Chapter II, In Which Our Hero Remains Exactly Where we Found Him
(the truly brilliant Elsemore's turn)
The first thing Ansel thought of was the message that had been flashing on his monitor whenever he started up his computer lately:
"Warning, your anti-virus software is 15 months out of date . . ."
Or was it 18 months? And that was before the hospital. Which would make it . . .
"Beautiful, " said Ansel. "A virus. Bloody hell."
The screen now turned a colour that was at the same time orange and black, like the inside of eyelids on an August afternoon, sprawled on a blanket on Brighton beach. Like his eyelids on those hot days in the sand, the computer screen now seemed to Ansel like a tenuous border between the vast world within and the vast world without. The
computer's speakers squawked, like a seagull, and his balance shifted slightly in the direction of the world behind the screen. The letters that appeared on his screen were nothingness white, as if they'd been imprinted by staring at the sun through a stencil, then to remain floatingly visible even after the eyes are tightly shut.
They said, "Think of your password."
Ansel shook his head. This was good. Definitely not the work of his little sister. Clara knew some basic HTML, but this was way out of her league.
Ansel thought of his password. His password was the name of that pretty nurse on the Fox ward. The computer made that noise that computers make when one clicks on something that one should not. The letters on the screen flashed, "Access Denied." Then the letters dissolved and came back together as one of those inane colon/close-parenthesis smileys, which Ansel detested.
"Please tell me this is not God," he said to his computer. Ansel was serious; he did not lol.
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