Flash Fiction - Found

Found
It had been a long night, but the job was finally complete.  It only needed a final pass to replace the project name in the files and he could send it to the customer.  Hitting the Enter key, he waited for the task to complete. At twenty seconds he started to worry. When the network monitor went into alarm at a minute his heart almost stopped.  Minimizing the virtual machine, he opened a new instance and tried to login.  The notice that his password was invalid, did not meet the complexity standards, and could not be changed for twenty-four hours was terrifying. He hadn’t changed his password.  When he tried to login as an administrator, he got the same result.  Noticing the flash of the minimized VM, he expanded the window to see a small message.  Completed; twelve billion items changed.

Twelve billion items, he thought, there are not that many lines in the entire project. Scrolling back through the command log, he looked at the dialogue box he had so recently accepted with that ill-fated ‘Enter’.    Find equals ‘Password *’, replace with ‘blank spaces’ and a checkbox Global.  In red letters below the check box, “Does not return until ALL are found!”  That was the night the internet stopped.