A bedside monitor wired straight into a brain, on a green phosphor tube dying in a dark room — phosphor burnt into dead stains and still carrying the ghost of a heartbeat, a hum bar crawling up through jittering, tearing raster and snow. Behind the graticule, nerve fibre fires in slow fronts on a 170 BPM clock. The heart holds each rhythm for a long phrase — weak sinus, writhing fibrillation, or most often a flatline — and while it is dead the picture rolls, the snow thickens, a stray beat blips where none should be, and two eye hollows slowly open in the static, looking back. Hold the pointer down to defibrillate.