Friday carried a strange pressure, subtle but constant, like the air before a storm that hadn't decided whether to break. Lucian moved through the morning with practiced normalcy, responding when spoken to, opening his locker, closing it, blending. The USB drive sat in his pocket, light and insignificant in weight, heavy in implication. He had tested the worm thoroughly the night before on his own machine. It behaved exactly as designed within a controlled environment. It mapped local devices, replicated within defined parameters, reported clean execution logs. It obeyed
structure. It obeyed him.
High School, Computer Science Lab
The lab hummed with idle machines and fluorescent lights. Lucian entered with the rest of the class, choosing his usual seat without hesitation. Adam dropped beside him, already mid-sentence about weekend plans. Lucian nodded at appropriate intervals, his eyes occasionally flicking toward the teacher's desk. He did not rush. The worm required proximity, not spectacle.
The lesson focused on server-client architecture. Diagrams filled the projector screen central nodes, distributed terminals, authentication layers. Lucian watched the arrows move between boxes, understanding far more than the curriculum required. He imagined his code threading through similar diagrams.
When the bell rang, chairs scraped loudly against tile. Students packed up quickly. Lucian zipped his bag halfway and waited. He tracked the room without turning his head too much. Three students remained. Then two. The teacher stepped outside to speak with someone in the hallway.
Lucian reached into his pocket.
The USB slid into the front port smoothly. A soft system chime acknowledged it. He navigated quickly, opening a folder labeled with a mundane title "practice_notes." Inside, a script disguised as a text file executed a background process the moment it was accessed. A command window blinked for less than a second. That was enough. The worm initialized, scanning the local network for adjacent devices.
It was designed to spread laterally across similar workstations first. It would escalate gradually, probing permissions, exploiting weak authentication loops. It was never meant to challenge enterprise-grade infrastructure head-on. It was exploratory, not destructive.
Lucian counted to five under his breath, then safely ejected the USB. He shut down the machine, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and walked out with steady steps.
In the hallway, Adam caught up to him. "You're weirdly quiet today," Adam said.
"Just tired," Lucian replied. His heart rate suggested otherwise.
They moved toward the stairwell when the lights flickered once overhead. No one reacted at first. Fluorescents did that sometimes.
They flickered again.
Then everything went dark.
Not just lights. The ambient hum of ventilation systems cut off mid-cycle. Classroom doors opened as teachers looked out, confused. The emergency lighting failed to engage. The silence felt immediate and unnatural, as though the building had exhaled and forgotten how to inhale again.
A ripple of noise moved through the corridor. Phones lit up briefly, then several lost connection to the internal Wi-Fi. Somewhere down the hall, a printer beeped erratically before dying.
Lucian stopped walking.
This wasn't consistent with a simple power outage. The grid outside remained intact; sunlight filtered through windows unaffected. The failure was internal, systemic. Something had forced the network to shut itself down.
His mind raced backward through his code. The worm's replication loop was adaptive, it increased propagation speed when encountering resistance. On his home network, resistance meant a firewall rule or a single locked directory. In that case, the worm would spawn additional threads to attempt parallel access points. It was efficient in small environments.
But the school servers weren't small. They were layered. Mirrored. Automated detection systems constantly scanned for anomalies. If the worm hit a detection barrier and interpreted it as a node rather than a stop signal, its replication multiplier would spike aggressively. The server, attempting quarantine, would allocate additional memory to isolate the threat. The worm, detecting new memory allocation, would treat it as expansion territory.
Feedback loop.
The server load would climb rapidly. Automated fail-safes might initiate protective shutdown to prevent hardware damage. In extreme cases, corrupted system states could trigger restoration protocols that wiped volatile memory and, if misconfigured, reformatted partitions to ensure no persistent malware remained.
It wouldn't look like sabotage.
It would look like catastrophic overload.
Adam glanced at him. "Did you hear that?"
Lucian realized his jaw was clenched. He forced it to relax. "Probably just a breaker," he said, though the explanation sounded hollow even to him.
Faculty began ushering students toward exits once it became clear nothing was rebooting. Lucian walked quickly out of the building, each step growing faster once he cleared the gates. By the time he turned onto his street, he was running.
