His high school English final was due in three days. The assignment was a 2,000-word comparative essay on Macbeth and The Lion King . The teacher required submission in actual format. Zane had a cracked version of Office 2000, but it crashed every time he tried to insert a comment.
The installer didn't look like a Microsoft installer. It was a command prompt window that typed itself in green text: microsoft office 2007 highly compressed
The document saved. The clock on his taskbar started ticking backward. His high school English final was due in three days
Clippy says: "It looks like you're trying to escape. Would you like help?" Zane had a cracked version of Office 2000,
"Works great! 5 stars. My toaster now runs Excel. It makes perfect toast every time—but only for rows 1 through 1,048,575."
But on the third day, he noticed the other changes.
The message body: "Team RazorEdge thanks you for installing. Your hard drive has been converted into a bootleg distribution node. While you sleep, your PC will upload 0.001% of this Office suite to any computer within a 5-mile radius that searches for 'free resume templates.' You are now part of the swarm. Also, your essay has a typo in paragraph 4. 'Simba's father' is spelled M-U-F-A-S-A, not M-U-F-F-I-N-S. You're welcome."