Page 95 of Vivacity

‘Holy shit!’ Jamie shouts, and I laugh. Now’s not the time for a swearing lecture.

‘Look at it!’ I say instead. ‘It’s incredible!’ It really is. He’s opted to have almost everything in white, and it looks positively futuristic, the soft RGB lighting of some of the components glowing prettily within the glass case.

‘I’ll be able to change the colours of the lights and everything,’ he says. ‘I might change it all to pale blue. That’d look nice and relaxing.’

I shake my head. ‘Consider me gobsmacked. I can’t believe you built that thing.’

‘We built it,’ he corrects. ‘I would’ve been too scared to do it on my own.’

I’ve done fuck all, but I’ll take it. We grin at each other. I feel giddy for him.

‘What’s next?’

‘We need to take it up to my room and connect it to my monitor, but it should be fine. Oh, and I’m going to change these, too. They look ugly.’

He points to some flat black wires attached to one of the components. They are indeed ugly, at odds with the sleek white of everything else.

‘Those ones came with the GPU, but I got spares in white just in case,’ he explains. ‘Look.’

He unwraps the replacements, which I agree will match the rest of the components far better. With the same efficiency, he disconnects the black cables from the part they’re attached to.

Immediately, the entire computer powers down.

I freeze.

‘What—did you just trip the fuse?’

‘Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod,’ he chants. ‘No no no no no.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘I just tried to hot-swap them.’ The pitch of his voice rises to panic mode, and he begins to jump around on the spot, shaking out his hands.

‘What does that mean?’ I can feel, hear, the panic in my own voice.

‘I took them out while the power was on. I think I just fried the GPU.’

Now, I don’t know much about hardware. But I know thatfriedis not good.

‘What’s the GPU?’

‘That box. The graphics card.’ He starts to cry. ‘Ohmigod, I’m so stupid. So fuckingstupid.’

‘Is it fixable?’ I ask, staring in horror at the now inert PC. The PC that cost over a grand and has just taken Jamie months to plan and almost three hours to assemble. I’m pretty sure the graphics card was the single most expensive component of this entire piece of kit.

‘I don’t know!’ he wails. He presses the power button, but nothing happens. He shakes his head, tears rolling freely down his cheeks. ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s fried.’

‘You mean it’s ruined?’

He presses his lips together and nods his head.

‘Are you serious right now?’

My tone has him looking up at me, his eyes huge. ‘I think so,’ he says in a small voice. He presses the power button. Again. Again. Nothing. ‘It would have caused a power surge.’ His voice grows even smaller. ‘I might have damaged the motherboard, too.’

I stare at him in horror. My devastation on his behalf flares bright and hot inside me. I want to pull him into a hug, to shieldhim from this brutal kick in the nuts. But within a fraction of a second it’s ignited into something far uglier, something that makes me want to shake him in frustration.

‘You told me you had this in hand. I’ve just watched you assemble the damn thing like a professional! How the fuck could you have been so stupid?’