Jib Kidder - "Windowdipper"

Danny said, "Don't worry, Mom. Your computer is just a computer. It's safe to go on the internet. It's not going to learn 'artificial intelligence.'"

I told him I had heard about it on 60 Minutes.

He said I must have heard wrong.

So I listened to Danny. Of course I listened to Danny. We paid all that money for him to know the computer stuff. I plugged the telephone wire into the back of my Dell and "surfed the web". Carrie says she doesn't have time for it - she laughs and asks if I'm surfing for porno, - but there's lots of good stuff. Danny helped and I figured it out pretty fast. I looked up Jodie Foster on WikiPedia, and found a good cruller recipe at All-Recipes and saw great clips of Johnny Depp on You-Tube. I "surfed" all around. You can get really lost on there.

Then one day, Danny got on there to fix something or other, or to check something or other, and he said, "Uh oh."

And I said, "What is it?"

And he said, "What's this?" He pointed at some squiggly on the screen.

"An icon," I said.

"What program is it for? I can't click on it."

"I don't know," I said. "It's been there for as long as I can remember."

Under the icon it said WINDOWDIPPER.

"I think it's a virus," he said.

This made me nervous but not too nervous, because Danny knows all about this stuff. He ran some programs. They took forever. I started making dinner. Then I heard screams and yells and I dropped the casserole and went running into the den. Danny was flat on his back, the office-chair knocked right over.

"What happened?" I asked. His nose was bleeding.

"The PC gave me a karate chop," he said.

"Oh," I said. I looked at the computer. It looked fine.

I helped Danny to his feet. He wiped his nose with his sleeve. "Stop that," I said. I went to get him some tissues. While I was in the bathroom there was another yelp. I trotted right back. Danny was on the floor and the computer was playing some rap stuff. Really loud. Clipped and repeated.

"Motherfucker!" Danny yelled.

"Danny!" I said.

The computer said, "Yeah!" in a voice like dolphinsplash.

"It karate-chopped me again!" he said. "How the hell does a computer karate-chop?"

The computer stopped rapping for a sec and instead it gurgled. It showed a YouTube clip of Captain Picard on Star Trek. It showed a clip of John McCain laughing all crazy, clapping his hands like a seal. It showed a clip of Michael Jordan doing a slam dunk. Then it crashed.

Danny hit ctrl-alt-delete. We waited.

[All on Yall, Jib Kidder's delicious & dented album of, uh, gamelan crunk and betamax glitch, is out now.]