Going Viral

by bloodsword

"I don't believe this shit," the man mumbled to his computer monitor. He took a sip of his extra-large Watty and grimaced in disgust. Picked a stray orange pube from his tongue. "They didn't even read my fuckin' story! The fuck is this comment supposed to mean, anyway!? 'Loved the way Pixy Dust rode Unicron LOL!' There wasn't any Pixy Dust or Unicron in my fucking story, nor was there anything remotely funny in it! What the hell are you LOLing at, you dumbass!?"

He rubbed his temples, leaving orange Cheetos dust behind. His head killed right now. Had been hurting a lot lately, but this took the cake. Nobody understood his beautiful writing. Their comments were irrelevant. It made him sick. Made him want to teach them all a lesson.

A grin worked its way across his pale face.

Yeah. Teach 'em all. A lesson.

The man brought up the profile of the latest imbecile to comment on his riveting story. Got a good look. Memorized the name and the face.

He went to his gun rack. Grabbed his finest and most powerful weapon. Locked it and loaded it.

The hunt was on.

"Damnit!" he barked, throwing the report onto the desk to stare hard at the holographic recording playing an inch or two above it. "That's the fifth one this week!" He lifted steel grey eyes to send a hard stare stabbing towards the two Wattpad Corp Security agents in front of him, the lines of their dark grey suits broken only by the stylized orange 'W' over their left breasts.

"I thought you said you could contain this."

"It is contained, captain," the agent on the left assured him, the lisp that he spoke with making him sound like Mike Tyson. "All assets in the field have been issued the appropriate counter-agents in our efforts to make sure this doesn't move out of the core."

"Hate to doom and gloom your optimism there with a shit ton of reality, but it's already moved out of the core!" the captain snapped in reply before pointing a finger at the screen, now frozen on the image of the writer pulling out and loading his weapon. "This frickin' numpty is nearly three city blocks outside of your quarantine perimeter!"

For a brief second he considered hitting the alert button on the corner of his desk to trigger a city-wide lockdown. Instead the captain kept speaking.

"This cyber virus is throwing the city into utter chaos. If we don't get a handle on it, blood will run like rivers through the streets." The stiffened finger came up to take in the two agents. "Wattpad Corp promised stability when they were granted hub status for all forms of social media by the government. Instead we have disorder on an epic scale as a cyber virus spawned in your servers is driving not only writers, but all kinds of users from multiple walks of life, into homicidal rages. Do I need to call in the Feds to shut your network down?"

Both agents quickly held up their hands.

"That won't be necessary, captain," the one with the lisp said.

"We have our best people on it," the other one hastily added. "Once our software engineers disassemble the virus's code, we'll be able to send out a cyber antibiotic and purge it from the network. Then a neural reset will undo the cerebral tangling the virus is doing to anybody that subconsciously sees it's embedded trigger pattern."

"Sounds awesome," the captain hissed. "Not sure why you're still standing here, though, and not doing all that bullshit you just said like ASAP."

"Captain," the agent with the lisp said before taking his partner by the elbow and steering him towards the door.

Just outside the door, however, instead of hurrying down the connecting hallway, the lisping agent pushed the other against the wall.

"Are you frickin' nuts, Jonesy?" he snarled, pinning his partner against the wall. "Why'd you say that?"

"About the engineers?"

"Yeah! You know we don't have anybody cracking viral code down in the shop."

"Yeah, but Pickering doesn't know that." Jonesy pushed his partner's hands off him. "I had to throw him a bone or he would've badgered us all day. And we've got better things to do."

"Like what?" his partner wanted to know.

"Like catching the slap dick that wrote the viral code, that's what! C'mon, Baker." Jonesy began striding down the hallway with a determined scowl on his face.

"Time to check the chat rooms! If this ass hat is like the others, they'll be bragging about it to their buddies!"

Catching a sky tram from the police headquarters' rooftop terminal, the two agents made their way through the smog-thickened air above Mega-Toronto towards Wattpad HQ, located nearly the city's congested heart. As he leaned against the cabin wall, Jonesy pulled out his companion, a hand-held AI that connected him not only to Wattpad Corp's city-wide network, but to every network it accessed across the planet as well.

