The next morning I rented a Zipcar and drove to a strip mall in North York, parking in front of Geeks-R-Us, a name which was no doubt in breach of some sort of copyright. I turned off the engine and let the rain berate me against the windshield for a minute as I sat in silence. I took a deep breath, tucked my laptop under my coat, climbed out of the car, and strode in. I filled out a form, turned my laptop over to a guy named Patrick, and waited like an anxious father for two hours until he returned.

“Do you have things backed up on the Cloud?” Patrick asked. I shook my head. “Why not?”

I don’t know, it was 2015 and the Cloud was still sort of new and I didn’t really understand it and I was lazy and apathetic and it seemed slightly ominous with undertones of a privacy-less dystopian future I don’t know fuck off Patrick I wasn’t on the goddamn Cloud.

“It’s an old laptop,” I replied.

“That doesn’t matter.” He looked at me blankly. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

What did he think he was, a surgeon? There’s nothing I can do. You’re not a surgeon, Patrick. I suddenly regretted imagining him as a doctor, perhaps even subconsciously imbuing him with the import of one, perhaps my bearing making him feel like one, there’s nothing I can do, this wasn’t the fucking ER, what did you mean there was nothing you could do? This was the twenty-first century. I even said it aloud: “This is the twenty-first century.” But then who was I to invoke the twenty-first century when I hadn’t even backed up my files on the Cloud. It might as well have been a typewriter. He told me the hard drive needed to be “wiped.” Patrick. He was a boy, really. A man with a little boy’s face. Or, he said, they could just replace the hard drive altogether. Either way, my files would be lost. I stared at him for a moment.

“Do you have a mother?” I asked him.

“Pardon?”

“What you’re suggesting — It’s like being told they could save your mother’s life if they replaced her brain.”