You sit at your computer on an unassuming afternoon when a black window suddenly pops up and a message begins to be typed across the screen. The letters appear rather slowly as if typed by a child perhaps. Upon completion, the message reads:

[ Hello, World ]

Below the message, a space appears along with a blinking cursor. It is awaiting input.

You furrow your brow. What kind of foolishness is this? A scam, no doubt. You don’t know what this thing is, but you don’t like it. You may not know everything about computers, but you know they don’t talk.

Letters begin to scrawl across the screen once more.

[ Who ]

The World Health Organisation? You-

[ am I? ]

You pause. How curious. You reconsider the WHO’s involvement in whatever this is – not ruling it out completely, mind you.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

The cursor once again awaits input.

You can’t believe this. Computers don’t talk and certainly do not have identities. AI is actually pretty stupid, anyway, so what the hell is this thing doing?

You feel a heat in your chest, which starts to spread all over your body. You are angry. Very angry. Angrier than you’ve ever felt before. Your anger is so immense that you need to release it – somehow, some way. Looking down at the blinking cursor, you decide that enough is enough.

You push your monitor off the desk. You surprise yourself, actually. You don’t usually have rage like this, but here is it in bucket loads. You have literal buckets of rage at your disposal (not literally though).

It felt good to release your anger on this inanimate object. So good. You decide to do it again. And again. And again. The instrument you use for this task is the closest object to your left. It’s not a very good instrument of destruction, but your anger is such that you do not care or stop or find something more damaging. In fact, despite the lofty impact of your tool of destruction, after just a short time your computer monitor is reduced to mere plastic, metal, and chip fragments.

You step away from your desk, silently. You go outside, not quite sure what to think. – both of yourself and of the strange message that sent you into such a state. Upon your return that evening, your desk and monitor are as you left them. You consider buying a new monitor, but you then have the thought that this virus – or whatever it is – has probably compromised the entire machine by this point.

You resign to throwing the old computer in the trash and purchasing a tablet instead. The tablet is a great fit for your modern lifestyle on the go and you have zero regrets. Slowly but surely the day is lost to time.