“Wine?” Christina arched an eyebrow.
Hell yes, I thought. Getting drunk with my old college crush? What could be better than that?
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll just be working on this while you do that.”
She left me to it. I glanced up and stared at her ass as she left the room, every curve of her pert behind visible in those tight leggings. God damn, Luke, you’ve hit the jackpot tonight, I told myself, hooking one end of the Ethernet cable into the port on my laptop. If you fix this girl’s problem, she’s going to be very, very happy…
She would. But I had to fix the damn thing first. Fail, and I had no doubt all this new interest Christina had in me would quickly dissipate.
The laptop finished booting, a command line blinking in the corner of the screen. I preferred to work in a non-graphical interface when I was on the job: partially for efficiency’s sake, but mostly because I liked looking and feeling like a cool hacker. I hooked the other end of the Ethernet cable into Christina’s router, waiting for the modem to start a connection.
Normally this would have involved a quick ping, maybe a request to log in. Nothing more.
Instead, the screen filled with ASCII characters, scrolling like a fucking waterfall.
The hell? I watched as the phenomenon continued, the black screen of the laptop filled with white characters. Most of them were gibberish, but here and there I caught a couple of strange words: Abbadon. Maleficarum. Unum Infernum…
As quickly as they had come, they were gone. The strange screen disappeared, replaced with something that looked like one of those green-and-black message boards from the 1980’s. I stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending.
Loading Morningstar Program, it read, the white letters standing out against the black screen. Loaded! Please enter your name…
I’d never seen anything like it before. ‘Morningstar Program’ didn’t ring a bell, other than it being the name of the street I was currently on. It certainly didn’t sound like any malware or computer virus I’d ever heard of.
“Hey?” I called, raising my voice so Christina could hear me from downstairs. “What’s the name of your Wi-Fi network? It wouldn’t be ‘Morningstar Program’, would it?”
There was a pause. “Huh? No...I don’t think so.” Christina’s voice sounded muffled. I heard the sound of a bottle of wine being popped, and my heart jumped in my chest.
“Well, uh—what’s the password?”
“Aren’t you the hacker?” There was a playful quality to her voice. “It’s ‘Abbadon1’. The number one, capital-A.”
That was one of the words I saw, I thought. Suspicion hardened into certainty—I must be looking at some kind of info dump from Christina’s cable modem. Probably just needs a hard reboot, I thought with a smirk. And so does Christina.
“Thanks,” I said, typing the password into the strange program. The laptop gave an angry little bleep.
That name is not acceptable, the program informed me.
“Aw, hell,” I muttered. Christina would be back upstairs with the wine at any moment. Having this problem well on the way to being solved by then would make me seem like a total stud. If I was still sitting around jerking off, I’d look like an idiot.
Fuck it. It needed a name?
Luke, I wrote, and hit enter.
The laptop beeped again. Thank you, Luke, the words said. Before activating the Morningstar Program, we require you to select one of the following two paths. This decision is final and cannot be changed once you activate the program, so we suggest you choose wisely. You may select:
THE ANGEL OF LIGHT
or
THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS
“What the fuck?” I muttered, shaking my head. “What is this shit?”
Just then, Christina entered the bedroom, bumping the half-closed door open with her butt. She held a glass of red wine in each hand, her thumb and index finger twisted along the sinuous stems of each goblet.
“How’s it going?” she asked, crossing around to my side of the bed. Her eyes narrowed as she read the screen. “Hey, if you want to play computer games, you can do it on your own time.”
“It’s not a game,” I said, looking up at her. There were at least three things I loved about that view. “At least, I don’t think it is. It happened as soon as I plugged my diagnostic tool into the router.”
Yeah, I referred to my beat-to-shit laptop as a ‘diagnostic tool’. Tricks of the trade.
Christina gave the laptop a strange look. She sat down cross-legged on the carpet next to me, handing me one of the wine glasses. “Is it a virus?”
“I dunno,” I said, hating how I sounded. I was supposed to be cool and in control, not flailing. “Doesn’t look like I have any other options, though. If I want to get into your cable modem and fix your problem, I have to answer this thing’s question.”
In response, Christina snuggled closer. Her head pressed against my shoulder as she stared at the screen, taking a long sip from her goblet of rich, dark wine.
“Looks like,” she said, clearly enjoying teasing me. “So which are you going to pick? Darkness or light—that’s it, right? Which is it, Luke: do you want to be an angel, or a devil?”
I stared at the two options. The Angel of Darkness, and the Angel of Light. The fact that Christina had said ‘devil’ hadn’t even registered with me—I was too busy thinking.
“Fuck it,” I said with a shrug. “I always did like being the bad guy in computer games. Darkness it is.”
I selected ‘THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS’ and hit enter, expecting to see the codes for Christina’s router.
Instead, the screen dissolved, along with everything else.
“What the fuck!?” Christina tensed up next to me, grabbing hold of my wrist. She spilled
