THAT DAY

I'm building a virtual world called Tharn, and need to check some figures I did in my head. So I click on the calculator icon and... another program comes up! I start checking around and find a vandalizing virus has erased the calculator program from my hard drive and carefully redirected its icon to another program! Great. The infection has to be lurking deep in the registry, since I recently did a massive cleanup of everything else after a virus crippled the operating system. I truly thought it was clean. Not!

I hook up a old, empty hard drive and back up all the data I can fit on it. Then I install a CD burner that works (the old one never did recover from the viral attack) and save the rest of my art & writing on CDs. Time to call a friend of mine who fixes trashed machines. Time to give up; this is beyond me.

THAT NIGHT

I'm riding on a British train, the old-fashioned sort with sliding wooden doors and compartments. I enter one and sit across from an attractive woman. We're alone.

She has a bolt in one eye.

It's a big one, with not just the usual memory cache and interface, but a camera too, so she still has full binocular vision. She looks at me, waiting. For what? For me to remove the bolt, of course. The data is mine; she's been keeping it safe for me. But... I don't know how it's done! Pull? Twist? I feel squeamish and adolescent--it's as intimate as sex, and surely more dangerous--I could blind her, and the brain's so close!

It must twist; I can see threads. I turn it slowly, carefully. Keep saying "I'm sorry. Am I being too rough?" and she keeps saying "No, it's fine," a bit amused at my squeamishness. It is funny, I suppose--anyone in the hallway overhearing us really might think it was sex! Only instead of screwing, we're UNscrewing.

Whew! Out it comes. Only... this isn't the end of it, of course. Where does the data go? I don't have an eye-socket. So what's the next step? I'll have to trust her. I'm out of my depth.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• ACTION: quit being squeamish. It's surgery time, and you're no surgeon. You've reached the end of your competence, done what you could: carefully extracted your data. Get an expert to do the rest. Some people are hard-wired for this sort of thing, practically cyborgs...

A NOTE FROM 2006

My friend spent hours, couldn't clean up the registry, and finally had to wipe it all back to factory defaults and reinstall every program I use, not just my personal data. It was hellish and I could never have done it. It's been clean since.

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