Actually, that would be kind of pathetic. But then, stranger things have happened.
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It was my fault, really. My own negligence or carelessness or some other equally ignorant trait. One moment, she was perfect, doing everything I told her without delay. The next, she was drowning, all because I was dumb enough to keep a full glass of water where I could knock it over.
It only took a second. My hand slipped, the cup fell. I grabbed for it desperately, but in doing so I only splashed more water all over the keyboard. I'd learned from an episode of Arthur that pouring coffee or tea or some other liquid on a keyboard makes a computer short out, and as I returned with a towel I expected to find myself facing a blank screen. What I found was perhaps more terrifying. The screen was completely frozen. I typed and clicked, but nothing moved. Realizing that the flow of electricity was probably making things worse, I hit the power button, not caring that I was about to lose a lot of unsaved data. My computer was in trouble, and a few hours of labor could easily be made up.
Her screen was dark, her innards were silent. It was time to get to work, clean her up while she slept. I wiped the water off her keys but soon realized that the water inside was a much greater threat than whatever moisture clung to the keyboard. Plastic doesn't care much about getting wet. Circuits and wires do. It was obviously that there was no way I was getting under the keys with my towel, so I unplugged her, picked her up, and tilted her to the side. Water ran from beneath the keys like so many tiny streams, already warm from its brief stay in her innards. I put her back on my desk and pushed the power button. Nothing.
Well, obviously there was still a short somewhere. I had to get more water out of her, that's all. I tilted her more strategically this time, channeling the water away from the power switch and into a corner of they keyboard. I even pushed all the keys to shake loose any moisture clinging to them. Another tiny rivulet ran out of the keyboard and onto the floor. I held her like that until I was sure all the water was gone, and then pushed the power button. The light flickered dimly but did nothing more. That's when I realized that my mistake was going to take a while to repair.
Still, I've always been the hopeful type, so I held down the power button a couple more times, thinking that eventually some kind of connection would be made. If I'd known anything about computers, I never would have pushed the button in the first place. Certainly I would have realized the faint crackling sound was a bad sign if I'd been in my right mind. But I wasn't, and so I kept pushing, persistently causing who knows what kind of damage to the circuitry inside.
Obviously, she wasn't turning on, and fortunately for her, I wasn't insane enough to keep trying. I eventually came to the conclusion that there was just too much moisture and that I'd have to give her some time to air out. I knew putting her out in the sun was a bad idea, so I put her, keyboard-down, on top of our air conditioner. The cool air would blow up into her circuitry and dry it out in no time, I thought. I amused myself by reading a book as the hours passed, until I impatiently decided that it was enough. Again with the power switch, again to response. Only this time, the LED switch lit up for a second before promptly darkening. This, I thought, was progress. Now I must be doing things right. After a couple more futile attempts to boot her up, I returned her to the air conditioner to dry out some more. Surely she'd be up and running again before the day was out.
No such luck. After several hours of sitting on the air conditioner, she would still not turn on. It was then that I started to panic a little. Was this more serious than water shorting out a few circuits? Was my laptop stuck in some kind of coma? My mind quickly cataloged what I might lose if she never woke up. I thought of at least three long-term assignments I hadn't bothered to back up on my flash drive, and of course the booklet I was laying out for the writer's workshop. Those assignments were important, but one would be easy to make up, and the other two would just be difficult. Everything else was backed up on my flash drive or somewhere on the internet – or both. But that was hardly consolation for the fact that my computer was lying helpless in a coma because I was dumb enough to keep water nearby. A part of me knew that I shouldn't blame myself, that it was just an accident, but the other part needed to blame something, and the laws of physics couldn't really be held responsible. My computer was dying, maybe already dead, and the best I could do was dry her off after drowning her because of my own stupidity. I could handle losing files, but losing her... that was something I could not accept.
I didn't sleep well that night. She wasn't even four months old. I wondered if the computer world would consider that infanticide.
Sometime that night I came to the conclusion that I would take her to the computer help desk. It was a logical choice, of course, but I'm not one to task for help, and besides, I have the irrational fear that people will mock me for the slightest mistake. “You spilled water on your computer? You moron!” Yeah, it's stupid, but I've started to get over it, and besides, she needed help more than I needed my pride. So the next morning, I got up and headed for the help desk with my computer safely stowed in my backpack.
However, two things happened that I hadn't counted on. First, the help desk had moved to the library. Second, the library was closed for the fourth of July. I'd known all along that it probably would be, but a part of me hoped that somehow, someone would be there to see her. If only computers had emergency rooms, I thought as I returned home. I had homework to do, but that could be done with my roommate's computer. If he'll even let me touch it, I told myself. By now he probably thought I was the killer of all laptops.
Fortunately, he didn't share my paranoia, so homework was completed, though with some difficulty. Japanese keyboards can be very confusing, especially when they start spewing characters you don't even recognize. I even had time to post an alert of Facebook: “Josh killed his computer. Turns out water isn't as good for them as it is for humans.” I put a humorous spin on it mostly for my own sanity. One of my friends suggested taking her apart and putting her in a bucket of rice. I was tempted, but I didn't have a bucket, rice, or a screwdriver, nor did I know how I'd put her back together again. I figured it would be best to leave her as she was than make things worse by tinkering. She seemed to be holding stable, and that was fine with me.
