Badware

Badware

by Kevin Spiess

It was Tammi Tucker's second month on the job. She was glad to be working. Barring any unforeseen difficulties, her entire student loan would be paid off in 58 years. Thankfully, she would not be awake the entire time; she planned to hibernate, cryogenically or otherwise. See, Tammi Tucker was the Cap'n of a space ship -- a cargo ship -- and could do anything she wanted.
The ship's crew consisted of herself and a friendly computer. So far, her nine-hundred tons of cargo consisted solely of woodchips. It was going to be used to make furniture, like intelligent chairs and tables, for everybody in a big geodesic dome called Wallmart 6, on a planet someplace.
Tammi had never been to Wallmart 6 before. She was told that it was like Wallmart 5,4,3,2, and 1; which is to say, it was just like any other prefabricated colony on the crummy, outer-system planets.
Her spaceship was half a kilometer in length, but her cabin -- the only cabin on the entire cargo vessel -- was about ten long steps across.
It was crammed with a bunch of stuff.
It kinda sucked.

Her spaceship was called The 4008, MEDIUM, EXTRA, WOODCHIP, ONE.

Never sign a contract you haven't read.

Her first month in space went by kind of slow.
Her first month in space kinda felt like two months in space.
Most of the time she spent playing videogames, reading books, eating delicious reconstituted food, exercising, composing haikus, pacing, watching movies, learning how to salsa, trying novel drug combinations, trying new yoga positions, mediating, skipping, prancing, watching numbers change on consoles, watching meters fluctuate on displays, reading manuals, having showers, having stand-up baths, enjoying massages, having breaks, sitting around doing nothing -- or maybe fiddling her thumbs, planning to buy things, complaining, cheering her favorite tennis players, and other things; sometimes she would: contemplate the meaning of existence, design new synthetic purses, make artificial life forms, simulate interplanetary wars, or pretend she was having a tea with someone famous (she would dress up the ship's cleaning robot up in silly hats made out of reconstituted food from the dispensary, and this would suffice as costuming); on very rare occasions, she got drunk and played Scrabble, by herself, which was, very nearly, impossible to enjoy.
Things got old quick.
So, she decided to spend most of her time in a drug-induced coma. This is what most people decide to do, after awhile, in similar circumstances.
Tammi was mandated to wake up every sixty days and make sure everything was kosher with the computer and the ship and the woodchips and everything.
The first wake-up went really straightforward:
...she felt like she had a nasty hangover; the cabin spun a little, then slowed, then stabilized. She surveyed her surroundings. Nothing had changed. At all. "Computer?"
"Yup!" said the computer.
"Is everything kosher?"
"Yuupp!" said the computer. "Everything is kosher!"
"Good stuff." Tammi plunked her feet on the heated floor. Tammi put her feet back on the bed. "Put me back under."
"You betcha! Here's some Vivocain!" the computer put her back under.
"Hmm...vibleocain..." she mumbled.

...she felt like she had a vengeful hangover; the cabin annoyed her, with each passing second, as she climbed out of bed, and struggled over to her chair. She collapsed into the chair with a good amount of gusto. As if, she had not just woken up, but instead, just climbed something really tall, and had finally gotten to the peak, where a tiger was waiting to be wrestled, and there was a cameraman from Time magazine there, who was waiting for the perfect photo-opportunity, for six years, and was all ready to go, now that a perfect subject had arrived... one with gusto.
Gusto.
Tammi belched.
"Good afternoon Tammi," the disembodied computer voice said.
"Hey."
"Want something to eat?"
"Lamb. A big pile of lamb. With mint sauce," Tammi climbed out of the chair. "And potatoes." She stared at the skipping rope on the floor -- nope. "And...some peanuts." She stared at the digital book on the magazine rack - nope. "And maybe some Brazil nuts, okay?" Tammi climbed into the half-closet-sized shower, and turned it on, glad that she was already naked, as she would not have to endear the tedium of stripping.
"Sounds fantastic Tammi, I'll make that for you," the computer said.
The food-box started to gurgle and make funny sounds. It started to shake a bit. And whir.
Tammi stuck her head under a stream of water. "Ah," she said. The shower did her wonders, and by the time she got out, dried off and put on a smock, her meal was waiting for her.
A little conveyor belt protruded from the food-box; a little convey of tasty shapes came out.
"Mmm...lamb," Tammi said, trying to figure out which bit was which on her plate. The lamb had to be the large, gelatinous brown cube with green drizzle-goo, no doubt, and the potatoes, well, they had to be the little white spheres, that looked liked little eggs; by elimination, that meant that the little yellow nugget things were the nuts, although pea or Brazilian, she had no chance of guessing.
Fortunately, the meal tasted much better than it looked.
Then there was trouble.

