Episode Details

AmimaWritten by Xelrog T. ApocalypseIt was an utterly normal day for me. Well... actually, I'd gotten a parking ticket and a jury summons, so it was a pretty shitty day for me. However, neither of those would seem of any consequence when I got home at the end of it to find my computer infected.But maybe I'm going a little too fast. Let me take a step back, and we'll start from when I returned from work that day. As always, the first thing I did was go through the mail. Feel free to imagine my aggravation at the summons here—it didn't help, either, that everything else was junk mail and bills. Whatever. Just one of life's many joys. Preferring to relax a bit before dealing with them, I went straight to my computer to do... well, nothing at all; just some browsing, check my email, et cetera. Doing nothing can be good for the soul. I noticed my computer running much slower than usual, though. Certainly slower than it was just yesterday. My first reaction was to look at my task bar to see if maybe my antivirus was updating, or maybe Windows was downloading new features or something. You know, the usual culprits. But alas, no such luck.I tried to put up with the slow speeds for a while, just wanting to get a level head before I had to deal with troubleshooting this thing—yet another nuisance on this day that seemed so ripe for them. Eventually, my patience reached its limit, though. My attempts to relax at the terminal having crashed and burned, I went to address this problem now, determined to find a way to wind down if it killed me. Upon opening up My Computer, a red flag raised: My hard drive had no free space left on it at all. To put things into perspective, I have a 1TB internal hard drive, with almost nothing on it. I got this computer from a friend of mine, much techier than I, and while I don't know nearly as much about computers as she, I know that a terabyte is a lot of space, and that my entire computer didn't use even 10% of it yesterday.Clearly, something was going on, and I suspected some kind of virus or malware. I've heard there are some out there that will create "garbage data" on your system, flooding it with pointless files just to fill it up and make it run slow. I'd always wondered what possible benefit there could be in this, but my friend told me there are some scammers who will infect you with one of these viruses, then try to charge you a fee to "clean and speed up" your PC. Fortunately, I hadn't received any such contact... yet. Still, my suspicions seemed grounded. I gave up and performed a scan with my antivirus program—a full scan. Sure, one might think a quick scan would be faster, but if it didn't turn up anything and I was then forced to do a full scan afterwards, it would just wind up taking longer than if I went with the full scan from the start. Kind of a roundabout logic, but I just wanted to get this resolved so that I could finally just relax at my computer.I went to watch some TV for a while. Nothing good on—I really just wanted to go browsing. A couple hours later, I heard the little "scan complete" chime from my speakers, and went to go examine the results. No viruses. No malware. I was baffled. However, there was one thing of note on the screen: "1 file(s) could not be scanned due to corrupted data values." The window had three options: "List," "Report," and "Dismiss." I clicked List to see the details of the file, and it showed a file made up of a bunch of square box characters. "□□□□□.anima" was the file name. This was no file that I put there, and I'm sure it wasn't there before. I'd never installed any kind of language extensions on my computer, so the file name was written in characters from some other language—maybe Japanese, or Arabic or something. I'd also never heard o