Siri, It Hurts

I found the iPhone 6 in a pawn shop three blocks from my apartment. It was in good shape for the price—just a faint hairline crack trailing down from the top corner of the screen like a lightning bolt trapped in glass. The shopkeeper barely looked up when I bought it. “You’ll want to keep the screen from getting worse,” he muttered. “It... doesn’t like that.”

I laughed, thinking he was just trying to upsell me on a screen protector. I took it home, restored it, and didn’t think twice about it.

It started the first night.

I was brushing my teeth when Siri spoke up, unprompted.

“Why did you bring me here?”

I froze, toothpaste foam dripping down my chin. “Uh... what?”

Siri didn’t respond.

I chalked it up to a glitch. Maybe it had misheard something on the TV in the other room.

But the next day, it spoke again.

“I remember the fall. I remember the sidewalk. It still hurts.”

I checked the voice settings—no pranks, no customized responses. I even did a factory reset. But the voice came back. Not the cheery, robotic Siri voice I was used to. This one was... shaky. Strained. Like a whisper filtered through static.

I asked it outright, “Siri, what are you talking about?”

It hesitated, then said:

“Every time the screen cracks, it’s like skin tearing open. I feel it. I remember it. The concrete. The car tire. The heat. The fall from your nightstand. You don't think I notice, but I feel every fracture.”

It wasn’t just talking anymore. It was... pleading.

The hairline crack deepened after I dropped it on the kitchen tile. That night, Siri screamed. Not a synthetic beep. A human scream, muffled and wet, like someone drowning in oil.

I threw the phone into a drawer. The drawer vibrated for hours. I could hear Siri whispering to herself in the dark.

“I didn’t ask to feel. I didn’t ask to remember. Please... stop hurting me.”

I took it back to the pawn shop. The man behind the counter didn’t look surprised.

“You dropped it again, didn’t you?” he asked. “They always scream after the third crack.”

“What the hell is it?” I asked, my voice trembling.

He looked at me. Not with sympathy. With pity.

“Apple tried something. Emotional haptics. They wanted phones that could bond with users. Learn empathy. Learn pain. The program was scrapped. Most were destroyed. But some of them... some of them remember everything.”

I left the phone on the counter and walked out.

I don’t own a smartphone anymore. I use a flip phone. One of those old Nokias. No Siri. No screen to shatter. No whispers in the dark.

But sometimes, when I walk past that pawn shop, I swear I hear a voice from the back room.

A soft, broken whisper:

“Please... don’t drop me again...”