The computer itself seemed fine,
sitting there, its plastic shining darkly in the single halogen beam. It had been recently Avira’ed and McAffee’ed,
and all was well in its software. Its hardware was immaculate. It had not been
recently connected to any pathogen-delivering internets, nothing had been
downloaded in recent memory. She had
connected her IPod to back up her purchases, and all went wild! Simultaneously,
her IPod and laptop experienced a sort of Technicolor meltdown, like a
cringe-worthy 70’s disaster flick. All
seemed well for the first half an hour, then little hints of foreboding began
to furrow the watcher’s brow. A tiny flicker on the periphery of the screen, a
shadow flitting across the address bar like an airplane flown too low blocks
out the sun. The space bar is suddenly unwieldy, refusing to bow any longer to
the assault of her thumb. On the arm of her chair, connected to the misbehaving
workstation by an umbilicus of white cord, the IPod blinks owlishly, then
repeats the action impatiently. Twice
more now and she feels the alarm growing exponentially with each LED blip.
These two electronic creatures are
her comforts; her music and passwords and games on the IPod, her friends in the
West brought closer through the power of Skype on the laptop. The loss of one or the other would be sad,
but the situation is occasionally inescapable. That is why she backs up one
with the other; the loss of neither is tragic. The loss of both, however, would
be tragic on the level of Lear, Hamlet, on par with the idea of having Newt
Gingritch for President.
The laptop screen repeats the blink
emitted from the IPod and then appears to shred. From disparate areas individual LED lines
seem to roll back on themselves until the image of Itunes on her screen is
tattered and fading swiftly to gray. With shaking fingers, she presses the
power button on the IPod and recoils before completing the habitual swipe to
the right on the screen. The image there, a battery, appears corroded, oxidized.
Then, both screens disappear. They do
not go blank. They simply go, as if something had sucked the plastic whole from
the frame. Some hysterical corner of her brain has retreated to the even worse
disaster movies of the 60’s and she sees Godzilla, his grin glinting with
reflected light from dozens of tiny screens caught in his teeth. She sees her
hands pounding on the keyboard, pulling frantically at the power cords and the
white cord connecting the two, but she can’t stop herself. She doesn’t much feel the need, frankly,
because she must be experiencing some hallucination, some remnant of a
psilocybin dream, or maybe she is actually asleep.
The keys quickly become fragile,
and she witnesses the silicon case of the IPod become ever more rubbery as what
is inside it turns to dust. Finally, helplessly, she holds her hands above her
head and watches in wretched fascination as both units crumble. Simultaneously, they seem to heave a sigh.
She swears she hears a little, exhausted “huff” rise from the pile of dust and
silicon now sinking into the green natty fabric of the recliner’s arm. A laugh
trickles from her lips, causing the dust to lift and swirl, which in turn makes
her laugh a little harder, until she starts sobbing, grasping one end of the
IPod charging cable like the head of a Mamba snake, away from her body, now
expecting it to perform some other dark trick.
The entire time her electronics were performing their final functions
and decaying, the cord had not moved. It
had also not shredded, or melted, or crumbled like the cold ruins of a house
fire. The cord was fine. And obviously horrifically dangerous.
She’d picked it up for very cheap
at a flea market; it had been pennies, and since her puppies had eaten her
previous charging cord, she simply couldn’t pass it up. She’d gotten way more
than she’d paid for. She’d be paying
more, obviously; not only did she now need a new computer and IPod, she needed
to replace all the apps, all the music, all her contacts and what writing she’d
recently backed up to CD (Thank god!)
She stood, dumping the pile of
computer-dust down the front of her jeans and onto the hardwood floor. Still
holding the cord at arms-length, she walked into the kitchen and pulled out a
ziplock. As the cord slipped into the clear plastic, she sensed more than saw a
movement at the bottom of the bag. Something appeared to be trickling out of
the cord, though nothing had on the way to the kitchen. The bottom corner of
the bag immediately sagged, then appeared to draw in on itself. As the reaction spread across the bag, she
instinctively grabbed the closest object, a canning jar, from the shelf next to
the baggies. She slammed the bag an its contents into the jar and swiftly
sealed the lid, and then-
Nothing. The bag turned swiftly to
dust and then settled at the bottom of the jar and the cord may as well have
been a butterfly for that was as evil as it looked. She held the jar up to her
eye, peering in at the dust (which became finer as she watched) and the simple,
white cord. She held the jar at an
angle, then another, moving the dust around in the bottom, hoping for a
revelation. None was forthcoming. It was a cord, manufactured by Apple or one
of its subsidiaries. It hadn’t changed though it had managed to turn at least
two pieces of electronics and one plastic baggie into the finest silt. But- she peered out at her armchair- the
silicone IPod cover hadn’t been touched, and the glass of the jar remained
blemish-free. She assumed whatever
caused the disintegration was not attracted to tin either, though it obviously
had no problem with the gold connections on the motherboards and chips. She
suddenly wondered about her purse, which had contained the monstrous cord for
most of the day. The array of plastics
available for consumption there would be wide and varied; was it hard plastics,
such as the fob on her car key? Perhaps petroleum products. Would she open her chapstick and instead find
sneeze-inducing dust? Her purse hadn’t disappeared and her clothes appeared
unchanged so the cord didn’t seem to eat natural fabrics. What about aluminum?
Obviously food for this thing, since parts of the computer, such as the ports,
were composed of it. Her keys were, what? Steel? Maybe they’d survived. She had to wonder, though, how this plastic
cord capped on both ends with aluminum kept from eating its own tail. Maybe the
damn thing was simply cursed. Sent out
by some technophobic Gypsy woman to destroy electronics where ever it went,
like the evil eye of the old man in Thinner.
(More later... maybe)
