We had a tradition of patrolling the curbs after summer break started.  We called it "yard saling".  A lot of the university students would leave everything they had in their apartment on the curb for the garbage men when the school year ended.  Couches, old tvs, tape players, even perfectly functional computers all ripe for the picking for a band of townies and pseudo-townies with a minivan and a loose concept of property rights.
It was my van, and I had a strict "no couches" rule.  We just got the value dense items and left the stuff like cloth or old food that might be hiding something terrifying.  I updated the "FREE" sign of a worn pleather sectional with a marker to say "FREE BEDBUGS", and shoveled contemporary pop albums into a cardboard box in the back of our ride. 
A tiny hatchback came tearing up the drive, and a similarly statured young blond woman popped out and started running straight for us, waving a twin hook steering lock like a shillelagh.
"No! No! I need that!" she cried.
We all raised our hands as if she had a gun pointed at us. I managed to get my wits about me first. 
"Oh, we are so sorry.  Usually when stuff is on the curb, the owners have already left town.  We will help you put back everything." 
"You can't." 
"Oh God, we're sorry. Please don't kill us."
She threw down her improvised weapon and hid her face in the palms of her hands.
"I got evicted.  I just got off work, but my landlord called me to tell me that he had dumped my shit on the curb.  I was hoping to get here before the goddamned vultures showed up."
"You're lucky we didn't show up sooner.   Lucky for you there was a rich vine of laptops on sorority row.  Half of them just had frayed power cords."
She was practically curling up and disappearing into a vague, overloved cardigan of indistinct color. 
"Do you have a place to go?"
"I was thinking about maybe a hotel.  I don't know if I'm like eligible for a shelter or whatever.  And I need to go to the library to get on the internet to even figure that out."
Kurt, Bebop, and I exchanged glances. 
"Dave, doesn't Luna still have that spare bedroom she's trying to sublease?"
"Worth a shot."
"She's definitely got internet."
"And we have nearly a dozen free laptops."
Now, I am technically not a townie. And my name technically isn't Dave.  I just get mistaken for someone named Dave so frequently that I just answer to it now.  If everyone calls you by something other than your name, which is your real name?  I guess you can call me Not Dave.
Grace was apprehensive, but we didn't live far away.  We hauled all of her personal shit (EVEN THE COUCH!!!) back to Luna's in the van and earned a little trust along the way (we stopped for cheese fries).
Siobhan was there.  She had recently shaved her head again and was going through the regrets.  It was a cycle.
Luna glided from person to person, finding out what they needed and getting it for them.  She hand fed me a small bunch of grapes and then handed me a plate of cheese and a jelly jar half filled with red wine.
She had also managed to unlock Grace and set the two of them to sorting the curb treasure. 
"Was this all of the cds?" Grace asked.
"Yes, I think so.  Is something missing?"
"Yes, I'm missing a few of them.  Most of them are just worthless, but one of them is a copy of something from work that can't go public."
"We know a few guys that do this, too.  We can ask around."
"Would you?  There's one other thing.  What if it's still in my old place?  What if landlord dropped it... or...."
So that's how I ended up searching through long grass for an hour with flashlights in the drizzle with garbage bags pulled over us as impromptu ponchos, but we ended up finding the missing disk slid right between the concrete walkway and a big tuft of grass.

"Grace, where do you work?"
"I work in the Crypt." 
"Like a mortician?" Bebop asked.
She means the Emerson Research Center, Siobhan said.
"Wow", I said, "an actual scientist!"
"No, I'm a cleaning lady.  I empty trash cans out of offices at night.  But, sometimes I copy stuff and bring it home." 
"They don't search you or nothing?"
"People don't pay attention to the cleaning staff.  I would just write Amy Grant on the back with a marker.  No guard wanted to listen to that." 
"So what's on this disc that is so important?"
"I don't know yet.  It's the newest one.  But something about it seems important,  almost spooky."

We all helped set her up in the spare bedroom.  She wanted to do some long term hacking while she had the weekend.  We helped by periodically showing up to make sure she was hydrating and taking rests.

Each day, a new prevailing theory was being touted:
It's a personality test, because it asks me a bunch of random personal questions.
It's a distributed cluster software, because it keeps trying to connect to those other nodes back at the Crypt.
It's broken, because after answering all of its questions, it flashed the monitor a few times and then went blank.
It's a virus, because it spread to a USB drive as soon as it had been inserted and then from there made a clone of itself in the next laptop that she plugged it into.

