He closed the lid and smiled. The ghosts were gone. The drivers were home.

The screen flickered. The trackpad was dead. The Wi-Fi icon was an X. The ethernet port didn’t recognize a cable. The sound was a crackling hiss. Even the USB 3.0 ports refused to acknowledge a flash drive.

Arjun leaned back. “You’ve got ghosts,” he whispered to the laptop.

He tried a third-party site. Bad idea. He downloaded “Chipset_Driver.exe” and instantly got a virus that changed his browser homepage to a fake Russian search engine.