Chapter 1: The introduction

My name is Rick Carr. I was a normal every day sixteen-year-old geek. You know the kind, red hair, freckles and frost blue eyes (my best feature) covered by coke bottle glasses. Even though I was tall for my age (just more than six feet) I looked like a cardboard cutout because I weighed in at a whopping 105 pounds!

I was the kid in high school the teachers loved but the kids hated. You might say I was too smart for my own good. The kids that did acknowledge my presence would get very pissed when I kept raising the curve and that was kind of easy, with an IQ of 185. Oh I tried to play dumb for a while and let my grades slip from a 4.0 to a 2.50 but all I got was beating from my stepfather.

Okay, enough about me.

Let me tell about some of my friends. Oh that's right. I left all my childhood friends in Iowa after moving here to Seattle last year.

Instead let me tell you about Brenda Stone, the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on. She is 5'8" with emerald green eyes, strawberry blond hair and Kathy Ireland's body. And she doesn't know I even exist. But that isn't really a bad thing because her boyfriend (John) is very possessive about her. Now the thing about John is he is a linebacker on the football team and looks like a Neanderthal on steroids (with about as much up stairs).

Now on to my family, there are my stepsisters (Kate, Debbie, Lisa), my mom (Lynn) and my stepfather (Bob). The twins (Kate & Debbie) are a year older than I and Lisa is two years younger than me. The twins and I don't get along; most of the time we try to ignore each other to the point of nonexistent. Kate and Debbie are as deep as an empty beer can. Their dream man is someone to take them to the mall and spend money on them. Now Lisa is completely the opposite, and we are each other's best friends. She is a tomboy who lives in faded blue jeans and some old "ZZ Top" T-shirts. And the only time she takes off an old pair of mirrored sunglasses is to sleep or kick ass. Then there is mom. She has had a rough life. After her high school boy friend got her pregnant on graduation night, he took off leaving her to raise a son by herself.

She did ok for the most part. I mean money was a little tight but we made out okay. Mom is 34 and after ten years of working two (sometimes three) jobs she is naturally worn down. She is hunched from working at the laundry and her skin is dry and wrinkled from the detergents used there. But I love her just the same.

What can I say nice about Bob? Nothing comes to mind except that with his money mom could cut down to one job. Bob is 'old school', believing that the only way to teach a child was to beat some sense into them and as his girls never did anything wrong in his eyes, I got a lot of sense beaten into me.

Well at least I have a job to keep me from spending too much time at home. Six weeks ago I got hired at Microsoft (in the mail room). My job is to deliver the sorted mail to the different departments. That's how I met Frank Richards.

Now let me tell you that I love computers and computer hacking, lucky for me I never got caught (or maybe it wasn't luck but something else).

One day on my mail rounds I passed Franks desk and saw him working on a win95 bug that had to be fixed before the release date. All the programmers, (not just Frank) were working on the same bug, but so far no one had found the cause. Well Frank was a nice guy in his thirties, and would take time to say 'Hi' as I came around. So when he turned and said "Hi" to me he was a little annoyed at me when I didn't respond. Instead I looking at the computer screen on his desk, covered with command strings. What really had my attention was that there was a saboteur in the programming department and said so to Frank whom I trusted.

He laughed, "What makes you think that?"

"Well," I volunteered, "the bug you are trying to track down isn't really a bug. It's a virus!"

His eyes got really serious and said "what!?!"

"The virus is right there on your screen but it's broken up into several different command strings so it won't activate until several months after being installed." I said.

He turned to the screen and looked for several minutes then said, "show me" (so I did).

Then his eyes got very large and then he reached for the phone but I didn't hear the conversation as I moved off to finish my rounds.

The next day as I came to work after school I was met at the mailroom door by a man from security. "Are you Rick Carr?"

"Yes?" I responded.

"Would you follow me please." He said, as he led me to the elevator and up to the 5th floor where the executive offices are located. I was led into a conference room. In attendance were Frank and several other programmers along with several men I had never met. I was shown to a chair at the end of the long table where everyone was already seated.