The kid who put all the pieces together and finally managed to hack the human brain was a sixteen-year-old prodigy from Iceland.

In an age when most people weren’t running up to date countervirus software on their phones, suddenly they were having to deal with what the bloggers dubbed “neurospam.” Being able to write code that essentially spoke directly to the brain in its own version of machine language, the kid introduced a layover on things you would see in everyday life. Where later bits of neurospam would actually be used by less than scrupulous companies to overlay advertisements you saw on the street with their own (the cola companies ate that shit up), this Icelandic joker, who signed his works as “Kortex King,” overlaid things with his own commentary.

You look at your dog. Any dog. Next to the dog’s head appears a cartoony thought balloon: “The reason I have gas is because you feed me the cheap shit. You know this, right?”

You look at your girlfriend or any woman you register as “hot” and the routine grabs a picture of your mom’s face from your memories and overlays it on the girl’s. “Ah, that’s better!” comes up in a little orange window.

You’re standing in front of a urinal and happen to look down. The fucker’s laughter at your johnson is so loud it just about takes your head off.

Somebody passed it to me on a flyer they were handing out downtown. They had downloaded this nasty bit of brain malware and placed it inside a nanite adtoxin, which I absorbed through my fingers seconds later. Fifteen minutes after that and the neurospam told the world I was infected by causing me to involuntarily fart. I read online later about how that was the telltale sign. Typical sixteen year old humor, except it was swimming around in my brain pan and it was in no way funny.

After they finally cleared that up, and the millions of infected people worldwide had gotten a counteragent that purged the malware, it was about six months before the next one hit.

Someone had discovered a bug in the brain, or perhaps when we were first created it was a feature. After hearing a particular word in the protolanguage that the brain’s code runs on, you forget the last three minutes of your life. So this little memetic bit kicked off a process that would leave you standing out in the street and not remembering walking out there, or even better, going at ninety miles an hour down an interstate when you could have sworn a second ago you were pulling out of a fast food drive thru.

Some sons of bitches even figured out to write out the word, so you’d be walking down the street and see it tagged on the side of a building in spray paint…bam, three minutes gone. It would take hours for somebody to figure out what was going on and cover up the word. After all, even if you knew what was happening, you’d forget the moment you looked at it again.

Part of the problem is that the CDC isn’t even sure what to make of all this. And the FDA finds itself being called upon to evaluate neuroware that uses heuristics to try and fight this shit.

So far nobody’s gotten far enough along to figure out how to make someone’s brain just completely shut itself off, but I’m afraid it’s just a matter of time. I just know I wear gloves when I’m out in the world now. I keep my music player cranked when I’m in a crowd. And I’m usually behind sunglasses. They’ve found that amber lenses give you a split second to look away if the memetic trigger has enough characters in it.

I presume it’s working well enough. Though I’m wondering if I would even remember if it wasn’t.