Technical Difficulties

I had the germ of this idea a long time ago, and it finally took Scalzi and Twitter to nudge it into storyhood. But don't blame him for my descent into cliché soup at the end.

Further inspiration came from a practical joke played by some geeks at my previous employer. Upon returning from a long vacation, one engineer found that his desktop computer at work would only run an arcade game emulator. He found the boot CD easily enough, and then the bootable flash drive plugged into a USB port in the back of the case, but it took much longer for him to find the second flash drive that had been hidden inside the case and wired directly to another USB port. It didn't help that he couldn't resist playing a few levels of the game every time it booted up...