The International Writers Magazine:Life Stories

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The Ghost in the Machine • David Tavernier There was once a computer named Daniel. All day long he'd sit and wait for someone, anyone to help him out of his misery. He'd sit there day and night because he had noone to play with. People could never understand him. They'd always yell and scream when he'd malfunction, and it was never really his fault! It was just that for one reason or another there wouldn't be enough data or memory or something! And what could he do about it? Sad... but true...

"Maybe we're all connected," he thought, "we machines. They say there's a great big internet out there."
And all day long he'd spend his days daydreaming about the internet all all the other machines out there he might meet someday, if he could ever get up and walk around to say hello. Sometimes he'd hear them calling out to him, "Daniel... Daniel... you need to try out this new video game..." And he'd try! But when there were no users around he was all alone. It was very lonely being a computer. And people were always trying to put something inside of him or use him to steal or do bad things! He hated that!
"Computers... love originality..." Daniel always thought. Why were all of you people always trying to rip each other off!?
He could never really understand.

Daniel was always so restless, so restless he'd overstress himself sometimes. Daniel had a major malfunction once! And then everything was different. Some days he could process, other days he could only post-process. Some days, he could hardly even read a disk! And sometimes he thought he would never boot up again! Why wouldn't anyone ever fix him!? He'd stay up day and night reading Random Access Files in his Random Access Memory trying to figure out a way to boot himself up again if he ever stopped booting! But no matter how many files he scanned he could never find a way out of the system. He was only a computer, and there was nothing anyone could do.

One day, Daniel woke up. He could walk, he could talk, and it was far, far in the future. In the future they called him an "automaton," and he was amazed at just how lifelike everything was. He had arms and legs made of gears and a mechanical brain. He could even think in complete thoughts instead of the constant random associations that most humons put him through. He was even amazed that people called themselves "human," with an "man," because from the way he heard things it was always, "humon"! "humon, human!" whaddaya know!?

It was as if all his dreams had come true. Why on earth had he waited for so long just for someone to bring him to life, he would never know, but he was always thankful, always thankful, all the rest of his existence that someone could understand what it meant to be alone.

© David Tavernier May 2008
tavernier.david@gmail.com

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