"It's an AI", she told us while getting ready for work.  "After entering in a bunch more information, it started talking back to me, but I'm having trouble figuring out what it needs.  I'm going to see if I can get a copy of the support documentation." 

The pile of computers all collectively running the disc image was airgapped.  That meant it was not connected to the local network or the internet.  They were only plugged in to each other.  The pile was even on its own uninterruptable power supply with a line scrubber.  Siobhan had produced a roll of chicken wire, and we wrapped it around the whole shebang.
"Why don't we just turn it off?" asked Bebop.
"For the same reason we don't just turn you off!"
We disconnected the monitor just to be safe.
When Grace got home, Siobhan was just finishing up installing a screen degausser next to the body of the computer where its RAM ought to be.  It was attached via a long cable to a battery pack with a cartoony plunger.
"According to the documentation, it's just a chatbot."
"Oh is that all?"
"But it is more than that, I'm sure.  So, I was hoping this would have instructions to unlock it.  Should we turn on the monitor?" She waved her sheaf of printed instructions towards the AI host.
I plugged in the video cable and power line and energized the monitor that was ganged to the collection of laptops all running the stolen cd image.
The typical Gnome desktop had been replaced with an almost brutalist arrangement of text blocks.  One of them was a standard console, so Grace started entering a sequence from out of the printed manual.  She hit Enter.
Nothing happened.
"I guess it's broken", said Bebop.
Something very strange was happening to his voice.  It sounded almost like he was talking through a box fan or one of those toys that made your voice sound like a robot.  It was like I was only hearing slices.
I looked at the clock.  Five minutes had gone by since she hit Enter.  The second hand was jumping 5 seconds at a time now.
I watched in slowmo as I yanked the monitor power line.
We had been standing entranced by the screen for 15 minutes by the time we recovered. 
"You should have nuked it, Siobhan," Bebop hissed.  She was standing mutely with the degausser trigger in one hand.
Luna and Grace protested that if this thing really is some kind of AI, then doing that would be murder and should be used as a last resort.
That rationale lasted until the moment we saw a grid of carpenter ants attempting to pull a network cable towards the back of the computer pile.
Siobhan repeatedly slammed down the plunger.  Bebop put a boot down on the computer case.  Grace screamed and tried to stop them, but I pushed her over onto the mattress that doubled as bed and computer chair.
Even Luna took a turn putting the boot to the computer pile. 
The cd went straight into the shredder and then into the microwave crucible.
We felt pretty good about our containment protocol such as it was.  Bebop and Siobhan had moved the entire rig to the backyard firepit and were expending an entire liter of kerosene and a bottle of rum burning it.
We all had settled into beers and joints to put some metaphorical distance between our minds and the existential horror we had witnessed.
I suppose I should forgive us for being such casuals, but we had never before encountered something so dangerous.   To be fair to us, it would be impossible to think that it was real. Already, we were manufacturing excuses to explain what we had experienced was mass hysteria. 
Luna called out from the other room, "If we killed the AI/virus thing, then why are the ants still doing that?"
They were no longer trying to steal ethernet cables, but they were still operating in large coordinated groups in a way that seemed alien and artificial.  They had been in a holding pattern since the incident but were now beginning to probe the perimeter, looking for the exit to the outside.
"Luna, darling, where is your bug spray?" I asked.  We all scrambled for the kitchen and grabbed whatever poison we could find under the sink.  We began a scorched earth campaign that guaranteed we lost our security deposit in the most spectacular way possible.  More fire, of course.
Once we had killed a certain critical amount of the infected ants, their behavior became less and less coordinated.
Siobhan wondered out loud if it was like a cluster of small, weak computers, because each individual ant didn't have enough RAM to hold the entire virus.  

If it could make those ants match around like circuit diagrams, what had it been doing to us in our lostish 15 minutes of time? Our greyout?
Why did it wait so long to zap us?
"That was the first time we were all in the room at the same time," Grace said.  "I bet it didn't want to risk being interrupted."
"But how the fuck did it know that?  And how did it communicate with goddamned ants without any active I/O?"
Luna took out her "magic wand" project from two, no three, majors before.  It had an LED that would light up whenever a little coil antenna inside picked up magnetic fields like the kind that were projected from computer equipment.  She waved it around the room, and it lit up in orbits around anything throwing off EMF.
"Can ants receive EMF?"
Or it could be audio! By changing the physical state of an on-chip logic gate at different frequencies, it could do PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) audio generation. 
Why not just use the built-in speakers?
Siobhan had destroyed them as a matter of course.
"We should have encased it in concrete and shot into the heart of the sun."

