The Archive

a propos of nothing

I don't have time to blog today, although when I do, I have some nice pics of Washington to share (Sensenbrenner's aide was something of a whiz with a camera, it transpires).

So, to give you something to do to avoid work, here's a little story I just found in my archives...

Eileen liked computers. And computers liked Eileen. Her parents always joked that, before they found and adopted her at the age of seven, she had been raised by a pack of wild laptops in the 7-square-mile Dell warehouse just outside Leamington Spa.

At school, the called her a prodigy when, at the age of eleven, she mastered both C++ and Pascal. But they were wrong. Computers were her friends, so it was only natural she’d want to speak their language.

They called her a genius when she reconfigured the school mainframe, enabling the faculty to store and update staff and student records at a touch of a button.

Then they called her a vandal, when she used that mainframe to amend those same records, delivering her own brand of justice to her fellow students’ grades, and tweaking a few details into the bargain. The Headmaster, Mr Pigface Arsehead (or so it now said on his payslips) had not understood the purity of Eileen’s intentions and had suspended her on the spot.

Outside of the computer room, Eileen had not enjoyed school. Which is why she spent the large part of the seven years inside the computer room, constructing a digital universe to her own specification.

But eventually school was over, and Eileen was liberated into the wonderful, wider world.

It was no better.

It wasn’t so much that she hated the world. It was just the people in it. People. They were so unpredictable, unknowable. Every day was a fraught journey through other people’s emotions, a turbulent rapids requiring constant mental paddling to keep upright.

The world of meat was just not right for her. Which is why she was now sitting on the end of her bed with her laptop, the chitinous clacking of her fingers scurrying across the keyboard the only sound in the room. Illuminated as she was from below by the pallid plasma glow of her screen, a visitor, had she ever had one, might have taken her for a ghost.

Which, in a way, she was.

She looked at her screen. But she didn’t see a screen. She saw a portal into an expanding infinity where you were anything you chose to be. Eileen made a choice.

She gave the Enter key a decisive jab. And with that, she was gone.

posted by Peter The Great @ 8:54 AM