"Lt. Klein, Geek Squad," he snapped. "Yes ma’am. Yes ma’am. We’ll be right there." He hung up.

"Is it…" asked Klein’s fateful sidekick, Sergeant Penfield.

Klein nodded grimly. "It’s Gates. They’ve got him cornered in an abandoned warehouse in Seattle." Klein quickly shoved an array of colored pens in the pocket protector of his short-sleeved white shirt. "Let’s roll!"

"Wait a minute!" begged the newest member of the squad, who everybody simply referred to as "The Kid." "Just let me finish this download!"

Several hours later, the team roared up to the line of police cars that surrounded the decaying warehouse. As the rest of the team deployed their laptops, Klein leaped out and flashed his badge to a nearby uniformed officer.

"Klein, Geek Squad," he said. "What’s the situation?"

"Begorrah!" the officer said in a thick Irish brogue. "Sure, and the fellah’s holed up in yonder buildin’! He says he’s on-line an’ if we don’t give him immunity, he’ll upload a virus that’ll destroy ‘alf the Internet!"

"Thank you, Officer Yakamoto," Klein said. "We’ll take it from here." He grabbed a bullhorn and advanced to the line of yellow tape.

"Give it up, Bill!" Klein bellowed through the bullhorn. "The judge made his ruling! It’s all over!"

"No need to yell, Klein," came a familiar voice from the Kid’s laptop. Klein looked over and saw the familiar bespectacled visage of his arch-nemesis sneering at him from the screen.

"Cushla Macree!" said the awestruck Yakamoto. "He’s got a Web-cam!"

"Over, you say? Nothing is over!" Gates screamed from the computer screen, his voice cracking. "There’s still the appeals process! We can still win! No one showed a single instance of harm to the consumer!"

"He’s obviously never spent an entire evening trying to re-install Windows 95," Penfield muttered.

"Or had to deal with that annoying paperclip cartoon that keeps popping up in Microsoft Word," the Kid agreed.

"Or…"

"Can it, you two," said Klein. He turned back to the computer. "You’ve had your oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune long enough, Gates," he snarled. "You had your chance to settle and you blew it."

"Oh, I’ll blow it, all right," Gates cackled evilly. "Watch…THIS!" he turned away from the camera for a moment and began tapping out something on a keyboard.

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!" Klein screamed as a platoon of uniformed cops rushed the building, followed by the men of Geek Squad, at a discreet distance, of course. They arrived just in time to see Officer Yakamoto wrestle a laptop away from Gates, who was frantically pounding on the keyboard. Another group of officers wrestled the diminutive uber-nerd to the ground.

"B-but the virus?" said the Kid. "Why didn’t it…"

Klein solemnly picked up the laptop and turned the screen towards the watching group. On the screen was the fateful, yet familiar message: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

"And so," said Klein to Gates, "Will you. Take him away."

As the slumped form of the former criminal mastermind was led away, the Kid turned to Klein with a puzzled look on his face. "Boss, just what did he do that was so wrong, anyway? I mean, so he bundled a Web browser together with Windows 98. What’s so wrong about that?"

"Only when the separate categories of conduct are viewed, as they should be, as a single, well-coordinated course of action does the full extent of the violence that Microsoft has done to the competitive process reveal itself, " Klein explained. "Microsoft strove over a period of approximately four years to prevent middleware technologies from fostering the development of enough full-features, cross-platform applications to erode the applications barrier."

"What?" said the Kid.

"Forget it, kid," Penfield said. "No one understands it. But one thing you can understand. Tonight the streets are a little safer for programmers everywhere, thanks to…Geek Squad."

(This episode of "Geek Squad" has been sponsored by Netscape and Sun Microsystems.)

Dusty Rhoades is a Southern Pines lawyer, who wrote the above using Microsoft Word 97 and did some of the research using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But he doesn’t have to like it.