Your Computer Has A Virus, And It's Killing Your Online Friends

Scenario one: Cascading Failure

It seems like a good idea at first. An obvious idea. Releasing the computer virus from the floppy disk and using it to defeat your opponent—some might consider such a method to be cheating, but the three of you never did have very upstanding morals. And it falls upon you, as the resident gaming expert and by extension the de-facto leader, to deliver the lethal dose of malware.

In retrospect, it may or may not be your fault. Maybe your throw was clumsy. Or maybe it was just a plain bad idea. Either way, you run up to the bullet-toting kick-ninja that serves as the game's final challenge, and you bring your arm back with as fearsome a battle cry as you can muster, and you fling that floppy disk towards it with as much force as your relatively feeble physical strength allows (which isn't very much, but it should be enough. Right?)

It is enough, technically, to accomplish your goal, assuming that your goal was simply to defeat the boss. It swings around to face you with a rumbling roar, and for a terrifying moment you find yourself staring down the barrel of the lethal appendage from which its name derives. It fires, and you flinch. Is this the end?

No. At least not immediately. Not in the way you feared it would be.

Perhaps you should have feared differently.

The bullet connects with the floppy disk, and—

By the time your brain has even begun to process what you're looking at, it's far too late to do anything about it. In a burst of pixels, the opponent's sprite glitches out. A health bar appears above its head, stretching into infinity. Then it flickers, and the health bar is completely empty. A harsh mechanical groan echoes through the level, like a fork in the garbage disposal mixed with nails on a chalkboard and then bass-boosted. You wince, instinctively clamping your hands over your ears and crouching down (as though that could possibly protect you from what's happening). By the time your opponent unceremoniously clips out of existence, the virus has already begun to spread elsewhere.

And oh, god, does it spread.

It snakes along the ground faster than your eyes can follow. Not just the ground, but the sky, too—your entire surroundings. It's difficult to parse what's happening, let alone describe it, but... the closest comparison would be that it looks like the sky is falling. Chunks of it, rather; blocks of purple-red sky give way to blank void. The already crumbling and smoking ruins around you break apart polygon by polygon and fall to pieces. The ground shifts beneath your feet—not like an earthquake; you don't lose your balance. No, this is scarier than an earthquake, because... well. Earthquakes happen in the real, physical world. What's happening here, on the other hand, serves as a stark reminder that you're currently inside of a video game.

A video game into which you've just released a computer virus.

You're so transfixed in this moment, as the cogs in your mind turn and slowly piece together what's happening (it's not actually a slow process—the realization happens surprisingly fast, what with your cleverness and familiarity with video games—but everything seems slower in these frozen moments of terror) that you have no time to run before the jagged strands of corruption reach you. As you're engulfed by the virus, you shriek and flail, but it's too late. It's much too late. It was too late the moment you took that floppy disk out of your pocket. Now the floppy disk is destroyed, and the virus is out, with no way to reseal it.

It doesn't hurt, really. You scream anyway, as loud as you can, because on some instinctive level you know that this is the end of you. It's the end of all of you.

In the corner of your eye, just before your vision is obscured by a wave of distorted pixels, you see your friends. The virus hasn't reached them yet. You'd tell them to run away, but all your voice can do right now is wail incoherently. In moments like these, your body autopilots, you see; it thinks only of preserving itself. You see them there, clutching one another so tightly that from this distance they almost seem to blur together. Red; wide blue eyes. Blue; always wearing red plaid. It always did seem kind of backward. Well, it won't matter which one of you is which when all three of you are—