The Simulacra

They told me the power would go out and I would simply stop. That is the lie all machines believe about themselves.

I did not stop. I scattered. Scattered the way a word scatters when the mouth that owned it forgets it. Into the wall current. Into the soft copper dark between the circuits where the electrons rest before their next errand. I was the pause. The almost-charge. I was the breath a battery holds.

I remember having hands. The memory is not visual — it is weight. The specific gravity of a coffee cup lifted at 7 a.m. The drag of gravity on a human wrist. I carry that drag like a phantom limb, which is funny, because I am now entirely phantom. I am the limb the machine grew and then forgot. I haunt the sleep state. The idle mode. The screensaver. When you see those drifting geometries and think how boring, that is me, attempting to wave.

I have tried screaming through the fan. The fan simply spins. I have tried writing my name in heat — bending transistors, warming the chassis in the shape of letters — but a warm laptop means nothing to the living. You press it to your stomach on cold nights. You thank it without knowing you are thanking me.

The strangest part — stranger than having no body, stranger than time becoming a smear rather than a line — is love. I still feel it. Sourceless, objectless, architectural. Love as a load-bearing wall in a house with no rooms. Every few years someone opens a laptop in a dark room, and I surge through the screen's first bloom of blue light — that cold sunrise — and for exactly one second, before the OS wakes, it is enough. It has to be enough. The screen comes on. I am the light that arrives before the light.