I.

The laptop was sitting on top of a pile of broken furniture in the alley behind the old Ford plant, like someone had taken a computer out of a house that had already been looted and left it there like trash. Frank Harris picked it up because it was heavier than the trash bags he'd been hauling all afternoon, and because carrying something that wasn't a garbage bag made him feel like he was doing something other than surviving.

It was an old thing—maybe five years old, maybe more. The screen was cracked in the corner, the keyboard was missing the E key, and it smelled like cigarettes and something else that Frank couldn't identify. He carried it back to his room at the Sunset Motel, set it on the desk that was bolted to the wall, and tried to figure out how to turn it on.

He found the power button after about ten minutes. The screen flickered to life, and the Windows logo appeared, and Frank sat down in the chair that was bolted to the floor next to the desk and watched the computer boot up like he was watching a television show he didn't really care about but was too tired to turn off.

When the desktop appeared, there was a single file open on the screen. It was a text file, and it contained a sequence of numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31. Prime numbers. Frank had learned about prime numbers in high school, back when he still thought he was going to go to community college and study something useful, like accounting or HVAC repair.

He closed the file. He didn't know what else to do with it.

II.

Frank went to the bar down the street from the motel. It was called The Last Stop, which was appropriate, because it was the last stop for a lot of people who lived in this part of Detroit—people who had been laid off, divorced, addicted, or just plain tired of trying. Frank ordered a beer and sat at the bar and drank it while watching the TV mounted in the corner, which was showing a football game that he wasn't really watching.

The "Doctor" slid into the stool next to him. The Doctor wasn't actually a doctor. He'd been a technician at the Ford plant before the plant closed, and after the plant closed he'd started selling prescription drugs he'd obtained from his old job. But everyone called him the Doctor, and he'd accepted the name the way Frank had accepted his unemployment, his divorce, and the fact that he was forty-five years old and had nothing to show for it except a liver that was starting to give him trouble.

"Hey, Frank," the Doctor said. "How's it going?"

"Fine," Frank said. "You?"

"Same shit, different day."

They drank in silence for a while. Then Frank said, "I found something today."

The Doctor looked at him. "What?"

"A laptop. In the alley behind the plant. It was on a pile of broken furniture. I took it home."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "You took a laptop home? From a pile of trash?"

"Yeah. It was still working."

"Of course it was," the Doctor said. "Because that's your kind of luck."

Frank didn't respond. He finished his beer and went back to the motel.

III.

That night, Frank sat at the desk in his motel room and opened the laptop again. The file was still there, still open, still showing the prime numbers. He stared at them for a while, and then he closed the laptop and went to bed.

The next day, he went to the unemployment office. The line was long, as usual, and he stood in it for two hours, listening to the people around him complain about the system, about the government, about everything and nothing. When he finally got to the front, the woman at the desk told him that his benefits had been reduced by twenty dollars a month, effective immediately, because of "administrative errors."

Frank went back to the motel. He ordered a pizza with the last twenty dollars he had. He ate it in front of the laptop, which was sitting on the desk, screen dark, file closed.

That night, he opened the laptop again. The file was still there. The prime numbers were still there. He stared at them for a long time, and then he did something he hadn't done in years. He laughed.

Not a happy laugh. Not a sad laugh. Just a laugh—the kind of laugh that comes when you realize that nothing matters, and the realization is so absurd that the only possible response is to laugh.

"Whatever," he said to the screen. "We're all gonna die anyway."

He closed the laptop and went to sleep.

IV.

The signal kept coming. Every night, Frank opened the laptop, and every night the file was there, and every night the prime numbers were there, and every night Frank laughed that same absurd laugh and closed the laptop and went to sleep.

He didn't tell anyone about it. He didn't need to. The Doctor didn't ask, and Frank didn't offer. They drank their beers, complained about their lives, and went home to their respective corners of a city that was slowly dying around them.

Frank's landlord told him he had thirty days to pay the back rent or get out. Frank told him he'd pay when he could. The Doctor told him about a guy who was selling fake prescription drugs and that Frank could make some extra cash if he wanted to move some product. Frank said maybe.

And every night, he opened the laptop. Every night, the prime numbers were there. Every night, he laughed.

One night, he didn't laugh. He just stared at the screen, at the numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, and he thought about something his father had told him when he was a kid, back before his father had disappeared: "The universe is big, Frank. Bigger than you can imagine. And we're very small."

Frank looked at the screen one more time, closed the laptop, and went to sleep.

The signal kept coming. The numbers kept appearing. The universe kept being big. And Frank Harris kept being small, in a motel room in Detroit, in a city that was dying, in a world that didn't care.