Below it, a line of text:

Her PC hummed. The fan quieted. One by one, twenty-seven outdated drivers turned green. Chipset. Audio. Network. Even a BIOS update she’d been scared to touch. The Mercer render loaded in seconds. She exhaled, victorious.

The screen went black. Then, line by line, her hardware began to speak. The webcam light turned on. The microphone array initialized. The SSD wrote furiously—not to install drivers, but to delete itself. Partition by partition.

Then a final message from the ghost in the machine: