We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [176]
When I returned, the computer was blank. It had shut itself off, which it had never done without being told. Disconcerted, I turned it on again but got nothing but error messages, even when I took the disk from the drive.
You’re way ahead of me. I carted the thing into work the next day so that my technical people might sort it out, only to discover the entire office milling about. It wasn’t exactly pandemonium, more like the atmosphere of a party that had run out of drink. Editors were chatting aimlessly in one another’s cubicles. No one was working. They couldn’t. There wasn’t a terminal functioning. Later I was almost relieved when George informed me that my PC’s hard drive was so corrupted that I might as well buy a new one. Perhaps with the infectious object destroyed, no one would ever know that the virus had been forwarded by AWAP’s own executive director.
Furious at Kevin for keeping the modern equivalent of a pet scorpion, I held onto the disk as evidence for several days rather than discreetly sliding it back on his shelf. But once I simmered down, I had to admit that Kevin hadn’t personally wiped out my company’s files, and the debacle was my fault. So one evening I knocked on his door, was granted admission, and closed it behind me. He was sitting at the desk. The screen saver was blipping in its desultory fashion, dot here, dot there.
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, tapping his floppy. “What’s this?”
“A virus,” he said brightly. “You didn’t load it in, did you?”
“Of course not,” I said hastily, discovering that lying to a child feels much the same as lying to a parent; my cheeks prickled as they had when I assured my mother after losing my cherry at seventeen that I’d spent the night with a girlfriend she’d never heard of. Mother knew better; Kevin did, too. “I mean,” I revised mournfully, “only once.”
“Only takes once.”
We both knew that it would have been ridiculous for me to have sneaked into his room and stolen a disk, with which I subsequently ruined my computer and paralyzed my office, only to come storming in to accuse him of industrial sabotage. So the interchange proceeded with an evenness.
“Why do you have it?” I asked respectfully.
“I keep a collection.”
“Isn’t that a peculiar thing to collect?”
“I don’t like stamps.”
Just then I had a presentiment of what he might have said had you burst in determined to find out why the heck he had a stack of computer viruses above his desk: Well, after we watched Silence of the Lambs, I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent! And you know how they have this whole task-force that, like, tracks down hackers who spread those terrible computer viruses? So I’m studying them and everything, ’cause I’ve read it’s a really big problem for the new economy and globalization and even for our country’s defense . . . ! That Kevin skipped such a performance—he collected computer viruses, end of story, so what?—left me feeling strangely flattered.
So I asked bashfully. “How many do you have?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Are they—difficult to find?”
He looked at me gamely, with that old sense of indecision, but on some whim he decided to experiment with talking to his mother. “They’re hard to capture alive,” he said. “They get away, and they bite. You have to know how to handle them. You know—like a doctor. Who studies diseases in a lab but doesn’t want to get sick himself.”
“You mean, you have to keep them from infecting your own machine.”
“Yeah. Mouse Ferguson’s been teaching me the ropes.”
“Since you collect them. Maybe you can explain to me—why do people make them? I don’t get it. They don’t achieve anything. What’s the appeal?”
“I don’t get,” he said, “what you don’t get.”
“I understand hacking into AT&T to get free phone calls or stealing encrypted credit card numbers to run up a bill at The Gap. But this sort of computer crime—nobody benefits. What’s the point?”
“That is