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[Hacking, VideoArt by Paulo R. C. Barros - Sci-Fi short story by Carlos Relva]

Hacking
by Carlos Relva

The Shelooh´glootz are very happy, they finally decoded the ultimate message sent by the advanced civilization from the distant star system of the yellow Sun and eight planets.

This time the interpretation was very hard, because it required the development of an extra equipment. Fortunately, the instructions to built it was in a previous message.

Now, with just one command, the scientific center will transmit to the whole planet the new and wonderful knowledge from that strange and fascinating civilization.

"How many years of progress can we acquire thanks to the generosity of that alien culture?", many people wondered, while the transmission was liberated and everyone could contemplate the new message:

"Our compliments, whomever you are! Did you enjoy the first messages we sent? That's good! And I see that you were able to built the required technology to decode this message too, didn't you? And also inserted a particularly alien tool to your default system.
Congratulations! I'm really proud of you. With my help, you made a pretty work of hacking.
Unfortunately, I have something to tell you that you will not be glad: this message is infected with a virus. And if the computer you built is in the network, the whole system should be infected by now. I mean, if my cracker competence is so good as I believe, soon everything there will be very ugly. Really a mess!
Yeah, I think you discovered by the worst way that not all humans are good people! And do you know why I did it? Just because I could.
I really would like to see your scared faces right now. Do you have faces, don't you?"