Suddenly, a pixelated hand reached out from the glass, grabbed Max by his oversized ears, and yanked him into the desktop.

Max pulled a chainsaw out of thin air. "I’ve always wanted to see what a virus looks like from the inside! Does it bleed binary, Sam? Can I keep its motherboard as a souvenir?"

The duo fought their way through a sea of dancing hamsters and Rick-rolling links. Max used a "Trojan Horse" as an actual mount, riding it through a firewall while Sam used a "Cookie" to distract a hungry search engine spider.

"To play the season, you must first survive the malware!" the beast roared, summoning a swarm of pop-up ads for low-interest mortgages and "Singles in your area."

"Max!" Sam hollered, grabbing his partner's tail. "I told you the 'crack-fix' was a trap!"

"Max," Sam said, drawing his oversized revolver, "it appears we’ve been lured into a sub-par piece of meta-fiction. If we don’t find the 'Uninstall' button soon, we’ll be stuck as desktop icons for a teenager in Des Moines."

With a click that sounded like a funeral knell, the download began. The progress bar crawled forward, fueled by the agonizing screams of the office's dial-up modem. But as the file reached 99%, the screen didn't launch the game. Instead, the monitor began to glow with an eerie, lime-green hue.

"Well," Max said, dusting himself off. "That was a rip-off. Not a single free lunch in the bunch."