One morning, I noticed crowds of ants about my laptop. It is a lowly pentium dual core, but it is the only one I have. Everyone is curious about crowds. They want to know why the crowd? And join it. And thus the crowd. I stood and looked. And I saw that these ants were only a spillover. From the bigger crowd. Which was inside my laptop. Inside. What could they possibly find that is edible inside a computer? For you may depend on it, ants are, where food is. I don’t know how many there were, but there must have been teeming, writhing swarms, for as often as I brushed off and blew away with puffs of breath the ones I saw, more appeared, skittering about on the keyboard and the screen. The little devils had made their way into the innards of the machine through its vents and orifices. They appeared to have made themselves at home in the caverns behind the LCD and the crevices and gorges under the keyboard. Sometimes there were only one or two. Sometimes they boiled up in half dozens out of the various holes. They drove me to distraction, for it seemed nothing could keep them away. For days, we warred. I brushed them off and blew them away until I was dizzy. I hid the laptop in inaccessible places. I picked up the machine and shook it violently. I placed it in a patch of sunlight by a window and hoped that the fearsome heat (it was May) would drive them away. I wrapped it up tight in a plastic bag, hoping to suffocate them. I grieved for my better nature, but it was they, the tiny fiends, it was they who killed it.
For a space, the machine would appear to have been cleared of the enemy. Then they would appear again, singly and in pairs and in little frolicsome groups. They mocked me, the dear little pestilences. One day, however, there were no more ants for many hours. I did not rejoice, much less exult. I waited. This had happened before. They were only playing with me, the minuscule sadists.
After a long while, I decided to not care anymore. I switched on the machine. It was fast. Much faster than I remembered. With a vague suspicion of something outre, I clicked on ‘about computer’. It informed me that my computer had a sixteen core brain. A monster of a processor. The diminutive darlings, the miniature heroes, were actually micro-techies, with jaw-mounted 4 nanometre tools. Despite my egregious, unthinking, unpardonable interference, they had been industriously at work, upgrading my pathetic antique to the latest and the futuristicest.