject, which otherwise he has resolutely refused to talk about.

So. There's really nothing so special about my Dad or what he did to me. Parents do this to their children all across the world. Stuff broken images of themselves into their progeny's tender growing skulls, careless of the damage which the jagged edges of their shattered idols might do to the soft tissues. With my daddy it was a chip and who-knows-what cocktail of drugs and hormones. In this case the harm was bloated like a tumor, not sharp like lacerations.

Oh, of course the chip was removed by court mandate when the whole thing happened with Dad, the Munich thing and the whole downfall drama. But the Malware was already installed. It uploaded my desires and secret thoughts to the mainframe, vast banks of servers in a secure desert facility. Daddy wasn't there any more to go over the analyses, but it kept cranking them out anyway. Feedback and reprocessing, the twin daughters of chaos, drew up plans for further tweaks to the Malware and duly pumped them in.

I get up from my stump, and stand on it to look around me. Trees and the sons of trees wherever I look. I make a short stump speech the content of which is known only to me and my Malware, then move on through the forest.