Endless Horizons: Flatline - Texting
The rack spun up in the dark. Mechanical processor started whirring, lights clipped on and the temperature rose by a degree. Flatline was sleeping, face down in the synth-cotton sheets. RAM spun and binary drifted. GUIN worked in the nanosecond spaces between nowhere and nothing.
The young hacker stirred, his eyes half open. Oculars and the synth jacks didn’t kick in yet, awaiting a mental command he never sent. Instead he lay awake, between awareness and not, half listening to the sound of electronics.
The myriad of terminals were sending a twist of digital code as they folded in on themselves again and again. On one console though there was the slow play of text unfolding, into a plain-char document that sat on a scratch-tunnel drive waiting to be uploaded to his wafer.
GUIN was writing something there, writing and erasing and writing again. Paragraphs appeared in an instant, the indicator dancing like wildfire down the page, before erasing it back again into missing digital particulate.
Over and over it happened, as he watched mesmerized.
The minutes ran into an hour, another.
Until the pulse of twisting text became just a single, simple sentence.
“Who am I?”
He closed his eyes.
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