Viral

 My kid is obsessed with computer viruses.  OBSESSED. 

It started last week when I booted up his dad’s laptop and for some reason it ran chkdsk and started deleting index files.  He was watching this and he can read pretty well now so he started asking what was happening, why index files were being deleted.   I, of course, had to pretend I knew exactly what was going on, so I started rambling about possible reasons, like hard drive damage and viruses.  I don’t even know if that’s true but he heard the word virus and kind of freaked.  

"The computer has a virus?!?!"
"Maybe.  That’s one possibility."
"And the virus is deleting index files?"
"No, the computer is doing that to fix itself.  Computers can sometimes heal themselves a little bit if things go wrong, kind of like your body can."

When it finally started up, I showed him how to run an anti-virus scan on AVG.  He seemed really concerned that there was a virus and when nothing showed up on the scan, he felt it was wrong.  "How can that be?! There must be a virus!"  it took a while to calm him down, and in that time he told several relatives about it.  

That night when I put him to bed, he started talking about his imaginary friend Left.  Left is currently exploring the moon.  He mentioned that Left had lost some exploring equipment on the moon.  I asked him how and he rang Left on his mobile to find out – which is something he does often.  He doesn’t actually have a mobile, of course.  His "phone" is just his hand (kind of like some people’s "girlfriend").  Interestingly, his ability to act like he’s having a real phone conversation is uncanny.  He often refuses to speak to me or his grandmother on the phone and he’s always shy around strangers, but on the phone to Left he’s like a small adult.  He pauses to listen, he gets cut off, he asks Left to repeat what he said because the reception is bad, he says "Right… uh huh…   oh I see…".     I start to forget he’s talking into his hand.  

So he rang Left to ask about the equipment he lost, and Left tells him that it got dropped into a volcano on the moon, so it’s gone forever.  They chatted about what’s going on up on the moon.  Then he hung up but straight after he quickly remembered something else he need to ask, and went to call him again.  He typed in the numbers on his palm and listened to the imaginary ring tone… and then he said out loud in his phone voice "The number you have dialled is not connected – please check the number and try again."  Exactly that, the official Telstra disconnected message memorised verbatim.  What a freak.   "Hmmmmm, that’s strange", he says, "I’ll try again."       Waits… "The number you have dialled is not connected."  

He looked down at his hand and then looked really upset. "Oh no! My phone has a virus!  It must have a bluetooth virus!  And some spyware!  It’s deleting my calls!  I’m going to put an anti-virus and an anti-spyware on it to fix it."    

This was the beginning of a 2 hour performance of him franctically fixing various kinds of viruses and spywares on his imaginary phone.  Black hole viruses.  Volcano viruses.   Cheese viruses.    I just stood there watching him, in a trance.  He created an entire mythology based around what he thinks a computer virus is, but most of it wasn’t too far off reality.   To fix the viruses, he didn’t zap it with a magic wand or give it medicine -he typed things furiously into his phone, reading them aloud as he did "Delete all index files.  Run file scan.  Open virus folder.  Find all files with the virus in them.  Delete those files.   Rename the virus folder."   I finally had to threaten to take his imaginary phone away if he didn’t go to sleep. 

Last night, after we read a story, he looked up at me with big innocent eyes and said "Mum… what’s a tracking cookie?"  

He’s 5 years old.  When I was 5, I was talking to my imaginary friend Jake and playing with Voltron and my Alf doll.  The Palex… he’s got a range of imaginary friends named after prepositions (Left, Right, In Front of You, Behind You), he believes that the low battery warning tone for my old Motorola phone is a kind of nocturnal monster named a "Toove" that looks like a circle with a line through it, he believes there’s a slug in his brain that causes him to be naughty and now I’m somehow accidentally raising him to become an IT guy instead of an astronaut.  What am I doing wrong?!  I swear I don’t let him use the computer a lot unless it’s raining.  We don’t watch TV.  I don’t give him lollies. I don’t remember ever dropping him on his head.    What what what?