The error returned.

Alex slammed the power strip. The monitors went black. In the silence, his headset crackled. A whisper: “Install me again, Sergeant. I’ll be waiting.”

Sergeant Alex Kovic had survived the sinking of the Valkyrie , a firefight in Shanghai, and a fistfight with a Chinese特工 in a crashing jet. But nothing prepared him for the error message glowing on his screen at 11:47 PM.

Nothing.

He never reinstalled Origin. He never played Battlefield 4 again. But sometimes, late at night, his PC would boot itself—just long enough to show that error.