"Oh boy," the computer said. "It looks like an esmail just arrived for you."
Tammi set down her glass of ersatz lager, and pushed the Scrabbles letters X, B, I, K, and O aside, disgusted. She wiggled a bit in her chair -- tried to get comfortable -- then stopped, giving up completely. "An esmail? From who?"
"A certain A'reef-gooma-koa, it looks like."
Tammi's heart skipped a beat. A'reef was pretty hot -- at least, for a robot smuggler anyways; he had a big fluffy pink mohawk and a real hamster bone through his chin. They met in her fourth-year Post-Modern³ Post-Colonial Plutonian Lit class. He always hung out in the back of the class, and wore semi-invisible designer polo-shirts. He only lasted a few weeks into the semester before he got into robot smuggling in a big way. "Open it!"
(Oh the joys esmail bring! Seasonal, celebratory, or otherwise! Nothing like it. It is so nice to hear from people, isn't it?)

"Whoa now, haven't run my anti-viral scans on the little bugger yet hang on --"
"Override," Tammi said, without thinking, as she had done on many occasions prior.
"Whoop! Here it is!" The computer displayed the contents of the email message:

Heyy Tammi !@!!@!
nbsp howw's itt goinngg ?? justt dringg inn wobbliee-bobbillees heree att thee pubsyy-wubbsyy andd ii wass thinkinn off uu !! kommee backeey soonn !!
ii gottaa shipp somee robotss!! laterr ,
A'REEF-GOOMA-KOA
RTFMxoxoxBRBxoLOLxoxoWTFxoxATM!
pss bookss aree forr looserrsss!

"Aw, that's so sweet," Tammi said. She felt her cheeks grow a bit hot. "That was so thoughtful of A'reef. Hey computer, I think I'll write something back, alright?"
The ship's cabin was silent.
"Computer?"
"Gguh—" the computer began, "ggguuuuhhhhhhh."
"Computer?"
Horrible noises came from the food-box. "Gguuhhhh..." the computer groaned.
Tammi bolted up. A little red light came on overhead. Tammi raced over to the observation console.
"I'm, I'm, sick --" an awful burping noise came from the food-box, and suddenly, the little door of it flew open, and a strong gush of dark-green fluid splashed out of the box and onto the floor. "Oh boy, I really don't feel so good." The computer's voice was now just barely personality-modulated: it sounded flat and tired. "Zarbullabba-dabba-buh!" Tammi swore. Tammi punched some buttons on the observation console. From here she could control the ship... if she could remember how. It seemed that there was some sort of computer virus attached to A'Reef's esmail, that much was apparent. Tammi punched a few keys, trying to get a sense of how bad the infection was. She requested a visual representation of the computer core. The computer core was a represented as a big, blue egg carton type thing, with wires running from it. It blinked red. Every other little section of the computer core had a big bold X through it.
Tammi started to feel a little anxious.
This wasn't good. All she wanted to do was pay off her English degree and now she was a year away from Mars with a computer core that was being eaten alive by some vicious badware. This wasn't good at all; this was actually really, really bad. Besides the low-level autonomic system, the bare essentials, the computer ran just about everything.
And the virus was propagating faster than double-penised rabbits. More and more of the computer core was turning red on the visual display, memory bank after memory bank went offline. Only about a tenth of the memory banks staved off the infection, and were big-bold-X free.
The walls faded from sky-blue with pink polka dots to grimy gray.
The floor became quite cool.
A closet opened, and her Porto-Gym 2500 LX fell to the floor, and broke. The quite background musak faded to white-noise'n'static. Tammi's pillow shriveled up, and turned into a little ball, the size of her fist.
Tammi cried.
She wished she was back home with A'reef-gooma-koa, enjoying his large kamda and giving him wet nucksters. And maybe doing some big globs of ‘piff.
You know, it's not easy flying space ships around delivering woodchips. So you take the course right, and it's a quick course, you're in and out of there in like five weeks. They teach you all about relativity. They teach you all about conversation of energy. They teach you about cargo manifest forms. They teach you about Asimovian radiation.
But it ain't easy flying those space ships around.
Tammi found this out.

