Here’s a question; does she want an audience, or just to cause chaos. Could you coax her onto a separate, junk box playground and isolate it so that she can do whatever she wants short of spreading outwards, or would she get tired of it and lonely if you weren’t checking in on what she’d been doing in the meanwhile?
Yknow, would getting a new computer so you can keep Elkie alive while also being able to do stuff regularly be viable, or would she just infect the new computer too?
@Badumsquish
Depending on what homepage she chooses, I might be cool with it. I mean, like you said, she’s a virus, so there’s a good chance it’ll be something NSFW… but for all I know she might also surprise me with something like a page involving “The Top 10 Ways to Prepare Pancakes With Cinnamon”, which I’d be totally down for.
Sure, she might also link me to porn at random intervals, but hey, nobody’s perfect, right?
At the very least, I’d give her a chance. I mean, c’mon, she’s really cute.
@Joseph Raszagal
You could try, but she’s still a computer virus at heart so she might be just as damaging when she tries to do good. Like “I’ll surprise him with this way better homepage I found…” kind of stuff :D
@Phantom Rider
Pretty much. Her virus instincts tell her to spread, delete, corrupt, infiltrate, etc, and she just sort of does it because she thinks it’s fun, but she’s not intently malicious.
@Joseph Raszagal
I always figured she was like Discord, with a prankster personality that won’t be tamed even if she’s not trying to do real damage. I bet she totally keeps screwing with GHMAA’s computer. (It’s pretty much got to be GHMAA’s computer, right?)
@aerion111
I just picked it because it’s considered to be the first ever computer virus. Elkie’s backstory is she’s literally the first one ever, that’s been somehow lucky to stay functional for near 35 years. In that time she’s managed to develop actual sentience. She’s only actually been sentient for a very short time though, so she’s still more or less just doing what her original programming told her to do: infect and spread.
I checked out the wiki page on Elkie…
It’s really not that bad a virus.
As far as I can tell, it prevents a game from working (possibly just once, possibly forever - not sure what happens on the 51st time it’s ran) and displays a poem, and it replicates itself unto floppies.
It doesn’t deliberately destroy anything, it gathers no data at all, etcetera.
Allowing a sapient Elkie virus to live in your computer will probably cause no more problems than allowing a sapient mouse-pony to live in your walls - if they can’t control their impulses, there might be some inconveniences, but you’ll easily be able to work around them as long as they co-operate.
I wouldn’t have the heart to delete her. Maybe put her in a really old computer that’s not connected to anything, like something from the 80s you can get at a thrift store. Occasionally feed her junk emails on a floppy disk.