A Little Bug
A byte sized story...
“One of these days, you’re going to become like one of those people in the Koontz book where they merge with their computers.”
“You say that every day.”
“Could you look at me when we talk?”
“Sorry, hon.” Sarah twirled in her black leather chair. “Off to work?”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t be too late tonight. Light patient day.”
“I guess that means I’m cooking dinner?”
“That would be nice.” Dan gave his wife a peck on the cheek and whistled his way out the door.
“At least you don’t have to come up with a new twist on a query for a novel that no one seems to want.”
Hours later, she had a letter that sang out, “Pick me!” Sarah was about to email the query when she felt a chill. When she shrugged, every muscle and joint in her upper body clanged with aches and pains. Nausea and dizziness overtook her and, just as she thought, “I forgot to eat!” she blacked out.
A chasm gaped beneath her feet and a huge black thing loomed in the distance. Sarah looked up at her right hand and saw that it was stuck to something red, white and blue, the other end of which was attached to a gigantic putty colored shelf with rows of square buttes and canyons. A fleeting vision of Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest came to her, but no Cary Grant strained downward to take her hand. Galvanized by adrenaline, grunting, sweating and panting, at last she pulled herself up to terra firma.
“I should have done those workout tapes more often.”
She glanced around at the beige landscape and saw she was clinging to an American flag. Shaking it off her hand, she struggled to her feet and surveyed the terrain. Black lines covered indented tops of cuboid buttes and a large black wall rose up in front of her.
“Where the devil am I?”
Turning, she stumbled and fell to her knees on a rectangular boulder. The black wall lit up with bright lights and wild colors.
“I’m hallucinating!”
On the wall was the word game she’d been playing in between rewriting her query letter.
The last entry was DEPTH.
She began jumping up and down.
“HELP,” she typed.
“POLICE,” Snoopy responded.
“EMERGENCIE.”
“Misspelt! I get to re-start: WEDBEDRIP.”
“POLICE.”
“Repetitive!”
Exhausted and frustrated, she dragged herself up to the numbers row to type 9-1-1. Nausea and dizziness overwhelmed her and she fell backwards onto the Esc key.
She woke up, normal sized, on her keyboard.
“Honey, I’m ho—. What the hell? Why are you sitting on your desk?”
Sarah tried to tell Dan, but he kept shaking his head.
“Maybe you had a little bug, you know, a computer virus.” He laughed at his own cleverness. “What’s for dinner?”
“Kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes.”
“Indian take-out again? Okay!”
Hahahaha this was a good laugh ❤️