System Restore

By caffeine.bloodstream

3.29.2007

Disclaimer: The only Mac I own is the one on my desk. Also, this is going to make very little sense if you haven't seen the commercials. Apple dot com slash getamac slash ads.

4

Dreams were strange things. Nobody could quite explain what caused the weird processing glitches that happened sometimes while a computer slept – some said it was the processor's way of finishing up tasks left undone during the day. Others thought it had something to do with leaving too many documents open, and dreams were the unit's way of protecting them from corruption. Whatever the cause, Mac's were restless and unsettling. PC was there, but out of reach; every time Mac tried to grab his hand, he slipped back, and every time he tried to create a network, he was disconnected before he could begin.

He was jolted from the nightmare, mercifully, by the chime of Skype's ringer going off. There was an orange glow drifting warmly through the windows that told of the beginning of sunset – strange, because he couldn't even remember falling asleep. But even Mac couldn't just run indefinitely, and the strain had finally knocked him out some time in the early hours of the morning.

When he saw the caller ID, his initial grogginess immediately cleared, and he picked it up before it could ring again.

It was Brian, the Geek, and his PC was all set and ready to be picked up.

There were questions to ask. Whether it had gone well – how much data had been saved – what happened now. But those were for after he got to the store. Right then, they'd just slow him down, and he had to go. PC was okay, or he wasn't, or maybe he was somewhere in between; whatever the case, Mac needed to be there. He was out the door the moment he'd hung up.

-

It was unfair, and he knew it, to resent the handful of people in line at the counter. They had things to deal with too. But a small, vindictive part of him felt that it wouldn't be so bad if the earth quietly swallowed them up or something, and when he caught that train of thought, he took a deep breath and resolved to relax. Or, if not that, to at least keep his anxiety to a background hum till it was his turn.

Finally, he was up, and faced with a Geek who wasn't Brian and who asked for name, job number, and a handful of other confirmations as to who he was and what he was there for. (In his insomnia, Mac had committed all the finer details to permanent memory. He'd even gone back through all his connection logs, and found out those pieces he hadn't been aware of – but he still preferred his description of PC's processing speed to the one in the stats. It was cute, something the numbers just didn't capture.)

The desk Geek checked his information against a sheet, nodded, and informed him that his PC was in the back, and they'd bring him right out.

'His PC.' Mac swallowed hard, and wondered how much of his PC would be left after this.

He'd honestly been expecting more of an initial shock, but when they brought PC out, he looked just as he had the day before. Almost. His tie wasn't as neat as usual – had they gone as far as removing his casing? The thought freaked Mac out – but otherwise, there was nothing to show for the ordeal. Not at first glance, at least.

Desk-Geek handed over a DVD-R in an envelope, with the explanation that this was all the data they'd been able to get off PC's hard drive. He tried not to think too much about the storage capacity of that DVD, and subsequently how little of the PC he knew had been salvaged. Maybe, he tried to reassure himself, the OS itself would fill in a lot of those gaps. Why not, right? It seemed possible. Mac had never fully understood PC's inner workings, and most likely never would, so…there was room for some hope. If he was wrong, it'd be that much harder, but he just had to hope he wasn't.

The cost the Geeks were asking for their services seemed like a stretch, but they had insurance. Mac gave that, and then his thanks, and was in turn helped out to the car; Mac found PC uniquely handsome, for the weight he carried, but he was still not an easy guy to cart around unconscious.

It was a small miracle that Mac didn't cause any accidents on the way home, because his eyes spent way less time on the road than they did on PC, resting there in the front seat, eyes closed and lips parted. He could have been asleep, if not for the slightly eerie lack of his usual whirring and humming. But he got them both home without event, and managed to get PC inside with a little careful leaning and supporting along the way. The couch was closest, so it was where they ended up, Mac's arm still around PC's waist as they both flopped to sit down. He hadn't noticed it before, perhaps because he didn't generally have to tote PC around like that, but now that they sat in such a familiar position, Mac was suddenly aware that PC'd gotten just a little smaller. He'd noticed that when Vista first came along, too, when all the old things were cleaned out to make room for the new, and briefly his mind flickered back to the mention of PC's "extra junk". Apparently he'd really lost a good deal of that. But for whatever unfriendly terms the first Geek had dubbed it with, that stuff was still part of PC. His PC. It was unnerving to realize that part of him was now simply and inalterably gone.

