Killing processes.

On the movie screen, it only needs to run a few frames for you to get the point. Displaying it much longer would be boring.

Late at night and couched in darkness, a face is illuminated by the glow of a CRT monitor. Modem lights flashing on a desk hidden in the blackness that is everything but the screen, the face and the fingers flying like drones over a dim grey keyboard.

It's a bit misleading, that part. In the movie, there's always music in the background. In reality, this is an activity so all-encompassing that we don't tend to notice the silence, the clock tick, or the sound of our own exhalation. Furthermore, there's always something exciting happening on the screen to warrant the activity. It's never just a person hunkered down for the night staring aimlessly ahead, most of the time at nothing at all. But that is what it's really like. Being the silent computer-glow person isn't a fleeting moment on film, it's hours and hours of actual life, actual heartbeats wasted. It's what I miss the most about having a working computer.

I don't feel that I really wasted all the hours I've spent thinking, "what next?" or "maybe someone will log on soon..." and I don't want back all the messages I've sent into the darkness to people who sleep instead of responding. "Are you there?" "Hey, you..." "Awake?"

Being alone in the darkness and calling out for companionship is an eternal facet of the human reality.