Yes, how terrible and worrisome when those externals became like organs, unfastened by bones or flesh to their hosts. Victims, all of us, to a life eroded by digital rain, pickaxed apart by bits and digits, with the small death of ring after ring ghosting through the cracks—each one a momentary, thin spike slid into the ego, bruising it, whispering, “You’re nothing” into it, compounding fractures in it, year after year, until the result was a paranoid beast unable to disconnect its mind from its pocket as it bulged with a poisoned treasure.