Finding his agent access app, a bright orange W in the center of his companion's touch screen, he thumbed it. And frowned as it immediately tried to update.

"Didn't this stupid thing update just yesterday?" he quietly grumbled. "Not that it helped. I'm still not getting my notifications and all my text documents are all jumbled."

Finally the W stopped rotating and, after scanning his retina, it opened. Quickly swiping through the first few useless screens, Jonesy finally got to Wattpad's much maligned chat room portal. Before he could try and remember his password, however, he heard a low laugh from the rear of the tram's cabin.

"Yeah, I was just at police headquarters," a low male voice then said. "I just had to go and watch them scramble as they deal with Requiem."

Requiem? Jonesy frowned. The word sounded familiar. A quick flip over to Wattpad's thesaurus app confirmed it. It was a fancy word for funeral song. Wait a sec; funeral song? Could this have something to do with the cyber virus?

Narrowing his eyes in concentration, the Wattpad agent focused on picking the voice back out of the background crowd noise.

"I even saw two Wattpad agents there," the voice was saying when he finally found it again. "Five-O probably called them on the carpet when they found out that Requiem was born on their stupid social media servers. Ha! I've got them chasing their own tails all over town."

The voice paused at that point as if listening to somebody on the other side of the conversation.

"Dunno. I lost them outside the station. But it doesn't matter. They've got nothing." The voice paused to laugh again, Jonesy nearly losing it against the background noise in the process. "Turn on your news vids and watch the carnage unfold!"

Jonesy frowned as he slid a hand inside his jacket to take hold of his stunner. He had heard enough. Time to grab this clown and see what he actually knew about the virus. A quick signal to a bemused Baker to draw his weapon and follow then Jonesy was easing his way through the crowded tram to where the voice had come from.

Before he could go than a meter or so, the tram began to slow down. A glance out the window revealed why: they were about to land at the downtown station!

'No!' Jonesy silently shouted. The chaos and crowds at the station would be the perfect opportunity for their quarry to elude capture in the ebb and flow of impatient humanity.

"Out of the way," he growled, renewing his push through the crowd. "Get out of the way, damn you!"

"Eat shit, weeble," a big man snarled in return as the agent tried pushing past. "You go by right after the mighty W answers my bug report to tech support."

"Do I look like tech support, pal?" Jonesy snapped in reply. "Move or I'll make sure all of your services are cut off for a month!"

Then the tram was shuddering as it dumped the last bit of its momentum and came to a halt.

"Hold it right there!" Baker shouted as a slim figure in a black hoodie bolted out the still opening doors. "WPC Security! I said stop!"

But the dark hoodie was already out and halfway across the platform as it sprinted for the elevators on the far side. Pushing aside several other passengers, Jonesy and Baker tumbled out onto the platform, stunners in hand.

Then they were both ducking, along with the rest of the crowd as the air was split by the staccato bark of a high powered slug thrower. Angry hornets of steel-jacketed death, several slugs buzzed wildly by over their heads. Then both agents were standing to fire steadily at the staggering figure that had stepped from the elevator to open fire.

The attacker took the stunner bolts in the chest and head, absorbing a number of them before he was tossed ragdoll-limp to the ground. Seeing him go down, Jonesy nodded in fierce satisfaction.

That was when he saw several bodies on the platform deck down and unmoving.

"Baker," he began.

"Already calling emergency services, partner," the other agent replied. Nodding once more, Jonesy eased forward, stunner ready.

"Everybody stay down," he urged. "Let us secure the shooter."

"Hey, isn't that the hoodie?" Baker asked, having joined him with weapon ready. Jonesy followed his partner's pointing finger.

"Yeah, that's him." Jonesy stepped by their unmoving target to kneel beside the shooter. One look at his twitching eyeballs, frantic even after getting stunned, was enough to confirm he was infected. Baker, in turn, knelt beside their downed target to quickly search him, coming up with a thumb drive. A quick scan with his companion AI yielded it had the virus's base code.

"Killed by one of his victims," Jonesy said when Baker showed him the drive. "Now that's what I call ironic!" He pointed to the drive. "Let's get that to HQ. Time to whip up an antibiotic!"