‘Which virus?’ I asked again.
He shrugged, including me in his stupidity rating. ‘Maybe Michelangelo... Michelangelo activates on March 6th and there’s still a lot of it about.’
‘Enlarge,’ I said.
‘Surely you know?’
‘If I knew, I’ve forgotten.’
He spelled it out as to an illiterate. ‘March 6th is Michelangelo’s birthday. If you have the virus lying doggo in your computer and you switch on your computer on March 6th, the virus activates.’
‘Mm. Well, March 6th was last Sunday. No one switched on this computer on Sunday.’
Isobel’s large eyes opened wider. ‘That’s right.’
‘Michelangelo is a boot-section virus,’ the expert said, and to our blank-looking expressions long-sufferingly explained. ‘Just switching the machine on does the trick. Simply switching it on, waiting a minute or two, and switching off. Switching on is called booting-up. All the records on the hard disk are wiped out at once with Michelangelo and you get the message saying “Fatal disk error.” That’s what’s happened to your machine. The records are gone. There’s no putting them back.’
Isobel stared at me, conscience-stricken, appalled and distressed. ‘You did tell us to make back-up floppy disks, I know you did. You kept on telling us. I’m ever so sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘You should have insisted,’ Rose told me. ‘I mean you should have made us.’
‘You don’t even seem worried,’ Isobel said.
To the computer man I said, ‘Would the virus activate on back-up floppy disks?’
‘Pretty likely.’
‘But we’ve got hardly any,’ Isobel wailed.
We did, as it happened, have comprehensive back-up disks containing everything the two secretaries had entered up to and including the previous Thursday. I knew they’d found the daily back-up procedure a bit of a bore. I’d seen them leave it for days sometimes. I’d reminded both of them over and over to make copies and was aware they thought I nagged them unnecessarily. The computer seemed everlastingly reliable. In the end I’d taken to making daily back-ups myself on the terminal in my sitting-room, storing the disks in my safe. If you want a thing done properly, as my mother had been accustomed to say, do it yourself.
At that exact moment, though the copies existed, they couldn’t be reached owing to the axed state of the safe’s combinations.
I could have reassured them all about our records and normally would have done. Suspicion stopped me. Suspicion about I didn’t know what. But it was altogether too much of a coincidence for me that the computer should crash at that particular time.
‘You’re not alone,’ the computer man said. ‘Doctors, law firms, all sorts of businesses, have had their records wiped out. One woman lost a whole book she was writing. And it costs nothing to make back-ups.’
‘Oh dear.’ Isobel was near tears.
‘What exactly is a virus?’ Rose enquired miserably.
‘It’s a programme that tells the computer to jumble up or wipe out everything stored in it.’ He warmed to his subject. ‘There are at least three thousand viruses floating around. There’s Jerusalem II that activates every Friday the thirteenth, that’s a specially nasty one. It’s caused a lot of trouble, has that one.’
‘But what’s the point?’ I asked.
‘Vandalism,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Destruction and wrecking for its own sake.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘For instance, I could design a sweet little virus that would make all your accounts come out wrong. Nothing spectacular like Michelangelo, not a complete loss of everything, just enough to drive you mad. Just enough to make errors so that you’d be forever checking and adding and nothing would ever come out right.’ He loved the idea, one could see. ‘Once you’ve written a programme like that, you have to spread it. I mean, one computer can catch the virus from another, that’s the beauty of it. All you need is a floppy disk with the virus in it. Feed the disk into any computer and transfer the data on the disk into the computer — which is done all the time — and bingo, the computer then has the virus inside it, lying in wait.’
‘How do you stop it?’ I asked.
‘There are all sorts of expensive programmes nowadays for detecting and neutralising viruses. And a whole lot of people thinking up ways to invent viruses that can’t be got rid of. It’s a whole industry. Lovely. I mean, rotten.’
Viruses, I reflected, meant income, to him.
‘How do you find out if you have a virus?’ I asked.
‘The way to do it is to scan the info in any given computer. The disk I use to do that has more than two hundred of the commoner viruses on it. It will tell you if you’ve been infected by Michelangelo or Jerusalem II. If you’d called me last week, I could have done it.’
‘Last week we saw no need,’ I said. ‘And... um... if this Michelangelo thing activates only on March 6th, then obviously we didn’t have it on our computer last year on March 6th.’
Our expert parted with more information. ‘Michelangelo was invented some time after March 6th in 1991 and only works on IBM compatible machines like yours.’
‘That’s no comfort,’ I said.
‘Er... no. Still, I can clean up these machines for you and give you a virus-free set-up for the future. But you have to be careful what you feed into computers from the outside. Friends can lend you infected disks. And... do you have any other terminals?’
‘There’s one in my house,’ I said. ‘But someone’s vandalised it.’
The expert looked shocked. ‘You mean, a different virus?’
‘No, I don’t. I mean an axe.’
The physical smashing of a computer pained him, one could see. Internal malignant illnesses were his stock in trade. Axes came into malicious damage, he said.
‘Computer viruses are malicious damage, it seems to me,’ I said.
‘Yes, but it’s a game.’
‘Not if you’ve lost your life’s work,’ I pointed out.
‘If you don’t make back-ups, you’re a nutter.’
I agreed with him entirely about back-ups, but I didn’t think viruses a game. I thought them as wicked as chemical warfare. I’d heard of a computer virus that had wiped out a whole geological survey with the result that wells for water weren’t drilled in time and more than a thousand people in a desert region died. The author of that particular virus had been reported to be delighted with its effectiveness. Too bad about the dead.
I said, ‘I suppose there’s no way of telling whether this virus of ours was introduced into our system on purpose or by accident?’
He stared at me earnestly, hand busy through the hair.
‘It would be unfriendly to do it on purpose.’
‘Yes.’
‘Most viruses are spread by accident, like AIDS.’
‘How long can they lie dormant?’
‘You could have a virus quite a long time before it was triggered into life.’ His eyes held all the sad knowledge of his generation. ‘You have to take precautions.’
I told him I wished we’d known him sooner and mentioned the name of the firm we had dealt with in the past.
He laughed. ‘Half the computers they sold were awash with viruses. They used infected diagnostic disks themselves and they used to re-wrap vermin-ridden disks that people had returned to them in anger and sell them again to the great unsuspecting public. They vanished overnight because they knew March 6th would mean an army of furious customers suing their pants off. Even though March 6th was a Sunday, we’ve dozens of cases like yours to clean up this week. Not our own customers, but theirs.’