The toaster wouldn’t toast, and the microwave wouldn’t—umm—make tiny heat waves, or whatever it does. The fridge, though, the fridge had slow-cooked everything inside overnight and the apartment stank like delicious death.

Though, what had woken me up this morning was my phone on the night stand. Rather than my alarm going off at the usual time, it started at 5:30am by repeatedly redialing a pizza place a few time zones East and putting it on speaker. They were getting kind of upset with me, but I couldn’t quite speak English yet on account of the coffee machine refusing to produce anything but high-pressure jets of boiling water aimed at my torso.

I finally managed to get the TV going. In-between bouts fighting to keep it on a news channel instead of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, I pieced together that we were at war. Sometime last night, we’d launched a cyber-salvo toward Asia. But, it had backfired: It turns out most of the embedded network processors in our stuff came from there in the first place.