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“Whatcha doing, McGeek?” Tony prompted as he walked into the bullpen and saw Tim busy with Gibbs’ computer.
“Finishing some security updates for the IT department,” McGee replied, distractedly, as he punched some keys on the keyboard.
“You move to the IT department when I wasn’t looking?”
“No.” McGee shook his head. “They’re just way backed up, so I volunteered to do our computers for them. I’ve already done everyone else’s. Just have Gibbs left.”
“Be careful, Probie. Gibbs will kill you if you break his computer or change the way things work on him.”
McGee waved a hand at Tony to tell him to quiet down. “I know what I’m doing.”
Tony shook his head and hoped for McGee’s sake that that was true. Tony dropped his backpack behind his desk and hit the power button to turn his computer on. He was about half way through his daily startup routine when he heard McGee utter, “Uh oh.”
“That doesn’t sound good, McIT. What happened?” Tony walked over to stand behind McGee, so he could see what he was doing. Tim was furiously pressing buttons now, though it didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything as far as Tony could tell.
“That’s just it, I don’t know. It was installing updates and then poof.”
“Poof?”
“Gone. Everything’s gone!” Tim’s voice had taken on a hysterical edge as he said this.
“You wiped out the boss’ computer installing updates?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Tony. This is serious.”
“You better hope you can fix this before Gibbs shows up.”
Tim looked up with wide eyes like a deer in headlights. “Where is he, anyway?”
“Had an early meeting in MTAC. Not sure how long he’ll be.” Tony shrugged, returning to his desk. “You should probably get Abby to help you, though.”
Tony hoped that Abby was able to help Tim as he for one didn't want to see the upbraiding that Gibbs would give Tim if he didn't figure out how to fix this before Gibbs got back.
“Good idea.” Tim agreed, running for the stairs.
"Abby!" Tim hollered as he flew into her lab well on his way to a panic.
"Tim? What's the emergency?" Abby turned around in confusion at Tim's obvious freaking out.
"I wiped out the boss' computer."
"What? How?"
"I was installing security updates for IT. They went smoothly on all the other computers. I don't understand what happened to Gibbs."
"Oh, Tim. Don't you know better than to touch Gibbs' computer? Even IT won't touch it."
“Just help me fix it,” Tim begged.
Abby shook her head at him and pulled up her keyboard. “Let’s see what’s really going on.”
They both huddled over her computer as she dove into the gory bit guts of Gibbs' computer. “Oh, Tim.” Abby pointed to some of the text scrolling across the screen. If you could call the hexadecimal code they were looking at text.
Tim grew even more worried. “How did that get there?”
Abby shrugged. “It’s undoubtedly the reason Gibbs’ computer stopped behaving.”
“Yeah. Let’s oust it.”
Both of them started mashing keys at their keyboards, but the intruder was stubborn and resistant to their attempts to make it leave. As the minutes turned into hours, sweat broke out on McGee’s forehead and started dripping down his face. He truly feared that Gibbs was going to storm in here and demand to know what happened to his computer any minute.
Tim didn’t want to disappoint him, but it wasn’t looking good for anything else to happen. Despite multiple Caf-Pow’s even Abby wasn’t finding a way to defeat this code. Every time they that they had it locked down, it mutated and found a way around or out of their confinement. Tim wanted to give up, wanted to admit defeat, but he couldn’t let whoever this was get the better of him. Both of them startled when the door to Abby’s lab slammed open.
“You, upstairs.” Gibbs pointed to McGee. McGee took one glance at Gibbs’ face and quickly scurried out of the lab.
Gibbs waited for McGee to get out of earshot and then turned to Abby, ”And you… That’s enough. Fix it.”
Abby pouted at Gibbs. “But Gibbs.”
”You had your fun, Abby. Let it go, now.”
“Fine.” Abby stamped her foot.
Gibbs shook his head and returned upstairs. “Next time, I suggest you stay away from my computer like the IT department does,” Gibbs warned McGee as he returned to his seat and booted up his computer.
McGee stared at Gibbs, opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. “How are you doing that?”
Tony glanced between Gibbs and McGee and then glanced at the stairwell. “It was Abby the entire time.” It wasn’t a guess.
McGee looked between Tony and Gibbs. “It was never broke.”
Gibbs shook his head.
McGee grumbled under his breath. He would have to get Abby back for this. He’d really been frightened. Though, he was glad that Gibbs hadn’t actually had a reason to upbraid him.