After reading your very enjoyable thread last night, this arrived out of the aether. I'm afraid it's a bit anti-social, as it didn't want to be a serial.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Eire...
"Well", says Mike, leaning back from his table. "If I don't need to be winning the lotto, or maybe finding some little creature's crock of gold."
"What would you be wishing that for?" says his wife, used to him.
"There's not enough memory," he says, gloomy as a smoke filled turf house.
"There's never enough memory," says she. "Though what you want it for when all you're doing is word-processing, I can't think."
"I'm going out," says he, knowing the phone bill is due any minute, and wishing to be anywhere but near his wife when it did.
Off he went, down the road, , greeting the postman as he passed, relieving him of the phone bill, and kicking at a stone until it went into a ditch. It was while he was bent low, retrieving it, that he heard a little noise. "Click, clack, clicketty, clacket," it went, for all the world like a little hammer hitting a little nail.
"Never," says Mike to himself, "never say that's a leprechaun." But he pulls himself up quietly and looks over the wall. And there, indeed, is a little man, all dressed in green, just like all the little men that ever appeared in all the books of Irish tales. Except that this little man is not hammering nails into shoes. Oh no. This little man is sitting there click-clacking at a little tiny keyboard, on a little tiny laptop, with a little tiny lead connecting it to a little tiny parabolic aerial.
"What are you doing?" says Mike, not helping himself.
"What's it look like?" says the little man, shortly, and not looking up.
"It looks," Mike begins, bending down to peer at that little tiny screen, "as if you're posting a message to the Mudcat."
"I am," says the little man.
"And which one are you?" says Mike, running through the names in his head, and thinking none of them sound like fairies, or even faeries.
"You won't catch me that way, Mike O'Hagan," says the little man, and in doing so does himself a bad turn, for Mike remembers just what he is supposed to do, reaches down and grabs the little man by the back of his little green jacket.
"Let me go, you great clodhopper," says the little man, "Let me go, I have to log off and shut it down properly, or the thing will crash, and who knows what evil will happen then."
Mike, with a sudden fellow feeling for the little man, almost lets him go, but remembers just in time to keep hold of him. "Not," says he, "until you," but the little man interrupts him.
"Not my crock of gold," says he. "Not my crock of gold." He is not pleading. He is laughing.
"There's a joke in it, is there?" says Mike, tough of tone, and thinking of that extra memory.
"There is," says the little man. "And you, being about the same things, should know it without me saying it."
"What should I know?" asks Mike, totally bemused, but still keeping ahold of the little man.
"You think I got a state of the art, Corylus Spellwriter, 256 megabyte RAM, 200 Hz, 10 gigabyte HDD,"
Mike mutters "256, 10 gigs," to himself, but doesn't let go.
"As I was saying, thoughtspeed modem, and the aerial, Y2K compliant, running Microsidhe Crystal Ball 2000, and the Office Suite, for dried leaves, do you?" says the little man. "If it wasn't for being able to hack in to...never mind what, I couldn't afford to surf the net at all, at all."
"You mean you've spent all your gold on your computer?" says Mike, gob-smacked.
"I do," says the little man. "Now will you let me go?"
Mike looks down on him, seeing a fellow in trouble, just for a moment. And then, out of the dark ancient imaginings of his people, something came over him, and he forgot that he was dealing with a fellow Mudcatter, and only remembered all the times his ancestors had tried, and failed, for the fairy crock of gold, and the hunger for gain came on him.
"All right," says he, "but only if you give me that computer of yours."
"You wouldn't be so cruel," says the little man, stricken. "You who know what it's like? You wouldn't cut me off from the Mudcat?"
"I would, indeed," says Mike, full of visions of what he could make out of all that faery technology.
"Very well, then," says the little man, "take it, and much good may it bring you."
Mike reaches down and picks it up, very careful, and than lets the little man go.
Back he goes home, full of bounce and ideas, whistles past his wife, and shuts himself into his room with the computer.
He solders a little, tests a little, and by and by he has that little tiny laptop wired into his keyboard and his monitor, and working like a dream.
It's the middle of the night, when he hears a small noise from downstairs. Quietly, so as not to wake his wife, he slips out of bed, tiptoes down to his computer room, and finds to his horror, the machine has started itself up, and is writing its own messages to the Mudcat, to anywhere, and they aren't messages he would want to author. It is quite clear that the rest of the Mudcatters think so, too. there they all are, posting messages to shut him out, so that he will never feel welcome again. Too late now, he thinks. Quite justified, when he thinks about what he did to the little man down the road. He cut him off from the Mudcat, and now, here he is, cut off, too. He thinks about the next phone bill. He unplugs the machine. It runs on. He disconnects the modem from the little tiny aerial. It still runs on. And then, amid what looks like a shower of dry leaves across the screen, he sees another message. "You have hacked in to Langley Head Office. We have traced your call. We are coming to arrest you. Wherever you are."
"Langley?" he says. "Langley? Isn't that Ford Trucks in England?"
"It was," says the little man from the window. "But this is a different Langley. You don't want to know these guys. Will you be letting me have the laptop back?"
"I will not," says Mike. "It's a virus you've put in it."
"It is not," says the little man, put out. "Microsidhe has very efficient anti-virus procedures. But you'd better look out of the window."
Mike cannot help himself. He looks out of the window. There is a helicopter over the other end of the valley.
"That's them?" he says.
"It is," says the little man. "Now will you let me have the machine back?"
"I will," says Mike, very reluctant, and in no time at all, all his fixing is unfixed, and the little man is away up the valley with his laptop bag over his shoulder.
For a moment, the 'copter circles overhead. Then it, too heads off up the valley.
Mike shakes his head and goes back to bed. He is not a happy man.
The next day, down at the bar, the talk is all of the 'copter. It's the Brits, says someone. Never, said another, it's the Gardai, and everyone goes quiet as they think what they could be looking for. They are still quiet when the strangers walk in, so they cannot fall silent.
The Americans look at the bar.
"Is there something strange about that hill?" says one of them, signing with a jerk of his head. "There is," says the man behind the bar.
"Well?" says the other one.
"It is the Fairy Hill," says another of the locals.
"No-one lives there?" says the first American.
"They do not," says the man beind the bar.
"There isn't any sort of government establishment up there?" says the second.
"There is not," says everyone in unison.
"There's nothing up there," volunteers the vocal local. "No-one in their right mind would be going up there, at all, at all."
The two men look at each other.
"Will you be Scully, or shall I?" says the first, and they leave.
The locals look at each other, pause, and burst into laughter.
Mike leaves, and climbs the hill. At the top, he speaks to the empty air. "I am sorry," he says, "and I thank you," he adds, before turning back to his memory starved, Microsoft-ridden tower.
And there it is. A new thread. "Does anyone have a Gaelic version of the story of the leprechaun and the field of bodhrans?"
And an answer, "Where is Bruce O. when he is needed?"
"I do," posts Mike, "if it's the field of boliauns you mean."
"It is," posts the other, "If you've learned the lesson of it."
"Oh, I have, I have," posts Mike, and turns to do a forum search. There is not one trace of all those flaming messages posted in his name the night before. Not one answer to them. All gone. And the others were joining in now, as if they had never been.
"That memory?" calls his wife, from below.
"What memory?" says Mike, thinking about Mudcatters' memories for a moment.
"Computer memory." says she.
"I'm happy with what I've got," says he.
"Only there's this SIM," says she. "On the old hearth stone. And a trail of muddy cat footprints..."