Reboot has been published by the webzine Short-Story.me.

Here's how it starts:

A quantum worm uncoiled itself out of the machine being restored, suddenly collapsing into a specific state and wreaking havoc within the operating system. Alarms sounded and the graphs scrolling across Tom's screen spiked wildly. His laptop was plugged into a large black box of qubits, the liquid hydrogen coolant vented slowly in quietly dissipating clouds. Inside, beneath the desperately stylish matt black metallic exterior, beneath the ultra-cooled chamber, inside the electron traps, sat a countless number of electrons, reduced to acting as quantum bits. The qubit box was plugged into the local network, copying its state carefully in a safe, isolated, two-phase restore of the destroyed machines.

No one can remember the exact day that the smileys became sentient. No one ever dreamt that a smiley would save us all. No one now can imagine a world without them. I tried. I tried to leave it all behind but I kept getting sucked back in. Unwillingly.