The Story

"It all started when we discovered a really cool MUD," she says. "It was gorgeous. We all wasted far too much time playing; it was worse than any MUD ever before. We didn't do problem sets. We didn't study for exams. One by one, we started failing our classes.

"One day, while playing, one of our friends didn't come back. He never surfaced out of the game. As far as I know, he's still in some psychiatric ward somewhere, dreaming of playing.

"We started getting suspicious. We tracked down the creators of the MUD. One of us cracked into their databases and destroyed their MUD. But something must have caught him, because he never came out again. But he left this cryptic message: `It's spreading!'

"Then, just recently, we found out about True Cyberspace, the most realistic cyberMUD yet. We found this entry point, the so-called MIT Portal, which we thought was the first and only doorway. We cracked our way in. We've put them behind schedule for opening the virtual MIT to the public. Also, we tried to close off the Portal itself, but it didn't work, so we tried to ruin the world. The worst we could do was deform the terrain a bit and kill off a player's character to kick him out. So all we could do were things like poisoning the food, changing a field into a carpet, adding graffiti warnings, and so on. We hoped this would act as a deterrent, to keep players from coming back.

She looks at you with a hint of desperation.

"Obviously," she says, "we've failed."

You refrain from mentioning that turning a sunset into a lightbulb would hardly scare anyone off....