Heero heard a groan from the computer desk in the living room. He could guess what had happened. He walked up beside Arys and leaned down to take a look at the screen. An error message had popped up.

"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down," Heero read the message aloud. "Hmm."

"Hmm is right," Arys pouted. "This is the third time I’ve gotten that message."

Heero almost made a crack about network security specialists who couldn’t handle their own computers, but when he saw the look on his wife’s face, he thought better of it.

Arys touched a key and the screen went blue instead of just shutting down the offending program.

"There was an exception at address 0000456669:0923…" Heero’s voice trailed off as he tried to make sense of the nonsense that came afterwards. "Who writes these error messages?"

Arys laughed cynically. "I bet they’re randomly generated."

"Just to annoy people like you."

Arys nodded, then shook her head. "No, not just annoy, make our hair go white, drive us up the wall, cause us to go insane. That’s not just annoying; it’s criminal." Arys reached for the power button and the computer went black as she shut it down for a few seconds. "Going on the network is even worse! I get the message ‘The connection has been lost" a million times a day, there are pages that don’t exist, and then there’s the dreaded ‘Request to the host has taken longer than expected.’ Like that’s supposed to make me feel better. It doesn’t tell me what to do next." She pushed the power button again and the computer came back on.

"How old is this computer anyway?" Heero watched as the monitor flickered onto the operating system’s main screen. Heero had kept his faithful laptop and had upgraded it repeatedly over the years so that it still functioned at the speed of current technology.

"Two years. Une won’t let me get a new one and she won’t let me upgrade it. She said that the budget is too tight for the Preventers to provide me with a new computer."

Arys sighed as she reached for the keyboard and typed out a command that connected to the network. "Watch this." The network’s login screen came on.

She touched the keyboard to type in her screen name and password and the screen went black.

Arys growled something low in her throat and buried her head in the keyboard.

Heero couldn’t help smiling. The black screen of death. He heard a sickening sound coming from the hard drive of the computer.

"Sounds like a hard drive crash."

Arys only muttered an affirmative from her defeated position.

"Is that what you were going to show me?" Heero reached for his gun and pulled it out, watching his wife the whole time.

Arys shook her head, her forehead tapping against the keyboard. "It wasn’t supposed to do that."

Heero cocked his gun and aimed it at the offending hard drive, which was still whirring to its death. He pulled the trigger, plunging a hole into the hard drive, silencing its death throes. Arys jumped out of her seat at the sound of the gun going off.

"Heero, what are you doing?" She stepped away from him and the computer, fear in her eyes.

Heero just smiled at her and then aimed his gun at the monitor. A hole appeared in the middle of the screen. He put his gun back into its holster and brushed his hands together. Arys came up beside him, the fear gone, but still confused.

"What did you do that for?" Arys asked.

"You can’t repair damage like that. Now, Une will have to get you a new computer."

Arys eyed the bullet holes in the monitor and the hard drive. She smiled. "Have I ever told you that I like the way you think, Heero Yuy?"