Spirits in the Wires by Charles De Lint

less, and he wasn’t here to air his own dirty laundry. He was just here to get a service done.
    â€œSo I take the site down,” Jackson said, “and we’re good? You won’t be coming around asking for another favor two weeks down the road?”
    Aaran shook his head and put his hand up in a Boy Scout’s salute.
    â€œScout’s honour,” he said.
    Which would mean something if he’d ever been a Scout.
    Jackson studied him for a long moment, then finally sighed.
    â€œOkay,” he said. “I’ll get on it.”
    â€œAny idea how long it’ll take?”
    â€œTwo, three days. By the weekend, for sure. Unless …”
    â€œUnless what?”
    â€œWhoever put that site up is smarter than me.”

Jackson Hart
    True to his word, Jackson started working on the problem as soon as Aaran left the apartment. The first thing he did was write a simple virus program—nothing fancy. Simple was as capable of shutting down a computer as complicated. Maybe it wasn’t as impressive, but
it
usually had a better chance of slipping in and getting the job done.
    The virus he wrote now would worm into the ISP’s computer that housed the Wordwood’s site, dig through every file stored on it, and erase any HTML links it found, replacing them with random gibberish. Any site hosted by that ISP would immediately be rendered useless.
    It wasn’t a permanent meltdown. But it would require anyone using that ISP as the host for their site to send clean files to replace the ones his virus had damaged. That could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on how much material they had to transfer back onto the site. Considering the size and complexity of the Wordwood site, it should be enough of an inconvenience and take them long enough to satisfy Aaran’s need for revenge.
    All Jackson had to do was get somebody at the Wordwood end to open an attachment, but he didn’t think that would be too hard. Since they seemed to collect texts of books, he’d simply hide the virus as a macro inside a file purporting to be a book with a trigger that would make the macro run as soon as the file was opened. Then the next time the Webmaster updated his site, the virus would piggyback along with whatever he sent and the server would go down.
    Piece of cake, really.
    He hummed as he worked on the program, then tested it. The programming soothed his anger the way it always did. That was half the reason he’d gotten into computers in the first place. Mostly, he loved the clean logic of programming. Computers were so much better than people. They were straightforward, doing only what they were programmed to do. They didn’t lie to you, or make fun of you. Or blackmail you.
    He was ready to send the virus by two A.M., only a few hours after Aaran had left.
    Now, he thought, we’ll see how tight the Wordwood’s security is.
    Logging back onto the Internet, he established his protocols through a confusing labyrinth of false trails and dummy ISPs that left no way to trace him back to the computer he was actually using. He aimed his browser at the Wordwood’s site. When the forest background appeared on his screen, he began to type into the white box floating in the center of the screen.
    Love your site. How do I submit a book to add to your library? An eager reader
    He’d barely finished typing when a response appeared, replacing his own text:
    Hello eager reader.
    Simply send the document file as an attachment addressed to: [email protected]
    Whatever you say, he thought.
    He opened Eudora, typed “a book from an eager reader” as a subject heading, attached his file, and hit “queue.” When he closed the e-mail software, he got a prompt telling him he had an unsent message. He chose “send and close” and watched the progress bar until the file had been sent. Eudora closed and he was looking at the Wordwood site once