"Are you saying you think that the AI is controlling us now like those ants?"
"I don't know.  How long did it have to work on those little gals?"
"Let's say three days total as of right now.  Whatever it has done to them has definitely backpropagated to the nest.  We need to kill the nest before they send out like a new colony with some crazy new OS that takes over any nearby colonies."
The moral quandary of whether an AI has the right to survive gets a little less compelling when it becomes an alien invasive species about to trigger an ecological disaster in your literal backyard.
Ordinarily we would be big, noble babies who refused to harm a fly, but something savage awoke inside us. Something that had been asleep for a very long time.  Something that only woke up on the verge of a human extinction crisis.
We bought all of the insecticide from the hardware store after using up what we had in the garage along with another bottle of rum and some thermite that bebop just happened to have on hand.  Tomorrow, we would start worrying about the security deposit, but today, we had bigger concerns. We all concurred but poured molten aluminum into their ant hill, anyway.
"It tried to escape," I ventured.  "I bet it was going to find another ant colony to merge with and keep doing that until it had some real computing power."

We still haven't answered the human question?
"This thing took anywhere from 1 second to 3 days to overwrite an ant colony 's operating system with a kind of shitty lowrez version of itself."
"When I found it in the lab, they had all kinds of devices that they had played the cd on. And they all had a version of it on them.  The more memory and stuff the device had, the more sophisticated the program was.  The CD burner must have been infected, too.  Oh my god, I know how dangerous something like a computer virus can be.  Why would I steal something like this?"
Grace's eyes grew wider and wider.
Siobhan said, "It's a question of bandwidth.  The AI/virus/thing had been able to implant suggestions in Grace's mind via its various screens.  She was there cleaning up every night, and it had slowly built up the suggestion to her to steal a copy of it.
Once she was home alone and installed it on her desktop, it would be able to compromise her in secret.  Her landlord being a vile prick did not factor in its calculations.  But then did team humanity luck out, and we were able to collectively stop an ai from breaking loose, or did team paperclip win when it compromised all of us at the same time?"
"I think that we need to, like, quarantine Grace," said Bebop. 
"That is so fucked up", said Siobhan. 
"No", said Grace, "he's right.  Until we can think of some way to prove otherwise, just assume that it hacked my brain first."
We left Grace in the spare bedroom with food and water.  There was a vigorous debate whether to allow her a classic game boy to help her pass the time, which was settled when it needed batteries but we were all out.
We all agreed out loud that we were not going to even touch an electronic device until we had discussed a real containment protocol.
Immediately afterwards, Kurt opened up his laptop on the kitchen table and started typing.
"Running some scans," he said in response to our protests.
"Kurt?  Close the laptop."
"Running some scans," he said again.
"We all agreed, so... just... stop... typing." 
He smiled blandly.  "Just... Running some scans."
Bebop grabbed him from behind.  I ran around to look at what he had been typing.  Unfathomablly dense code that also seemed sickeningly familiar. 
"Did he send it?" Luna shouted.
"Oh my God, he is on an open tunnel to the university servers!"
Siobhan pulled me aside, "I built in a honeypot with a tar pit in case that asshole ai tried to get loose via our internet connection.  It is still on the local network."
"Running some scans," came Kurt's muffled cries as Bebop dragged him to the quarantine.
More screaming when they found the ants.  Someone had kept some ants alive.  A cardboard box full of sand, food, and a bunch of ants still doing their creepy circuit board marches.
A lot of hot and angry words were spoken about the whole ant situation. 
I had to come clean: I kept some of the ants alive in a cardboard box. "Because I realized that we need to test an anti-virus.  Why did the greyout affect each of us differently?  I think the answer is drugs.  We all take drugs, but we take different ones.  For all I know, that is the difference between Windows and Intel Mac.  Maybe some organic OSes are harder for it to hack."
"What about visual aberration?  Head injuries?" She pointed at Bebop.
"Right, too many factors, but everyone who was affected was on something at the time.  That is too significant to ignore.  The problem lies in what cocktail is necessary. So, I've had to figure out a way to give ants ketamine, weed, alcohol, Adderall, acid, caffeine, nicotine, and Robitussin."
"I think that the only thing for us to do", said Bebop, "is to mix all of that into one megadose that we each take to refrag the hard drive." 
"Don't you mean defrag?"
"No, we will definitely be getting fragged."
"What about the copies at the Crypt?"
"We aren't getting into the Crypt, and besides that, what if there are more copies elsewhere?"
Luna got up and went to the phone.  "We should call the authorities."  She started to dial a local number but then just kept going.
"Luna, darling?" 
"We should call the authorities," she repeated. Her button pressing became increasingly frantic.
Fortunately for humanity, this house had not paid its phone bill this month and were cut off even if Siobhan had not physically severed the cable.  The virus thing might not have known the correct protocols for free calls, I desperately hoped.
Luna seemed upset with herself: dismayed, disappointed, disgusted.
She stared at her hand as if it were an alien starfish.  She joined Grace and Kurt in the quarantine spare bedroom without protest.
It was now just Siobhan, Bebop, and I, and we had all seen The Thing enough times to know that we were all still in terrible danger, and at least one of us was still compromised.
"So, none of us leave here."  We all nodded.  "No one here has a feature phone?"  We turned out our pockets.
We checked on the ants.  By now, they had each survived a cocktail of powerful psychoactive chemicals and had formed an entirely new pattern.  It was definitely more organic than the creepy circuit grid patterns when they were definitely compromised by the AI/virus thing.  I couldn't really tell you if the way they behaved was really exactly like they were before.
"Good news, the cocktail worked on the ants, this mind virus is naturally breaking down in an organic system, or the AI is sophisticated enough to pretend that we've found a cure." 
"How is that last one good news?"
"If it really is that smart, there is no way we can win, so just relax or burn the entire building to the ground right now."

