Memoirs of a Virus Programmer

Memoirs of a Virus Programmer, Pete Flies, Stonegarden.net Publishing, 2005

Living near Minneapolis, Johnny Pepper is a young software engineer who gets a job at the high-tech Beamer Corporation. He can't wait to do some actual software engineering, but is told to read manuals until the right project comes along. His office mate is Danny, a very cynical person who spends his days reading news items off the Internet to Johnny, despite Johnny's absolute disinterest, and in gabbing with a woman named Fillmore. Needless to say, Danny does very little actual work.

After three months of reading about Beamer's WebCutter software, Johnny gets to actual code writing, fixing bugs here, and plugging holes there. It gets to the point where Danny and Fillmore give their work to Johnny, so they can continue gabbing and not-working. Eventually, Johnny is given his own project, to be included in WebCutter's next release. He works on it day and night for 5 full months; just when he is ready to hand in the finished product, he is told that it won't be needed, after all.

Meantime, outside of Beamer, Johnny is dragged by his roommate to what turns out to be a Christian party. There, he meets Katya, an anarchist who works in the pharmaceutical business. They see each other for a while, but the relationship eventually fades away. It doesn't help when Katya finds Johnny in bed with a woman from across the street, who is separated from her husband.

Because of these things, Johnny decides to write the ultimate in viruses to affect WebCutter. He spends a lot of time on it, makes it look like it came from Danny's computer, and records the whole story to explain to Katya why he did it.

This is a really good satire on modern, high-tech office life. It's a pretty "quiet" story, but, for anyone who has ever spent their days looking at pages and pages of computer code, it's very much worth reading.