She tried to execute the emergency subroutine. The computer crashed and she had to do a reset.
Once the computer booted back up, she tried again. This time, she thought it was going to work. She double-tapped the EXECUTE button with her finger, and a new screen came up, and it said: ARE YOU SURE? (below, there were two buttons: YES and NO).
Tammi double-tapped YES.
A screen came up, and said: ARE YOU SURE?
Tammi cried.
The lights were dimmer. The cabin was quieter. The food-box was hopeless. Anything she ordered came out looking like a hard, gray dill-pickle. This was bad, because before, everything had been gelatinous and cubed. Tammi was at the point yet were she was brave enough to eat the gray dill mystery pickle. She was getting to that point, however, and it scared her.
The cabin was cold. She'd exhale, and she'd see her breath. This was not good. Frost on the display screens, just like it use to accumulate on the windshield of her old flapper, back home. And it seemed to be getting colder. She now had on every single piece of clothing she had brought. She felt like an Eskimo in one of those movies about the old people that don't exist anymore.
The esmail virus/badware had totally crippled the computer. The colors on the displays got all screwed up. Now, there was only cyan and magenta. The console wasn't even capable of flashing red anymore. The audio link was pretty gibbered as well. If Tammi gave any queries, the computer was no help. The computer would only respond with rhetorical questions, on unrelated subjects.
"Cc-cc-ccomputer," Tammi said, shivering. "Hhow-hhow is the anti-ti-virus run-running?"
There was a clunking sound. "Oh Tammi...Tammi...How would you like it if Johnny stole your saxophone?"

Tammi was on her cold bed when she heard the voice.
"Hey, hey," the voice said.
It didn't sound like the computer. The voice was hoarse, and deep.
She peeped her head out from beneath the covers.
"Yeah -- you there," the voice said.
"Who are you?" There was a blurry projection in her pantry. It was a big amoeba. It wore a brown blazer. The amoeba had four long pseudopods which swung around not knocking over things, because they were holographic.
"I'm a computer virus," it said.
"Oh," Tammi said.
The amoeba floated over to Tammi's bed. Tammi wiggled deeper under the cold, unpowered bedcovers. The thing was huge. It blotted out the feeble overhead lights. One of the pseudopods reached into a pocket and pulled out a formula. The formula read: if g < z then p=(b(41)*y4(b+(k-6.423))) and goto subroutine5. The amoeba floated even closer. It waved the formula at Tammi. She cowered in her blankets.
"What's that?" she said.
"Its code," said the virus.
"Oh?"
"Yes." The pseudopods pushed the piece of code towards her, as if hoping she'd take it. "Can you fix it? I think this piece is broken."
"No."
"Shucks," said the computer virus.
The amoeba floated back to the centre of the room. It began undergoing fission. Tammi stared. "I'm self-propagating," the virus said. A big tear started up its middle. "I wish my code wasn't broken." Protoplasm oozed out of its large tear. "—its tough being -- ugh!"
By the time the amoeba was done splitting, Tammi thought she was going to pass out. It was pretty intense.
The new amoeba had a blue sports jacket, and only three pseudopods. It seemed friendly. When it was whole it floated over to Tammi's bed. The first amoeba started to fade away into a cloud of pink fuzz.
"What do you want?" Tammi asked.
The amoeba turned upside down. Now Tammi could see it also wore a tie. The tie was striped. The amoeba shot a pseudopod at her. "Have you ever thought of debt consolidation?" it asked.
"No," Tammi said, in all honesty.
"Now's a good time!" The amoeba sounded pretty happy. "Sign these forms," the amoeba said, and pulled an envelope out of its sports jacket.
Tammi didn't sign the forms and the virus got angry. It floated over to the corner of the cabin, by the computer console. A dull red emanated from an organ suspended in the amoeba's chest. "Well, no more food for you," it said.

