The contagion of fear

I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me. Late one night in my first year at university and having found computer science to be my life’s calling, I was in the back of the large computer science lab, talking with some fellow underclassmen. We were snidely decrying the lack of technological understanding in the broader population, with the kind of arrogance and hubris that youth and precociousness can uniquely summon. Somewhere in this discussion, a terrible idea was hatched: what if we went next door to the general computer lab, and told the humanities students there that a computer virus was spreading through their machines? Would they believe it? To my everlasting regret, we acted on this ugly urge: we went next door to a packed lab of students working on term papers, and — with synthetic alarm in our voices — loudly announced that a virus had escaped the computer science lab, and that they all needed to…