Something was
wrong. I could taste it. I could smell it. A sick kind of pall hung over my
computer (god rest her soul). Very gently, I caressed my keyboard, softly, like a lover. I opened my
packet sniffer. I checked my
firewall. Things were bad, there was some
nasty vodoo in the air. Before I could take any action, four words in a big, red, nasty font that made my hair stand on end and my eyes bug out of my head flashed across my
console screen*: J00 hAv3 b33n 0Wn3d.
I cut off my connection. Quickly, I traversed my file structure to see if the
malignant snot bag was just screwing with me, or if he had trashed my disk. Mostly, everything was there. Reinstalling or carefully combing the software to see if it had been compromised would be a bitch, but at least the raw data looked intact. Then, as I went through my disk, I noticed something was missing. . .something was wrong. Deathly wrong.
I was missing some stuff from
/dev. Mostly, it would be just reconfiguring, reinstalling. Nothing major, it looked like, but. . .there was something. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Suddenly it hit me. I sprang up from my chair. I followed the
USB cable from the back of my
computer to where it should have lead. Instead of what should have been at the other end, there were only a few
crumbs. A
few,
succulent crumbs.
He had taken my
cake.
Now it was personal.
*say, how the hell did he make flashing red letters appear on the console, anyway?