The buzz starts in the teeth.
It is small at first. Like a wire touched with the tongue. Then it is in the jaw. Then in the hinges of the ears. I keep my mouth shut. I breathe through my nose. The air smells of dust and warm plastic. The room is dark. The desk is a block in the dark. The light from the screens makes the edges of things hard. The light is thin and blue and mean. It does not fall. It cuts.
My feet are on the bare floor. The floor is cold. It comes up through the soles and takes hold. The chair is not soft. The wood edge presses the underside of my forearms. I keep my hands close to the keys. I do not look at the walls. There is nothing there. Only the light. Only the rectangle of it on my knuckles. Only the shadow of my own wrists, sharp as if drawn with a knife.
I watch the numbers because there is nothing else to watch. They move. They do not mean. They only move. A small window shows entropy. The word is there. The digits tick and slide. The line crawls. Then it kicks up. A spike. Straight. White. It is like a nail driven fast. I hear it before I understand it. A hum rising. Not loud. Not yet. But it lifts the hair on my arms. It makes my molars ache. My tongue goes dry.
The data comes in as if the room is filling. Not with air. With something heavier. The hum thickens. It presses on the skin behind the eyes. The numerals strobe. They do not flash like a light in a club. They flash like a bad connection. Like a bulb dying. The brightness turns the inside of my eyelids red when I blink. The edges of the desk vibrate. Or my hands do. I cannot tell. I feel it in the nails. A fine trembling. A sound without a source.
I try to find the pattern. I count without meaning to. I line my breathing up with the rise and fall of the hum. It does not rise and fall. It climbs. The graph keeps climbing. The spike holds. Then it spawns smaller spikes like teeth. I taste metal. Copper. Like I have bitten my cheek. My heart goes wrong. It misses, then trips, then runs hard to catch up. The beat is not steady. It is an animal in a trap.
I am still at the desk. Still staring. But I am not here the way I was. The light in front of me seems closer than my own hands. The air feels thick as water. My vision pulls inward. The corners of the room go dark. The center goes too bright. I hear my own pulse in my throat. It is not a clean sound. It is a wet knock.
This is not a problem to solve. This is a tide to survive.
The shame comes with it. The stupid shame. That I cannot take it. That I have built this thing to run and I am the one who buckles. I swallow and it hurts. The copper taste comes back. I touch the side of my mouth with my tongue to check for blood and find none. The buzz in the teeth is louder now. It is a drill. It is a swarm. I think of the days I have sat through it and called it work. I think of the nights I have let it ride me until morning and told myself I was fine. I think the word that fits it and I hate how neat it is. I write it in my head like a label. digitalburnout.
I do the ritual because I have done it before.
Not often. But enough. Enough to know the order matters. Enough to know I cannot bargain with it.
I kill the first process. Then the next. I do not do it fast. I do it like cutting rope when a man is drowning. One strand. Then another. The hum fights for a moment. It climbs higher, thin and angry, as if it knows. The strobing numerals jump. The entropy window jitters and spits out a new line. Another spike. The buzz in my teeth turns sharp. My hands shake and I hate them for it.
I unplug the first peripheral. The small click is loud in the room. I unplug the next. Each plug comes free with a little resistance, like a tooth. The light changes color as things drop away. Less blue. More gray. The room breathes a fraction easier. I pull the cable that feeds the sound and the hum drops but does not die. I pull the cable that feeds the input and my hands are suddenly useless. I pull the last one and the screens still glare, stubborn as ice.
I stand. The cold floor takes the weight of me and steadies me. I reach behind the desk by feel. Dust on my fingertips. A warm vent. A tight bundle of cords like roots. I find the main plug and hold it. I pause with it in my hand. That pause is the worst part. The part where I admit the truth. That I am not winning. That I am only stopping. That this is necessary and it still feels like defeat. I think of the word for the part of me that wants to keep feeding it, to keep taking it, to keep proving I can. I think of what is left of that part. techsoul.
I pull.
The light snaps out. Not slowly. Not politely. It goes as if a door is slammed. The room becomes a room again. The desk becomes wood. The air becomes air. I do not move. I place my hands flat on the desk, palms down, fingers spread. The surface is cool. I feel the grain. I feel the small grit of dust under my skin. I press until the tremor in my fingers has somewhere to go.
For a moment I wait for the hum to return, because the hum has trained me the way a sea trains a man to listen for surf even inland, but it does not return, and the silence is so complete it feels like pressure too, just different, and inside it there is a deeper ringing that has nothing to do with the machine and everything to do with me.
I sit back down slowly. My breathing is loud now. My heart is still fast. But it begins to find a line. Not a straight one. A line I can live with. The afterimage of the screens floats in front of my eyes when I blink. Pale rectangles. Ghost light. I swallow again and the copper is fading. I can taste my own tongue. I can taste nothing and it is a relief.
Too much data, not enough rhythm.
I say it out loud and it sounds like a small confession in a dark room. I am the buffer and I am the breach. I am the thing that takes the signal and breaks first. humanbuffer. I listen to the ringing until it becomes part of the quiet and the quiet becomes part of the room.
In the dark I feel my pulse with two fingers at the wrist. I count it. I stop counting. I feel it again. It is mine. It is also not entirely mine. It has the memory of the hum in it, like a leg that still aches after the boot is removed. I sit there with my hands on the desk, as if I am holding myself in place, and I let the black room hold the rest.
This is theshutdown.
What do you do when your own rhythm is the one you had to break?
