From Filth & Mud Read Online Free

various tablets and smartphones. All of them, when not otherwise occupied by his work, were churning out data packets for the S.E.T.I. @Home project. He was a nerd of the highest-most order, a romantic optimist fundamentally. He had to be if he believed that one day he would find intelligent, alien life.
    He took a quick glance at his 70-inch, wall-mounted, display where he’d patched in all of the data from his computers. However, like yesterday and every day for the last fifteen years, there was no signal. He waved his hand vaguely at the display and brought up his ‘Von Neumann’ screen. A couple of months earlier, he had decided to increase his processing power exponentially, but there was no way of reaching that goal without a massive cash inflow. Unfortunately, his employer was not the bonus-giving type especially since Miles wasn’t exactly bringing in the kind of money that his classmates from MIT were with their high-frequency trading algorithms on Wall Street, in London, and Hong Kong.
    So he just had to be clever. Miles put on his hacker’s white hat , and wrote a little code that would find the computers of conservative fundamentalists, mostly from the Bible Belt; the kind that didn’t believe in evolution. The little code would run through the browser histories of all of the computers it encountered looking for search terms such as ‘Evolution lies’, ‘Bill Nye + sucks’, ‘Neil de Grasse Tyson + sucks’, and not surprisingly ‘porn’— boy there was tons of that in the histories . Once located, his program would inconspicuously download the S.E.T.I. program onto the hard drives of the unsuspecting and witless owners. While the computers were actively in use by their owners, presumably on social media or on various pornography sites, the program would borrow half of their processing power to run the S.E.T.I. algorithms through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing protocol, BOINC for short. As an added bonus, Miles had added a few lines of code, which he had called, ‘One for God, One for Science’. The bonus code created a Twitter account for each of the pious. The Twitter account would follow and retweet anything Bill Nye and Neil de Grasse Tyson tweeted whenever religious messages were being tweeted or posted on social media. In the case of ‘gay porn’ queries, the pious would receive social media feeds from George Takei; Oh my!
    Miles had converted approximately 30,000 computers so far, and he had catapulted in the standings of the S.E.T.I. top participants. But even with the growing flock, he had not heard a message from the heavens. Despondent, he poured himself a steaming-hot cup of coffee and pulled his never-ironed khakis out from under a keyboard that itself was covered in coffee stains, some fresh, some dried, and some added by Miles’ unsteady hand as he reached across the clutter of electronics. He grunted—annoyed at the balled-up denim shirt that he couldn’t quite reach. Miles hurried his clothes on, waved god-speed to his relentless listeners, and headed out the front door, tired, wrinkled, and brilliant as ever. 
    Moments later, Miles stepped outside into the parking lot. It was bone-chillingly brisk this morning.
    “Should’ve brought my jacket,” Miles muttered as his lips trembled at the cold bite of the morning chill. He managed a stuttering “m…morning,” as Tracy from the third floor bounded out in front of him. Tracy had that cheery, springy bounce in her step that made her legs that much more attractive and gave her breasts that extra perk that drove him nuts at all other times of the day but made him want to strangle her in the mornings. 
    Miles drifted off, daydreaming about Tracy, as he followed her long, exposed legs down the parking lot toward her car. A sudden, loud sneeze startled Miles back into the world, and he recoiled instinctively as he caught the moist mist in his face; some had definitely gone into his mouth.
    “Damn it!