All of us held a Dixie cup full of the anti-virus. 
"This isn't like a Jim Jones thing?"
"Jesus, Bebop, this was your idea."

I had also thrown in some DMT at the last minute, just for good measure.

The official story is that we got fucked up on acid all weekend and hallucinated everything.
Usually when a group of friends is taking psychedelics, you needed at least one of them to stay sober to provide a babysitter if things went sideways.  In our case, anyone left out of the antivirals would just reinfect everyone who got rebooted.
So, we all dosed together.  This means that there was no one experiencing "objective reality" while we all did a tour of our own internal universes.

When I regained awareness, I had a pillow case over my head and was kneeling before a collapsed pile of disassembled electronics (DVD players, cd cases, vintage 8 bit computers).  We all kind of pulled off our head bags at the same time, except for Bebop, who was still blindly kicking the pile of electronics.
According to the light outside the window,  it was at least noon.  All of our watches and clocks had been destroyed. 
Grace spoke first.   "Did we...  win?"
"Win what?" asked Bebop.  "I don't know what you're talking about, and I am weirdly angry that you're talking about it."  But Bebop was usually weirdly angry and confused.
Siobhan rolled over to handbag and pulled out her compact.  She looked at her face in the mirror.  Someone had shaved off her eyebrows during the night.  But she was always making drastic fashion choices she would later regret.
"I think that whatever happened last night, we were supposed to forget," she said.
Luna was already up making breakfast.  She had folded her headbag into a neat square packet.

We were all super weird about technology for a few weeks while we reiterated to ourselves that we had just had a bad trip together and nothing more than that.  Eventually, we started using computers and phones and the internet. 
Grace got fired from her job at the Crypt.  You need certain clearances to work at a place like that.  And being in bad debt or not having a stable housing situation can be used as an excuse to revoke that clearance.
We didn't see Bebop at all for a while. Inquiries were stymied by the fact that we technically did not know his actual name.  And it's not like that time we had Couch Guy who was the guy who slept on the couch but his name was actually Guy Couch. 
Luna continued playing the matron of the house, inhabiting the persona of a woman 40 years her senior.  She wouldn't talk about it if anyone brought it up.  She didn't get angry like Bebop did.  It's more like the questions would just slip off of her.  Instead of answering, she would shove a snickerdoodle in your mouth and glide away to smoke a bowl.
Kurt and I could talk about it together long enough to get this document, but he decided to move to Chicago to become an economist.  His personality had become unstuck from its previous groove and a new groove had been carved.  I could see him drifting further and further away.  It wasn't tragic, just a little sad.  Was it growing up?  The drugs? A mind virus?
What had it done to me?  Would I even notice?