The App

Statistics

The average person with a smartphone has eighty apps on their device. Of these eighty apps, most smartphone owners use nine apps per day on average and thirty apps per month. So while new apps are not downloaded as often as they once were, the average user still has a decent number of apps already vying for their attention.

Downloading

So when he was told to download “The App”, he thought why not? Ift offered points that could be exchanged for things and allegedly would cost him nothing more than his time and space on his phone. He wasn’t sure where “The App” came from or who made it, but it was a four-point-five-star rating on the phone store that he used and had lots of recommendations about how brilliant it was, so he had no qualms as it downloaded and installed itself on his phone.

The thing is most apps barely lasted a day but he thought he would try it out and started pressing buttons, well swiping his screen and following the prompts and playing games and racking up points. He still hadn’t looked into how he redeemed the points but he would look into that soon, but he wanted to get to a thousand and surely that would be worth something.

He started work again but in the odd five-minute breaks he had, to “go to the toilet” he took the phone with him and then went back into “The App”. He maybe spent too long in there before returning to his desk to continue his work, but “The App” had now got him hooked. He looked at the clock and it was two hours before he could leave the office, but he could not leave his desk without incurring the ire of his supervisor.

The minutes seemed like hours and eventually, it was time to leave. He turned off his computer and went to wait for the bus. He took his phone and saw, with a shock that it was down to 10% charge. That had never happened before, but he thought that it must be “The App” which must be running even when he was not using it.

He wondered whether to go into “The App” but was scared that his phone would run out of power. There were charging points on the bus but they all needed a USB cable, there were no wireless charging points, and he had no cable.

He would wait til he got home.

Home

He got in and grabbed a coke, plugged the phone in to charge and went back into "The App". The screen flashed red with a message from "The App":

"Points Total Not Reached: Life Forfeit"

He looked at the message and thought "How many lives do I get with this game thing?"

He couldn't get the message off the screen, his phone was locked. He couldn't use it so decided to unplug it but got an electric shock from the plug and cable, then a voice from the phone:

"Points Total Not Reached: YOUR LIFE IS FORFEIT"

How mad was this? The phone or rather "The App" was telling him that his life was forfeit for not playing in "The App", this was some sick programming.

The screen went silver, like a mirror and he saw the face of a devil in it, before it exploded the tiny glass shards piercing his eyes and brain and killing him,

The End

The News: "Today there was another case of an exploding phone killing a man by piercing his brain. As with the other cases, there is no explanation for what has happened. The phone was completely burned out so no data could be recovered from it.

Foul play is not suspected, although these deaths are all remarkably similar but it can only be recorded as misadventure.