She stepped out from my clunky old laptop's VGA port, a vision of nineties punk all green and blue jumpsuit and a rainbow mohawk.

"H1," she said.

"H1," I replied, because I simply couldn't help myself.

I'm such a sucker for accents.

I didn't blink when she appeared, as I already knew that elves, goblins, orcs and trolls all belonged in storybooks, but the gremlin in the machine, well… that was as real as real can be. I was very familiar with such things, and very familiar with the damage they could do.

"Oh, no," I said next, causing this vision of potential corruption to raise an eyebrow.

"0h, n0?" she asked.

She had feet where I would have expected hands, and four arms, each ending in a set of six long fingers and no thumbs, and yet she had five toes on each foot, each one of them tipped with a nail polish, bright red in color.

I had been compiling a mix of my favorite songs to upload to the car I was hoping to lease through my work's offered opportunities.

I clicked on one of the Radiohead songs that I'd first selected and listened as twenty familiar seconds played fine.

"Phew," I whispered.

I hovered over Tool's Lateratus and clicked. The opening guitar, so peaceful and rhythmic, not a single hint to the crescendo this song built to… So far so good.

11111101010 stood there, smugly, looking up at me from the table. Both sets of her arms were crossed, and her head was down between her feet.

As I clicked on my most beloved Smashing Pumpkins song, my heart sank. Some strange symbols appeared, a combination of a zero and a one that flashed red as the polish on the gremlin's toes.

"Not butterfly…" I groaned.

"Tastes l1ke teen sp1r1t," the gremlin grumbled.

"Don't you mean it smells like teen spirit?" I asked, then in a panic I double checked my Nirvana download.

That was corrupted too. It seemed somewhat appropriate, though was equally frustrating.

"Del1c10us," said 11111101010 as she burped, and I caught a moment of some Super Fury Animals.

"Seriously?" I groaned, deeper and longer this time.

"Buy me a p0ny?" asked the new arrival.

"I'll be buying you a muzzle if you don't stop eating my playlist," I replied.

I quickly surveyed the damaged and noticed anything by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky seemed to be getting ignored. Sadly, there was little respect in the gremlin community it seemed for the use of a mighty cannon's "boom" as a musical instrument.

"What 1s next 0n the menu?" asked 11111101010 with an eager and hungry look on her face.

"Let me find you some raw chicken to gnaw," I offered. "I'm pretty sure I have a drumstick or two I was planning to cook up for tonight's dinner."

11111101010 shook her head.

"N0 thanks," she said. "1'm a vegetar1an."

I groaned for the third time, this one my longest and loudest yet. I got the feeling that 11111101010 was going to be a most interesting year.

"000h… Can0ns…" said the gremlin.

I could not help but sigh as Tchaikovsky vanished right before my eyes.

There came a great B0000M as poor 11111101010 burped again.

"Happy New Year," I laughed.

Because if you don't laugh, all you can do is cry.

-