His bedroom door shut behind him with a sharp click.
He didn't sit down. He didn't check his laptop for updates, logs, or confirmation.
He went straight to the wall above his desk.
Sticky notes came down in handfuls—network diagrams, shorthand variables, IP ranges scribbled in tight ink. He tore them free methodically, dropping them into a trash bag. No sorting. No rereading.
He powered on his laptop only to enter recovery mode. Full format. Not quick erase complete overwrite. He selected every partition. When prompted, he confirmed without hesitation. While it processed, he pulled out his external storage drives and queued them for the same treatment. He wiped browser caches, reset saved credentials, cleared development environments. The desktop tower followed, its drives reformatted from boot-level tools.
He did not search for what the worm had done. He did not try to measure damage.
He erased.
Sweat gathered along his spine despite the cool room. He kept replaying the lab scene in his mind. Had anyone looked back? Had a camera angle captured the USB insertion? Even if it had, students used flash drives daily. That alone proved nothing.
Metadata.
The thought came suddenly.
He had focused on propagation efficiency. On recursion depth. On adaptive replication logic. But had he stripped development environment identifiers? Many compilers embedded machine names into build paths automatically. If the worm retained original source strings, any forensic recovery might reveal them.
He stopped moving for half a second.
Then he resumed wiping everything.
By Sunday, the school announced extended closure due to "critical system failure." Lucian read the email once, then deleted it. Monday passed. Tuesday passed. No knock at the door. No official call. His parents complained about inconvenience, unaware of the gravity beneath it.
Four days,
Lucian began to believe the overload had been attributed to outdated infrastructure. Schools often delayed upgrades. Maybe administrators blamed internal misconfiguration. Maybe the worm had self-corrupted beyond traceable form.
He repeated it silently: There's no evidence.
Wednesday evening, sirens broke the quiet.
Red and blue lights painted fractured patterns across his bedroom ceiling. The knock was firm, not aggressive. His mother answered. Voices murmured in the hallway. An officer asked for Lucian by name.
The interrogation room felt colder than expected. Metal table. Two chairs. A pane of one-sided glass. Lucian sat with his hands clasped tightly together, staring at the surface of the table.
A local detective entered first, tone conversational. Questions were simple: computer use habits, presence in lab Friday afternoon, knowledge of the outage. Lucian kept his eyes down.
"I didn't do anything," he said, the words catching unevenly.
The door opened again. A man in a dark suit stepped in, composed, posture straight. He introduced himself as assisting due to the scale of the digital breach. He did not raise his voice.
"We've recovered partial system logs," the suited man said calmly. He placed several printed pages on the table. "The malware retained original development paths. Multiple infected machines recorded a consistent source identifier before shutdown. That identifier corresponds to a device name registered to you."
Lucian's fingers tightened.
"Additionally," the man continued, "the worm's source code was not obfuscated. It replicated faster than it masked itself. When the server initiated quarantine protocols, it captured fragments of the payload in memory snapshots before formatting sequences began. Those fragments included compiler metadata."
Lucian's breathing became shallow.
The detective leaned back slightly. "We're not asking how clever it was," he said. "We're asking why you did it."
Lucian stared at the table. He could see the flaw now with painful clarity. In optimizing spread speed, he had deprioritized concealment. The worm had been elegant in movement but careless in origin hygiene. He had assumed scale without understanding defensive depth.
"I didn't think it would…" His voice trembled. "I just wanted to test it."
The suited man watched him carefully. "You built something capable of self-amplification inside a network you didn't fully map. That's not testing. That's deployment."
Silence pressed into the room.
The detective slid a pen toward him. "If you want to explain it in your own words, this is your chance."
Lucian's composure fractured. Tears blurred the printed code in front of him. "I couldn't stop," he admitted, voice breaking. "I knew I should. I just needed to see if it would work."
The suited man's expression did not harden, but it did not soften either.
"And now you've seen," he said quietly.
Lucian nodded once, shoulders shaking.
The pen hovered over the paper as the weight of what he had built—and what it had done—settled fully for the first time. He had wanted control over a system.
Instead, he had triggered one far larger than himself.
The room remained silent except for his uneven breathing as he began to write.
To be continued~