So the bug — or virus, or spyware, or, whatever it is — is now apparently counting down to something, and that something looks like it's going to happen while I am somewhere in Szechuan province and I can't fix it and yeah it's creeping me out and yeah I'm not happy about this. (The recent appearance of words like "mayday", "metastasize", "hemorrhage," and "classified" isn't cheering me up, either.)