The next day, I took her to the help desk the first chance I got. I half-hoped they'd tell me she just needed to dry out some more. What I got instead was a look that was everything but reassuring. “Did you try to turn it back on?” the doctor asked. Yes, I had. Multiple times. “You're supposed to let it dry out for two days,” he explained. “You probably fried the motherboard.”
I'd only heard about motherboards form a kid's cartoon, but I knew it was important and that frying it was definitely not a good thing. What was worse, it was my own interfering that had done it. If the hard drive was her memory, what was the motherboard? Her heart? And that faint crackling, was that the sound of her going into cardiac arrest because her idiot owner wouldn't stop pushing the power button? Before, ti had been an accident. Now... now it was murder.
The guy offered to salvage what he could from the hard drive and transfer it to my flash drive. It was like something from an alien movie. Use the host, kill it, then take its memory. So, naturally, like the heartless beast I was, I accepted. Turns out the guy couldn't get tot he hard drive anyway – something about not being allowed to remove more than one panel at a time. Some surgeon you are, I thought. “No, can't restart his heart, I already have his brain open.” He told me the real surgeon would be in later in the afternoon. When I came back, they told me that the guy who could get at her hard drive only came in the second half of the week and only replaced screens. They couldn't restart the heart or the brain, then. Either way, they weren't going to help me.
I ended up taking her to a practice a few blocks away who could do both, or would at least try. The receptionist, a balding guy in his forties, took down her information as he explained the procedure. “We'll see if we can save it,” he said. “If not, we'll get what we can from the hard drive for you.”
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“Depends,” the receptionist answered. “They'll let it dry out completely before they fiddle with it. Sometimes they just leave them there for a week and a half, just to be sure.”
And that was it. I left her there with the receptionist, hoping that somehow they'd be able to save her from my mistakes. I was going to lose time making up the work I'd lost, and my grades would probably suffer, but I knew I couldn't complain. After all, she was the one whose last memories might be water flooding her core and repeated electrocution. That trumped by far anything I was going to lose.
It must have been my roommate's computer who ratted me out. A bold move, considering he lived in the same room as a known laptop murderer. Or maybe they just all knew when my laptop suddenly disappeared. Perhaps she'd had a chance to scream before the water drowned her out. One way or another, though, all the computers on campus were out to get me.
It started in my third class of the day. Our teacher asked us to take a quick online test. The girl next to me finished it in less than a minute. When I tried to log on, though, everything went wrong. The browser wouldn't start. The other reject my credentials the first two times. Then it wouldn't let me on the site because the 'connection' was 'slow.' Homing he was just the only vigilante, I went to the library to find an open computer. The first was locked. The second refused to let me log on. The third cooperated, but very grudgingly. By the time I answered both true-false questions, I was running late for my next class.
As I went, I reflected on how easily computers could take over the world by shutting all the humans out, and tried to shake the feeling that that's exactly how they would punish me for killing one of their own.
A week later, I returned to the clinic. The clerk on duty was a younger guy, probably a student. I told him I wanted an update. H disappeared into a back room for a time. I wasn't sure what kind of news to expect. I still clung to the hope that she would come out fully functioning, as though nothing had happened. The logical part of my brain told me the best I could hope for was a thumb drive with all her memories. The truth was somewhere in between. The clerk told me the hard drive was out, but that there was too much data to store on a mere flash drive. I felt a moment of fatherly pride for her – after all I'd done to her, she refused to be compressed into a mere thumb drive. He told me they were expecting a shipment of external hard drive cases, and that they'd be able to enclose what was left of her within the week. Although as a whole she could not function, her mind could at least be saved – and with it, a part of herself as well.
The next time they went back, they still weren't ready. The shipment had just gotten in, and all the surgeons were on break. An hour later, the balding receptionist called and told me it was done. She was ready to come home.
I paced in the waiting room as the receptionist went to retrieve her. I wondered what she would look like now. What color would she be? What size? How would I carry her with me? I was a little anxious, but mostly excited. Her recovery had come just in time. This time, I would take better care of her.
The receptionist returned with more items than I expected. The largest was the laptop itself, now completely useless. The diagnostics sheet taped to its cover confirmed a damaged motherboard as the cause of death. Then there was a small cardboard box, within which lay the real prize. She was black and smaller than I'd expected – three inches by five and practically flat. A USB cable stuck out from one end, splitting in two at the other. I wondered if both had to be connected and contemplated the challenges that might raise.
I paid the clinic for its services an rode home, heading straight for the library. A blue LED lit up on her surface once she was connected. Navigation was a little confusing at first, but soon I found the hard drive I knew so well. All the files were there. Nothing had been lost.
As I closed out the window, I paused a moment to see what name she'd been given. “OS” - that was hardly adequate. I took a moment to come up with a suitable name and typed it in. Elena. The laptop I'd nearly destroyed. She wasn't the computer she used to be, but she was still there, and somehow that made everything all right. Fear not, Elena. You will never drown again.
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I wasn't really sure how to illustrate that... so... here's a simulation of the robot takeover.
Great story Arnett! If not a little sad...has anyone ever told you what a great writer you are? Cause the writing was great!
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