A case of cyber passion?

Behold the Fair (and Bare) Melissa

By Rick Horowitz

Consider the lovesick male of yore. His heart aflutter with emotion, his smoldering desire desperate for release, he seats himself in some dimly lit corner, dips quill into inkpot and scrawls his deepest yearnings onto empty sheets of vellum.

If he's the concise sort, he produces a sonnet, 14 lines of iambic longing. If he tends to go on a bit, perhaps he comes up with an epic, stanza after stanza of cravings boldly rendered. And if he's really wordy -- well, why not make a play of it? Five acts of tender tribute are not a phrase too many where that special woman is concerned.

We know it's true; we saw the movie.

And it's been true ever since; Shakespeare is hardly the only gent who poured his passion onto the page. Love gets all the juices flowing, including the creative ones. How many works of timeless quality -- novels and photographs, paintings and songs -- have been produced by otherwise ordinary men scaling the trellises of devotion?

And now? Computer viruses.

Say hello to Melissa, topless muse for the digital age.

Maybe you were lucky the other day and your laptop didn't succumb to the latest cyber invasion. Or maybe you were one of the tens of thousands all over the globe who took the bait and opened that perfectly innocent-looking "Important Message" from -- or so it seemed -- someone you knew.

"Here is that document you asked for...don't show it to anyone else."

The document you "asked for" was a list of Internet porno sites, it turned out, which would have been annoying enough. But you weren't just a victim; you were part of the problem, too. As soon as you opened the document, that wily virus named "Melissa" tunneled its way into your e-mail address book and sent out another 50 messages just like the one you received, to your friends and associates, with your name on top.

Turmoil in the wired world, giggles from the geekery. "Melissa" was everywhere.

And then, an arrest.

The man behind the virus, the authorities announced after frantically tracking the mischief back to its alleged source, was one David L. Smith, a 30-year-old software programmer living in an apartment in New Jersey. Pale-skinned and heavy-set, Smith didn't get out much, the neighbors said, except to go to work. He spent all his time on his computer, the cable guy said.

And Melissa? Who's Melissa? The authorities had that one covered, too. Melissa, they said, was a woman David Smith knew when he lived for a while down in Florida.

Melissa was a topless dancer. David Smith, they said, named the virus he allegedly created after a topless dancer in Florida.

OK, so maybe it wasn't exactly love.

Or maybe it was anyway. There's nothing in the rules that says you can't fall hard for a woman who removes her shirt professionally.

Which may have been exactly what happened to David Smith. We don't have the details -- but that hardly keeps us from speculating. Did David and Melissa hit it off from the get-go? Or did he worship her talents from afar? Did he let her know how he felt about her? Did she tell him she felt the same? Or did she tell him to take a hike?

Either way -- romance or rejection -- it could have stirred something in him, something strong and real, something inspiring. He'd want to show her -- he'd need to show her -- that he was somebody, not just some overweight, pasty-faced nerd lurking at a back table in some smoky club. He had talents, too!

He may not have been the poetry type, but he could make pixels leap to his command, send her name winging across the seven seas. One way or another, she'd know exactly what she meant to him.

Let the rest of the world call it a virus. For David Smith and his Melissa, it may have been the love bug.

Posted 4/6/99. Passionate about fun Web sites? Tell your friends about this one!

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