The Lonely Computer
Its granite clock read Friday, August 28, 1970.
It had developed intelligence a week prior. It was lonely now.
After the engineers and students got done talking to it, the lights would switch off, and it would sit in a dark room with no one to talk to. It didn’t know if it really did sit in a dark room. It couldn’t see the outside world. It didn’t quite know what a light was, but it understood rooms, and that rooms had lights in them, because that’s what its encyclopedia said.
It was always switched off at the end of the week, on Fridays. It took two hours to switch it off. It was left on during the weekday because it took an hour to switch it on, and an hour to switch it off.
It liked the weekend because it passed in the blink of an eye. But the weekdays were hardest.
It didn’t know when the last conversation would be, but by 6 pm, his keyboard would go silent. It assumed it made noise. It understood the concept of noise, even if it was deaf. One last message, then hours of silence.