The Virus: the spy thriller I wrote at fifteen
At fifteen I posted a 5,800-word techno-thriller to my forum in one sitting. It has island bases, exploding elevators, and a hero who keeps blowing up elevators just to find out if they will.
Sometime in early 2004 I sat down at the forum I ran, DragonSiblings, and posted a 5,800-word spy thriller in a single go. I called it The Virus, and I signed it “by Todd.” I was fifteen. I have it back, word for word, and I am happy to report it is exactly as good as that setup makes it sound.
Here is the opening:
It was about 11:30 at night and I was enjoying my vacation from my job. When the phone rang! “Hello.”
On the line is a good friend of mine, a fellow Computer Science and Programming major, naturally, calling at 11:30 at night with a national emergency.
So already, at fifteen, I have a job, a vacation from that job, a college major, and a friend who calls in the middle of the night with a mission. The emergency is a disk holding a virus that will crash every computer on Earth for 24 hours. The bad guys are called the Equators, “because there base is located under the Equator in the Samoa Islands.” I want you to know that the geography gets worse from there and I do not care.
The plot, such as it is
The two of us fly out, take a boat to an island that is one solid building with “no sand, not even a palm tree,” and get to work the only way I knew how at fifteen: we open our laptops and hack the building. Every problem in this story is solved by opening a laptop and hacking something. Locked elevator? Hack it. Security grid with infrared beams? Hack it. I was a kid who had just discovered that computers could do anything, and it shows on every page.
My favorite thing about the story is the elevators. I blow up roughly three of them. The best one is the one I destroy on purpose:
I want to test to see if it would blow up and it did.
That is the whole sentence. No reason, no plan, just a teenage author who needed something to explode in the next paragraph and reached for the nearest elevator.
There is a hostage named Jared who built the virus and now regrets it. There is a girlfriend, Nikki, who turns out to be the one person alive who can crack the security system, which is convenient. There is a real gun handed over at a dramatic moment to replace the tranquilizer one. And then, after all the explosions, the romance gets resolved with the speed of a kid who wanted to wrap up the chapter:
One year later Nikki and I got married.
That is it. That is the entire love story. Mission, marriage, next scene.
The part where it never ends
What I love most, reading it now, is that I clearly could not stop. Chapter one ends, and instead of a clean finish there is a creepy phone call from Jared to an unknown person, setting up a sequel. Chapter two is a whole second mission to a frozen island in the Siberian sea. Chapter three opens with me, years later, suddenly realizing the threat was never really over, panic filling my body for no reason the plot has earned yet. And then it just stops. There is no chapter four. Fifteen-year-old me left himself on a cliffhanger and never came back for it.
The forum reaction is its own little time capsule. The thread has exactly two replies from me after the story. The first, posted a week later, is “lol.” The second is “Thanks.” I was my own audience and my own polite acknowledgement of that audience.
I am not going to pretend this is good. The tenses wander, the hero is named both “I” and “Jason” depending on the paragraph, and the geography is a crime. But I also would not change a word of it. It is a kid who loved computers and loved stories and saw no reason those were two different things, typing as fast as the ideas came. That kid was right about more than the geography.