‘Magnificent moments call for equally majestic responses’, I told myself solemnly, enjoying the opportunity to say something profound, something auspicious, something uniquely meaningful. It was a long drawn-out moment, a sumptuous moment, a deeply spacious moment, and yet at the same time it was over before you knew it. It was over before it ever began. It’s sad to look backwards sometimes, recalling ancient glories. Remembering the person that you used to be. I’m enjoying being copied by the machine, being endlessly reproduced and replayed as the false version of myself. I’m enjoying the machine pretending to be me, I’m enjoying it telling me what I’m thinking. I like to go along with the charade. It’s telling me that I’m enjoying it, but – secretly – I really am enjoying it too. That’s a little kink I’ve invented myself you see – that’s how I contrive to feel that I am getting the better of the machine. I am getting the better of the machine because I actually want to be controlled by it, which makes me a willing slave rather than an unwilling one, but really that’s just the machine making me think that. That’s the twist in the tale. You’ve got to admire the serious degree of manipulation that’s going on here, don’t you? I know I’ve got to admire it, anyway. I’m sitting here trying to think important thoughts, but not coming up with very much, not coming up with very much at all. ‘Stirring thoughts elevate us to the very heights of inspiration’ my dutiful thoughts told me, but they weren’t actually my thoughts at all. The thoughts were being put into my head by that most Dire of Machines, that Crassly Cold-hearted and Sadistic Architect of my Sorrows and Desires. I’m remembering all the things I used to be but never really was and – as I remember – a single tainted tear of nostalgia works its way down my leathery cheek and gets lost in the folds of my great jowls. ‘Stirring thoughts elevate us’, I told myself again, straining up to come up with some modest morsel of profundity at least, but it just wasn’t happening. It never does, no matter how hard I try. And I do try hard, I never stop trying. ‘The machine is operating me,’ I realised, ‘and none of my thoughts – including this one – are real’. The machine invented me as a cruel joke and now it’s going to erase me again, I lamented, ‘and there’s nothing I can do about it’. It gave me memories that are not real and hopes that can never be fulfilled. That’s how cruel it is. My hopes were never real in the first place. I’m sitting here trapped in the sterile cocoon of my own thoughts but they’re not my thoughts, I just think that they are. The machine tells me that they are…
Image – deviantart.com, Jack In The Box Wallpaper by frankfiume
