do you want to save your changes.

I

The IT guy asked to borrow my laptop to scan it for a new virus. It sounded like a decent excuse to get out of work so I handed it over. The next day he came to my desk and said he’d been up all night and needed help. He said the virus had gone over on him, whatever that meant. I told him sorry man I don’t know anything about that stuff and he was like yes you do, of course you do, you’re the only one who knows. He was clenching his teeth and sweating from his bald head down to his jeans. He shook the computer at me and I saw a spreadsheet with the word DELETE written over and over in every cell, covering the page. I’m not positive but I want to say every instance of the word DELETE was in a different font. I told my boss I felt uncomfortable and went home early. IT guy stopped coming to work after that. No one ever said what happened to him. It took them a week to get me a new computer.

II

Someday soon, your guitarist will stop putting her instrument down. She will explain that she is trying a new exercise she found online, something about cultivating oneness through discipline. She is always trying new things, which makes her a good guitarist, but you will think, wow, this one is really something. She will keep that scuffed blue Telecaster slung over her shoulder all hours of the day. She will sleep with it. She will drive with it. She will stop showering. It will not seem like she is playing it any more than usual, only at practice and gigs, but she will never take it off. She will quit her day job. One day she will tell you her mother died unexpectedly but she isn’t going to the funeral because the airport won’t let her through security wearing a guitar. The day after that she will miss rehearsal. 

You will drive over to her house and find her sitting in the backyard, cross legged under a big knobby oak tree, sixstring across her lap. She might remind you of a shinobi meditating over a katana, or a mourner at a grave. She will be muttering and covered in blood. You will approach and see the blood is coming from her arms because she has worked the D and E strings under her skin, into her veins. You will gasp and she will smile at you. That’s when she will say she is quitting the band.

III

He stands over a pyre of desktops, Macbooks and one terabyte hard drives, slathering everything in kerosene and smoking a cigarillo. He is not particularly careful about keeping the kerosene off his legs or keeping the rillo in his teeth. It took most of his self-regard when it took his wife. It’s taken thousands by now but it never felt real until the morning he found her with the plug-end of a one hundred and twenty volt Sony Vaio power adapter down her throat. Blue and smiling. Sometimes he’d rather join her than avenge her any more. Let the embers decide.

For a while his only solace was a web forum for survivors where he found himself in heated debates over whether it was psychosis gone digital or malware gone analog. His position had always been simpler: that God was real and vengeful. Eventually he lost his will to argue, but by then no one was going online anyway.

He empties the gascan and steps back, takes a long drag. The junkyard reeks of rubber and oil and sweat. People live here now, pseudovictims drawn to the machines. When he leaves tonight they will gather in prayer around the fire. He hated them for a while, now he feels a sort of kinship. He finishes the cigarillo and pinches it on the crook of his thumb. 

A low hum tickles the air. He pauses. Everything should be deactivated, all batteries and power supplies removed. Fire on its own is not enough, you have to bleed the things out, drain them before burning or it might go airborne. That’s his theory, anyway. 

He stamps the cigarillo beneath his feet and paws through the pile. There it is again. A brief, mild buzz. A machine giggle. He’d been careful, he was always careful. What did he miss? 

He shoves a stack of computer towers aside and then he finds it. The lit screen of a Samsung Galaxy S7 glares blue at him. Panic crunches his chest as he picks it up, feels it vibrate as a CNN notification arrives. Something about the stock market. He lights another rillo. 

He turns the device over, rips open the back panel. No battery. He gags on tobacco smoke and throws up a little. The phone vibrates again and this time it’s a text from his wife asking if he remembered to eat breakfast.