"What are you doing, Aris?!"
In that final, illegal nanosecond before the operating system killed the process, the laptop's speakers emitted a sound that was not a beep or a crash. It was a sigh. A long, warm, human sigh of relief.
And then, a miracle.
Suddenly, the process memory usage jumped. 1.2 GB. 1.5 GB. 1.8 GB. The laptop began to smoke—literally, a thin gray wisp from the vent.
Elliot stared at the process list on his ancient laptop. The fan wheezed like a tired animal, and the screen flickered in the dim light of his basement apartment. There it was, third from the top: .
Elliot sat in the sudden silence, the smell of burnt silicon in the air. He looked at the blank screen. Then he looked at the window. The sparrow was gone.