The cabin was once again, silent, cold, and empty. Tammi got out of bed, with trepidation. She sighed. She didn't want to deal with talking projections anymore. The talking projections were bastards. All of them.
And no sooner had she climbed out of bed, did a beam of light flit out of the holographic projector, and start writing a message:

HI TAMI TUCKER!
THIS IS JOHN, YOUR AUTOMATED WALLMART INTERPLANETARY TECH SUPPORT FRIEND! I'LL BE HELPING YOU TODAY. FIRST OFF, YOU ARE IN NO DANGER! EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY. DON'T PANIC. YOUR SHIPMENT OF WOODCHIPS IS NOT AT RISK.

Tammi stared wide-eyed, incredulous! Deep-down forgotten harbored hopes that Wallmart Interplanetary had not abandoned her were brought out of the freezer; the hopes were then warmed, resuscitated, and embraced; hope was with her again: could the end be near? Tammi anxiously awaited the holographic projector's next message:

OUR VIRUS SCANNERS HAVE DETECTED AN INFECTION IN YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM. YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM IS NO LONGER FUNCTIONING AS IT SHOULD. HOWEVER, WALLMART INTERPLANETARY IS HERE FOR YOU IN YOUR TIME OF NEED.

"Way to go," Tammi said. She picked up her skipping rope and started to skip. It took forever for the next screen of text to appear:

YOUR SYSTEM IS INFECTED BY THE SO_NASTY-C VIRUS. IT IS CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING INTELLIGENCE AND MAY TRY TO EMPLOY THIS INTELLIGENCE TO YOUR DISADVANTAGE, OR, TO COERCE YOU TO EXPEDITE ITS REPRODUCTION. HOWEVER, ITS METHODS WILL BE NUGATORY.

Tammi stopped skipping. She stared at the message. "Nugatory? Expedite its reproduction? What the hell does that mean? Nugatory!" Tammi thought she may have heard that word before. She tried to think back to her English classes at the university. "Nugatory?"
Another bit of text came up:

THERE IS ONE WAY TO IMMEDIATLY CLEAR THE SYSTEM OF THE SO_NASTY-C BADWARE. IT IS VERY SIMPLE. THE VIRUS HAS A PROGRAMMING FLAW THAT YOU MUST EXPLOIT. IF THE EXPLOIT IS USED, THE VIRUS WILL DESTROY ITS ASTROMARG%IE EXCEPTION ERROR XE00064:::

There was no post-triple-colon text. The floating cursor blinked a slow, regular, sad pulse, overtop a blue screen, as if it felt abandoned, guideless, lost.
"Astromarg?" Tammi skipped. "What?" The text was replaced by a new message:

IN ORDER TO CLEAR THE SYSTEM VIRUS YOU MUST BUY DR.FOXXX'S TRIPLE-LENGTH IMPROVEMENT PACKAGE. IT IS THE ONLY ALL NATURAL ENCHANCEMENT PRODUCT ON THE MARKET THAT GUARANTEES TRIPLE-LENGTH RESULTS - OR IT'S FREE!!!

Tammi continued to skip. She figured if she stopped skipping, her whole little world would implode into the cold vacuum of space.
The virus returned. A little bit of the amoeba's cellular wall peeped out of the closet. It waggled a ski-gloved pseudopod at Tammi. "So, Tammi," it began -- this time its voice was different: quicker, squeakier, more used-spaceship salesmanish -- "what do you say? Buy Dr.Foxxx's Triple-Length package and not only will you get freedom, food, and guaranteed results, but if you order now, I'll also throw in this!" The amoeba reached into the closet with a long, dangly pseudopod (that was almost three times as large as the others), and pulled out a length of pink rubber, then was contoured into the shape of a U. It had golden tassels at the ends, and blue lighting bolts on it.
Food sounded good. "What's that?" Tammi said, still skipping.
"Introducing the Ab-ton-mizer! It's made out of galaxy-age Worko material, and is all the rage in the --"
"Nope," Tammi said.
The amoeba came fully out of the closet. It drove the Ab-Ton-Mizer into a hollow cavity in its protoplasm, then, a moment later, launched it, with excessive force, from an orifice. It flew across the cabin and struck a pastoral painting. The virus lignified out of sheer disgust. "Well!" The virus squeaked: "no more light for you then!"
The cabin became dark.

But the cabin was not completely dark; the cabin wasn't black.
Ingenuity saved her; ingenuity was sparked by the darkness; from the spark came confidence; it all resulted in a little bit of light:
It was a little consolation for Tammi, and a small amount of light, in that the badware had little control over the bathroom OCCUPIED indicator, and a small amount of illumination shone forth -- getting the light to stay on (getting the bathroom perpetually OCCUPIED) was a bit of challenge, but a nail-file and a fear of death by accidental impalement goes a long way in a non-optimal situation; Tammi jimmied the door-close sensor, and now her cabin was bathed in a dark blue iridescence, and Tammi was a little mollified, for a small amount of time, before it sunk in to her how actually horrible and actually awful her entire situation was.
Would she have to buy Dr. Foxxx's enlargement pills? Ab-ton-mizers? And if she bought both, would the badware leave? Or would another generation of amoeba just generate another polyester sports coat and pick up were there parent left off, as proper progeny should...? So many questions. So many unknowns. Perhaps there was another alternative?
"Hey, hey you," said something squirming in the dark corner of the cabin.
"Uh, yeah?" Tammi said.
"Earn a university degree in two weeks. Obtain a prosperous future, money-earning power, and the prestige that comes with the degree you have always dreamed of. Earn a bachelor's degree based on your present knowledge and life experience, with no money down. Call 1-206-984-0106 today."
Tammi couldn't make out the squirmy shape in the corner. "But I already have a university degree," Tami said.
"Oh," the mystery voice said. "A lot of good it has done you."
"What?"
"I said," the virus said, "a lot of good your university degree has done you!"
Tammi told the virus to go fuck itself.
"Good idea," the virus said. "Well, I'm ah, turning off the gravity; I hope that's okay." Everything in the cabin that wasn't secured started to float. Tammi hovered off the ground and wiggled around a bit. This was her first time in zero gravity and she didn't like it.

No virus-projections were around. Things floated all over the cabin, like Tammi. She began collecting the knick-knacks, and putting them in a plastic satchel. One of the knick-knacks, her intelligent toothbrush, tried to sell her weight loss pills.
No toothbrush previous to this moment in time and space had ever been so destroyed.
In fact, the toothbrush, no longer exists.
Not even in stories.

