RS-232 and other forms of grief

The alien’s name was something unpronounceable in any language spoken on this planet, which suited him fine because he was, to be perfectly honest, having a terrible Tuesday. He had come for food. Simple enough. The loft on Avenida Corrientes smelled of instant noodles and soldering irons and the specific despair of a man who owns 17 external hard drives and trusts none of them. The nerd was out. The alien was in. So far, so straightforward. Then he opened the drawer. Listen to me , because this matters: there are places in the Universe — dead stars, collapsing singularities, the men’s bathroom at a Ramones tribute concert — that contain within them a density of wrongness so profound that the mind simply refuses . This drawer was one of those places. It had a life. It had geology . Cables lay in strata the way civilizations do, each layer representing a different era of human optimism and subsequent abandonment. The alien reached in — four fingers, bluish, slightly luminescent, the kind of fingers you’d trust with delicate surgery — and pulled out a coil of something thick and grey with a connector on each end that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated the concept of insertion.