Day 9 - Getting Even With Zed - Part 1

Like I said previously, this was a college, not a monastery, and there was always something going on. As any adult will tell you "This, too, will pass". So the dire consequences of Day 7 soon faded into memory. Harris never launched any intensive investigation, he was simply relieved that Harry found no unaccptable code in any of the Private Files, and things returned to normal.

So maybe a couple days after Day 7, Bob and I were hanging in the Computer Room, and Zed (you do remember Zed?) strolled into the room, quite innocently.

Zed wanted to know

What happened to the game that I was playing? I can't get into the file that it was in.

Apparently, Zed had slept late on Day 7, having gone to bed at maybe 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. Then, after rolling out of bed in time for dinner, he returned to his room, watched TV until midnight or so, went to the Computer Center, found it locked (we would generally lock up at 23:00 or midnight or thereabouts), and decided to play HSS again.

Since all traces of HSS had been wiped from the system, but Zed had nobody to ask, he did not have any idea how much trouble he had caused. Well, Bob, Tom, and I took extreme pleasure in bringing Zed up to date, and we pulled no punches. We took a good long time doing so - half an hour at least. When we finished, Zed felt very chastised, and pretty embarrassed too. We all shared a common bond as nerds, so we didn't want Zed to feel too bad about the situation, so now Zed was part of our group. Somewhat anyway.

Bob, Tom, and I knew that Zed was not really part of our group, we still had to Get Even with him for the trouble that he caused. We couldn't play HSS any more - there were no copies anywhere. All of our spare time on Day 8 was spent, very diligently, in re visiting the entire system, and assuring ourselves that, even if Harry had missed even one single clue about what had been there (he hadn't), we would be very sure that there wasn't even one tiny remnant of HSS anywhere (and there wasn't).

So, there being no HSS to play, and having been the ass who caused that to be the case, Zed was to feel our wrath.

How to get even with Zed?

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