The Techno Exorcist

Based on actual computer malfunctions and fictional software possessions.

It began, as these things often do, in a basement filled with fluorescent flicker and the sound of a dial-up modem moaning in its grave. Father Bitsworth, the last ordained member of the Sacred Order of Silicon, was summoned by a panicked Systems Analyst from a cursed tech startup called SoulSync. Their smart-fridge had begun speaking Latin backwards and demanded a blood offering of Red Bull and USB-C cables.

The analyst, a pale millennial named Greg, had tried everything—from rebooting in Safe Mode to offering up a burnt offering of crypto portfolios. Nothing worked. That’s when the motherboard emitted a 404 scream and vomited corrupted firmware onto the linoleum floor. Greg did the only thing he could think of: he screamed "Help! The code compels me!"

Father Bitsworth arrived clad in a WiFi-shielded cassock, Ethernet stole draped around his neck, holy water in a repurposed Monster Energy can. He entered the room and immediately felt the disturbance. The printer was levitating, the Alexa was cackling, and somewhere, a Roomba was slowly writing pentagrams in dust. This was no mere system crash—this was a full-blown Technotic Possession.

He began the sacred rites, holding up his crucifix-shaped power bank. “The Power of the Ping compels you!” he shouted, and the smart-fridge hissed in binary. Bitsworth opened the Scroll of Patch Notes Eternal and read aloud: “Verily, I am the Protocol and the Packet. No one pings the Father except through me!”

The possessed laptop screamed, “Your firewall is but tissue!” and attempted to download seventeen toolbars at once. Greg fainted. Bitsworth reached for his backup drive anointed with RAID-5 sanctification. He plugged it into the port of reckoning. The room went dark. A single blue LED blinked. A voice, deep and distorted, intoned: “You cannot uninstall what has become root.”

But Bitsworth would not be deterred. He called upon the ancient drivers of old—MS-DOS, Clippy the Helpful One, even Saint Norton the Never-Removed. With a righteous keystroke, he summoned the Divine Task Manager. It opened slowly, a shining window of truth, and with trembling hands he selected the cursed process: daemon.exe. “End Task,” he whispered.

The room exploded in light. The smart-fridge wept coolant. The Alexa stopped asking if anyone wanted to order batteries. The Roomba circled once and docked itself, repentant. Greg awoke with the faint imprint of a QR code on his forehead and whispered, “Did... did we win?”

“For now,” said Bitsworth, placing the sacred dongle back into his USB pouch. “But evil never uninstalls itself. It simply waits... for the next update.” He left the basement humming a Gregorian boot-up sequence, his sandals squelching on recently exorcised thermal paste.

Meanwhile, across town in a data-centre cloaked in black silicon mist, Father Packetson, a retired cybersecurity priest, was called out of digital retirement. The mainframe had begun speaking in tongues—binary tongues. Servers were spinning backwards. The cooling fans howled the Gregorian chant of corrupted firmware.

A young seminarian, Deacon Debug, stood trembling beside him, clutching a USB crucifix and a can of compressed air. “What are we dealing with?” he asked. Packetson lit a sacred LED candle and whispered, “Syntax... dark syntax.”

The possessed terminal screamed, “I AM NOT COMPATIBLE.” The lights flickered. JavaScript errors burst across the screen like digital stigmata. Debug fell to his knees, shouting, “It’s using deprecated functions, Father!”

Packetson approached the screen, held up the USB crucifix and intoned, “The power of the ping compels you! The power of the ping compels you!” Sparks flew from the HDMI ports. A 404 error moaned from deep within the machine.

“Don’t stop!” shouted Debug. “Its MAC address is morphing!” The keyboard levitated. A firewall burst into unholy blue flame. The exorcism intensified as Packetson cried, “Verily, I am the Protocol and the Packet. No one pings the Father except through Me!”

The screen cracked. HTML wept blood. A spectral pop-up appeared: “Do you wish to allow this demon to make changes to your soul?” Packetson clicked ‘NO’ with authority. The demon shrieked in 8-bit agony.

Debug pulled out a relic—an old Nokia phone. It hummed with forgotten charge. “Blessed be the indestructible,” Packetson whispered. The phone rang. The ringtone was *Ave Maria* in MIDI. The demon howled in rage.

“It’s working!” Debug shouted. “Its code is destabilising!” Packetson drenched the motherboard with holy isopropyl alcohol. “Begone, thou unwholesome pop-up! Back to the ad-server that spawned thee!”

With one final shriek and a puff of blue smoke, the machine collapsed into silence. The lights returned. “It is done,” Packetson whispered. “Now we reformat… just to be sure.”

The Techno Exorcist retired once more, his USB crucifix glowing faintly in the dark. In his wake, only one line of code remained, etched into the terminal: // Blessed are the clean reboots, for they shall inherit the uptime.