Then the speakers crackled. Not static—voices. Thousands of them, faint and fast, like old tech support calls playing backwards.
I reached for the power cord.
The error message finally appeared, decades old, in that familiar Windows 7 dialog box: windows 7 crazy error scratch
By the time I reached the desktop, the error had spread. Explorer.exe was not responding, but that wasn’t the crazy part. The crazy part was the scratch . Then the speakers crackled