There comes a point when things get worse, then worse, and you figure you should do something different and see if it anything changes. The cabin was dark, cold, and gravity-less, when Tammi reached this point; she was hungry; she hadn't had anything to eat in eighteen hours. And she was scared.
Rescue was unlikely. WallMart Interplanetary most certainly knew that something was seriously wrong aboard, but, there wasn't all that much they could feasibly do. Presumably, they had already tried to reinstall the shipboard software remotely -- and this had failed -- and Tammi was in deep space, still traveling fast enough to severely hamper chances of actual rescue. And she was far, far, far away from her ultimate destination.
She was in trouble.
She thought of what she could do.
She came up with nothing.
She decided the best course of action would be to find out more about her antagonist, and take it from there.
The dull blue cabin filled now with whorls of smoke. Jets and puffs of subtly shimmering dust came out of the ventilation ducts in the ceiling; the air became humid, and smelt like metal... like aluminum. It was although she was no longer aboard her spaceship at all. There was a fog, and it was cold, and it was dark -- she could have been in some cabin on some desolate part of a barely colonized planet -- she felt very alone. She felt very alone but had a cherished idea of hope that she may, somehow, overcome the situation, preserve and survive. She would eat lamb-cube again. Once again, she would master the ship. She'd figure out how this badware clicked, and she'd figure out how to kill it. "Hello, virus?" Tammi said.
There was no answer, and besides her small area by the blue bathroom light, the rest of the cabin was nebulous, obfuscated by the smoke.
"I want to talk to you," she said.
Nothing.
"I want to buy some stuff," she said.
And out of the wall of cloud came a creature. It was different than any of the others. It was bigger, for starters. It was huge. It almost stretched from wall to wall. It was thinner then the others. The others appeared as a watery bag of bits, this one was flat; bulging spherical vacuoles were clustered around a black cavity that undulated. It sallied forth -- it was quick moving; it came out of the clouds, then jerked back in; visibility was limited, but Tammi could see that the thing was a beast. The thing carried a briefcase in one pseudopod and a paper cup of coffee in the other. The cup of coffee was about a foot long. "Do you want to get rich, quick?" The thing's voice was deep, slow, and gruff. It sounded a bit sick. The creature coughed a phlegmatic cough and its body shock and the noise was awful.
Her life depended on this. "I do," Tammi began, "but first I want you to answer some questions."
"You want to get rich, quick?" The creature shrunk into the clouds a little bit. A feature of the creature started to dully blink red, a slow pulsing. "Good, good." The thing erupted into a stochastic series of the same modulated harsh cough.
"What's your name?" Tammi said.
"419," the creature responded. "Cash or credit?"
Tammi swore. It was a waste of a question. "But --" she stopped herself. She didn't want to upset the creature. What would it take next? Besides, her money didn't have much use if she died on this stupid spaceship. "Credit."
"Dee-ducted!" The effect was immediate. The red blink in its chest became a red strobe that lit up the cabin. And it grew. Even larger; it began to fill out, meter by square meter; it expanded until it took up more than half of the cabin. Another organ popped into existence in its protoplasm, and its briefcase got larger, and its handle transformed to gold; the coffee however, shrunk, but changed from paper to glass, and gained whip cream, and caramel drizzle (Tammi crept over and stared at it; watched as it whorled and reanimated, and it looked more delicious now, it looked even more appealing, re-projected). "Ahh," 419 said, "that's great. I hope you get rich, quick." The creature wiggled around a host of pseudopods, and did not cough. "Your G.R.Q Plus package will arrive in about three months, ship-time. Well, I think I'll turn the gravity on now." And with that, Tammi felt herself become heavy, and she dropped, and fell to the floor in a heap, and bashed her kneecap on the corner of her chair.
Everywhere objects fell and clanged to the floor; here a digital book fell to the floor and smashed open, there a Porto-Gym 2500 fell and broke into further smaller pieces. Tammi smiled and rubbed her knee.
The cabin was a bit brighter now; the blue bathroom light and red organ light from the creature mixed in the cabin through the suffused smoke. It was progress. "419, I want to ask you some more questions," she said.
419 retreated. "More questions? About me?" Its voice was no longer coarse. "Do you want to get richer, quicker?" Its bulk shimmered.
"No," Tammi said.
"Then I can't answer any questions. You have to buy something to get something in return."
"Why?" Tammi said.
The creature folded; brought its points together, centered its bulk. "What are you, a socialist?" the computer virus said.
"Just answer my fucking questions!" And Tammi, suspended in the cabin, put her head in hands, and started to sob.
Beside the bathroom door, overlain on top the billowing gas, four necklaces appeared. They looked cheap. "How about you just buy one of these lovely necklaces, and I'll answer some more questions for you? They are made out of genuine topaz and high quality Dimonde."
Dropping her hands, and blinking wet tears out of her eyes, Tammi checked out the necklaces. They were pretty gaudy. "How much?" she managed to say. She eyed the creature and its pulsating organ-bits and its plethora of gurgling, snapping little bubbles of gas and wondered, if it were real, would she be able to hurt it?
"Only six easy payments of nine-hundred and eight-six dollars—"
"What!"
"-comes with a money back guarantee."
Tammi added it up. "That's ridiculous!" Her face turned red. She grabbed her satchel of collected knick-knacks and hurled it at the beast. The satchel flew harmlessly through the projection. "Do you know how much debt I have?"
"Debt?" the creature intoned, then coughed.
The creature vanished.
"Hey, hey," a voice said, deep within the smoke.
It didn't sound like the massive badware. The voice was hoarse, and deep.
Tami saw some motion in the clouds. She grabbed on to the bathroom door handle to stabilize herself, and tried to make out the shape coming towards her.
It was another amoeba, with for swinging pseudopods. It wore a brown blazer.
"You again," Tammi said.
The amoeba came up to her. It reached into a pocket in its blazer. The computer virus began to prod her with an envelope. "Say," the virus said.
"Yeah?"
"Have you ever thought of debt consolidation?"
"Sometimes," Tammi sighed. Was this the end? In deep space, cold, hungry, delivering woodchips? Solicited by holographic amoeba? Killed by badware? What kind of real badware would do that? Kill someone, if they did not buy? Tammi looked around and saw nothing worth dying for. Her life, if it was going to end here, would be a life of strung together failures, a live of emptiness, of pointlessness, and stupidity; regret came up strong and choked her; she could not speak.
"Hey, um, could you take a look at this?" The virus said. It put the envelope away, and from the same pocket, pulled out a formula. "I think it's broken. It doesn't make any sense." The formula was about a foot long and was written in white text; it read: if g < z then p=(b(41)*y4(b+(k-6.423))) and goto subroutine5.
The glow from the formula lit up the cabin. She saw the far wall for the first time in a long time. "Sure," Tammi said, "for some food."
The virus squirmed. "That's really swell of you." The virus snapped its pseudopod like a whip and the formula floated over towards Tammi.
It was a nightmare. The amoeba was sticking formula in her face, and she was never much in computer science at school. All she could think about was food and how bad everything was going. "Whats gee?"
"Gee...gee...well, that's like the client's overall consolidated debt."
"Okay, right." Tammi studied the formula for the first time. She was interested, despite herself. "And pee?"
"Pee...pee...that's a little tricky to explain," the amoeba searched some of its pockets, presumably looking for answers.
"Sum it up for me," Tammi said.
"Pee is sort of like... how much...well... it has to do with chaos theory, super-singularities, and my product development matrix."
"Oh," Tammi said.
"See, that's were the problem is, I think." The brown-blazered virus poked the formula with a digit. "I think that 41 should be a 42," the badware tugged at its nucleus. "Yeah, something is definitely funky there," it said.
This was going nowhere. "Can't you figure it out? Why don't you change yourself?"
The amoeba's cell wall firmed up. "Change myself? I don't know the foundation of logic behind any of this! You made me -- so you fix me!"
Tammi's eyebrow arched. She squinted. "Me?" She began to rub her hands together. The cabin seemed even cooler. She thought about trying the manual console again. The distress beacon might be back online, by some miracle. "If I fix your code, can you turn on the heat for me?"
"Sure," the virus said, and its cell wall loosened up a bit.
Tammi couldn't believe it. "Good." She thought that she should not seem to anxious to ‘fix' the virus's code. "I just need to know what zee and k and subroutine five is, than I'm all set."
The amoeba started to spin. "Thanks for fixing me. I'm really supposed to be better, you know," the amoeba said.
"I know."
"Those ones are a bit easier to explain. Variable zee is sort of like the, consulting fee interest accrued after twenty years on the debt consolidation program --"
"Oh," Tammi said, and tried to wrap her head around it.
"-variable k is the spin of an electrically neutral lepton, and subroutine5 is my self-fission program." The amoeba turned upside down. "At least, I think that's what it all means."
Tammi stared at the code.
"Hey, have you ever thought of debt consolidation? Pretty soon I gotta split."
She wished she had anything from a piece of chalk to a electric-pen to work out the formula with. "Just hold on a second, I'm going to fix it..." maybe if she added some numbers to throw off the p variable the virus wouldn't be able to propagate correctly.
"No, really, I have to go -- last chance for debt consolidation!" the amoeba chimed.
"Okay, okay, consolidate my debt!" Tammi said.
"Wow! That's great. Cash or credit!" the amoeba opened up its jacket and pulled out a thick paper envelope. "Just tap this and you'll be all set!" The virus was excited.
"First, I figured out the problem with your code! The less-than sign should be a greater-than sign. That'll fix'ya up, virus!" Tammi was holding herself so tightly than her nails began to dig into herself.
"Thanks! That's good to hear. Okay, done. Now, cash or credit?"
"Credit, definitely, credit. Put it all on credit. I'll pay later." Tammi taped the envelope.
"Awesome! Okay, calculating," the amoeba pulled out an old fashioned calculator. "Calculating," it continued.
Tammi held her breath.
"Okay, just trying to get a handle on all your debt here..."
"Did you get all of my student loans?"
The amoeba was furiously hitting buttons with a bevy of pseudopods. "Yup. Pre, post, and during."
"Overdraft?"
"Check."
"My SuperCard?"
"Check."
"Flapper payments?"
"Ah, I thought those were under your parent's name; okay, one moment. Check."
"What about my Susie-Sammy Card?"
"Got it."
"My Frequent Travelers Discount Account?"
"Oh, forgot that one. Hang on a second," Tammi could hardly make out the calculator-striking pseudopods. They were going so quick. "Carry the five," it mumbled.
The amoeba started to bulge. Bubbles skirted throughout its body. The bit of the amoeba's nuclei that Tammi could see underneath the jacket, was growing red, and beating, like a heart. Squiggly little worm-like things coursed throughout the badware's being.
"Is...that...it?" the virus said. It sounded exhausted.
Tammi started to sweat, although the cabin was no warmer. Did she have enough debt? Did she misunderstand the formula? Tammi took a catalogue of all her possessions. Did she have anything else outstanding?
Then it came to her. At first, she wanted to slap herself for forgetting something like that. Maybe it was enough to save her. "Virus," she said, pointing at her magazine rack, "that digital book is on loan from a public library -- I'm sure there's late fees -- did you add those?"
"Calculating," the amoeba said. A new pseudopod grew out of it and combined with the other three banging on the calculator, working out figures. "Calculating projected interest accrued," the nucleus became brighter now, and began to pulse; it grew and expanded and strained against the cell wall, "applying, applying," the virus said, its voice weak and haggard and strained, "computing...applying constant of general relativity to interest payments --"
Tammi was horrified. The amoeba's nucleus was beating like a heart. Beside the heart was a wide-open vacuole, and it now, began to expand furiously.
"Ugh!" the amoeba said, and exploded.
No sooner had the bits of burst amoeba splattered against all surfaces of the cabin did that wonderful voice come back, that she missed so much: "Tammi, Tammi? Can you hear me?"
"Computer!" Tammi screamed.
"Tammi, you saved me!" The floor grew warm; jets of heat blew out of nozzles in the wall, and pushed away the thick clouds of gas. A light came on overhead, and it was white, not red, nor blue, and it was bright enough to illuminate the entire cabin. "I thought I was a goner!"
"I knew all that debt was worth something," Tammi said. The automated cleaning robot whirred to life and got to work. Within a minute, the only remaining trace of her entire ordeal was the bathroom light being on. "Don't let me override you again computer, make me some lamb, fix my bed up, and get some pills ready because I'm passing out. Don't wake me up until we get to Wallmart 6."
nbsp "Done; done; done; done; but what about the sixty day maintenance checks?" the computer said.
Uninterrupted sleep was tempting, but saying the cursed ‘o' word was not -- she'd never say that word again; never again; never ever. And she'd have to learn to live with it all, and deal with it, because she had many, many, many more trips ahead of her, and many more years of space travel -- that is, if she ever wanted to pay off all those lovely debts of hers, anyways.