He couldn't dwell on that. Not yet. Not until he knew just how far-reaching this had gone. With a shift, he reached back to pull the DVD envelope from his back pocket, sliding out the disc and staring at it. It had his job number written there, in unceremonious Sharpie handwriting, just beside that disquieting "4.7G" label.

4.7G. Four point seven gigs. It wasn't much. Desk Geek had explained, as they took PC out to the car, that he was basically ready to run – Vista had been reinstalled and set up, and the disc didn't hold any essential operating files. Just the less permanent data that had survived the virus attack. It had bewildered Mac somewhat that even then, no one seemed to know exactly what had caused all this. He got the feeling no one –could- know. It could have been any of a hundred---what was it? 114,000?---any of a whole lot of viruses, and with damage this severe, there was no way to tell. That thought had given Mac pause, and made him wonder if PC was really a lot braver than he'd ever given him credit for, just for risking that on a daily basis.

Then he wondered if, when PC woke up, he'd have that same courage. Or the same laugh. Or the same surprising, wonderful affection for Mac. How much of that had been pre-installed?

(He was betting the affection part wasn't. Recent compatibility aside, their families were practically Montagues and Capulets.)

Okay. So…okay. The OS was all in place. He'd been informed that he'd probably have to talk PC through a wizard or two to get him back up to speed – reintroduce him to any networks he used, update his clock, little procedural things like that. Once he was going, Mac could load the saved data from the disc, and just see how that went.

Out of curiosity, he peeked at the disc's contents, but damned if he could make heads or tails of it. It really had been a random sampling – there were a few things he recognized, a spreadsheet here or a movie file (that was a little surprising) there, but most of the files had extensions he was pretty sure he couldn't do anything with unless he ran Parallels, and that seemed unnecessary. Whatever ".dll" meant, he trusted PC to know his way around it.

PC, who still sat there, head lolled forward now, waiting to be turned on. As desperately as he'd missed him, Mac was more than a little apprehensive. He, who had always been of the "get it over with, rip the bandaid off all once" school of thought, was reluctant, because he knew this was going to hurt. No matter how much of PC had been saved (4.7 gigs, apparently), a great deal of him was lost, something Mac had never really prepared himself for. Turning him on would mean finding out exactly how much 'a great deal' was, and that scared him.

But he was going to have to take that step eventually. And for better or worse, he just wanted to hear PC's voice again.

He took a deep breath, reached over for PC's Power button, and gently pressed it.

The response was immediate. His eyes flickered open, then closed again, and there was that familiar whirring he'd been missing from the moment Geek #1 had done his 'hard reboot'. PC buzzed and hummed and clicked, the way he always did when he was just waking up or coming back from a crash, and Mac was utterly silent all the while. He watched the Vista loading screen appear – something he realized he'd never seen, up till then – and watched the progress bar move, creeping its way towards completion.

And there it was, awareness, returning little by little to PC's expression. He paused, and blinked, and blinked again, processors humming in what sounded like a stretch as he checked his clock, then took in a glance around him.

Then he saw Mac. For a long moment, he just stared, and Mac stared back. Then he smiled, the optimistically naïve smile of one with all the best intentions but absolutely no idea what he was doing, and that made Mac ache even before he spoke up.

"Hi," he said, pleasantly and simply and with no sign of recognition at all. "I'm a PC."

Mac swallowed hard, and had to look away for a long moment before he felt composed enough to nod and answer, fighting all the while the feeling that someone had replaced all his circuits with lead.

"Yeah, I know," he answered quietly. "I'm a Mac."