Virus writers

Ray-man was a nightcrawler, a lover of darkness who preferred the company of his online world and his souped up laptop over ordinary humanity. A grad student killing time on a boring internship project, he spent his nights tending the server farm and wondering how all his tenured professors could stand the tedium of government work.
His shift at the SETI lab was a half hour from done, and he craved a glazed raised, a few hours playing role playing games on his computer and a solid sleep. The sheer tedium of tending a bunch of computers to look for alien transmissions was driving him to a restless state of irritated distraction he was ill suited for.
He shift was almost over when he realized something truly odd was going on. All the com lines in the lab were jammed, but with outgoing transmissions only, and the temperature in the server room had jumped twenty degrees in the last half hour.
Something was pushing information out fast enough to keep a T-3 line jammed, and to drive every one of the servers to near melting point.
He logged into the system with his own laptop. None of the lab machines would let him into the system. He looked at the odd code scrolling by, finally getting excited by something at work. One of his sneaky hobbies was writing viruses, and he knew what almost all the good ones looked like. This one was amazing, and unlike anything he'd seen before. But how the hell did it get into and now out of the system?
As his system crashed, he realized how it got in, and realized that there was life out there in space. And that it too got bored, and wrote code for fun. And this one was going to take down every computer on earth with a connection.


"At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you."
Johann Goethe