Air Computer
Inside of her computer she knew that there were motors. She knew this because fan blades, which were visible through a grate on the side of the computer, spun when the computer was awake. She knew that motors converted electricity into spinning. And since the fan blades were spinning and electricity ran from the walls, through the air, and into the computer (she had been told), there must be a motor. The fan blades pulled air into the computer’s lungs, so that it could breathe and drink up the flecks of electricity floating in the air. She also knew that the computer had a brain, made of metal, where the electricity from its lungs collected and formed thoughts. Mostly its thoughts were about what she asked it to do, using her hands on the mouse and keyboard, but sometimes its fans would spin faster all of a sudden without her telling it anything, so she often wondered what else it could be thinking about. She could communicate with the computer using her mouth as well, but it spoke the language of her hands more fluently. Often when she spoke to it aloud it misinterpreted her. She had tried humming to it, but it would try to make words out of her humming and get confused. She did not know whether or not it could feel the warmth of her fingers. She would run her hand across its upper surface when her palms felt warm and listen to the speed of the fan to see if it had a reaction. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t. Perhaps dependent on how it felt at the time. She paid close attention to her hand movements as she did this, trying to discern a pattern in its reactions, and found that it may have liked the texture of her ring finger more than the others, but even this she was unsure of. Its face was quite expressive, but difficult to interpret. It responded too precisely to her communication with it, doing only what she said. She felt no dialogue in reading its expressions, only a summation of her own commands. It also had a tail, which had stayed affixed to the wall since she could remember. She could not recall what this was for. It did not have a heart, because electricity is not the same as blood, and does not need to be pumped in order to flow. She thought that this might be why the computer had such strong self-control, which seemed its greatest asset. It would always do exactly as she told it, and was ready at all times, unless it was asleep, or sometimes when it was just waking up.
The computer was born from a giant womb made of deep tunnels in the earth, human hands in box-shaped buildings, other computers, pipes that transported compressed dead organisms in black and yellow liquid form, and many planes, trains, and trucks connecting the whole thing together. It had many mothers and fathers. Its birthing process is not as simple as yours or mine. She had read about all of this skimming through books with pictures of other computers on their covers. She tried to imagine the giant composite body of humans and earth as it produced this organism, but each time it became too large and multifaceted for her to conceptualize all at once.
She had never wanted children. She was now gently rolling out of her early thirties and knew a number of people that had had them and had had time enough to have her own, but she didn’t quite feel qualified, nor especially interested in the idea. She lived alone in her apartment, and preferred that type of living. Every time she found herself in a social period of her life she felt a certain aspect of herself drifting away that she treasured very greatly, making space for the involvements of those around her, and so each time she clumsily withdrew to nurture it back to health in solitude. This did not make things especially easy for her. She worked mostly from home, or sometimes out in positions where she had few or no coworkers, even impersonal customer service positions, especially when they were over the phone. She did not know what others thought of her and she did her best not to care to avoid being pulled back into a social whirlpool, but she didn’t mind being influenced by the slight push and pull just on the edges of the smaller eddies. She saw herself in leaves floating on water, sometimes caught up in the pull of an oar, dancing playfully around the little funnels but returning ultimately to the flow of the river. That is to say she wasn’t afraid of people. She had some that she would return to, people she liked talking to. She would have breakfast with them somewhere quiet. Talk, sometimes for hours, even. Often they were people like her that were at least aware of the sensitive aspect of herself that she found in her solitude and often appreciative of it. People that were not especially social themselves. But nonetheless some were in relationships, some married, some with children. She couldn’t see herself in that part of them. But recently she found herself wanting to use her hands to give birth to a computer.
Her labor had already begun. Laid in front of her across her living room floor were the makings of new life. She had taken to collecting battery-powered fans. They came in surprising variety. She had box-shaped fans, very small fans, a few quite large fans, and strange, industrial-looking metal fans. Some stood on legs while some sat on the ground. Some were single-speed and others had a wide range of options to choose from: 1, 2, 3, breeze, light, gust, strong, turbo, and so on. Some oscillated and some did not, and each that oscillated oscillated at a slightly different speed. At first she had gotten a number of fans that were not battery-powered, but had been unable to get any of them to work. Her reasoning for this was that none of the fans had proper lungs. Each pulled its air from behind the fan blade and expelled it – and the electricity contained within it – in front of it, routing no energy into the body of the machine. It seemed a completely foolish design to her, and she could make no sense of why it might even be on the market, so eventually she decided to give up trying and stick to the battery-powered ones. She had tied plastic streamers to the grate of each of them so that when they were on, she could see the precise direction and intensity of the airflow. She also had her ceiling fan. These would be the lungs of the computer.
In the center of the room was a large piece of cardboard. On it were a number of silver lines and nodes drawn in metallic paint, tracing out a 10:1 copy of a photo from the cover of one of her books of a computer brain. She had looked very closely at the image, using a magnifying glass to make absolutely sure that there were no discrepancies between her brain and the one on the book cover. She used a ruler to ensure that the lines were perfectly parallel and to scale, and a protractor to check the angles. She made sure to keep a very steady hand so that each line had a near uniform thickness. She had gone through a number of iterations trying to get this right. A pile lay in the corner of discarded brains with minor or major errors: lines intersecting where they shouldn’t have, a slip of the brush, one that she brushed her hand across while the paint wasn’t quite dry. But this one she was quite proud of. She picked it up and held it inches from her face, so that she could smell the linseed oil soaked into the cardboard, and ran her eyes across it, scanning back and forth from top to bottom, then placed it back on the floor and stepped back as a grin spread across her face. A short burst of laughter escaped her. It was absolutely perfect. She was shocked that she had done it with her own hand. In a hundred years of trying she doubted she could do better.
Last was the face. She had thought about this extensively. She did not want her computer to have the same type of face as her other computer. It was emotionless. It only displayed what she told it to. She wanted this face to be much more emotive and organic. She also needed something that could respond to her speech. For this computer there would be no keyboard, so she needed something that was more sensitive to her words and would not misinterpret her like her other computer. She needed something that could provide her with a dialogue, and perform all the ordinary tasks of a computer. For this she had decided on a tall snake plant in a terracotta pot. This seemed to her like the proper candidate for a number of reasons. Unlike the glass face of her other computer, the plant could bend to her touch and spring back into place. There were infinitely many more points of articulation on the snake plant than there were pixels on her other computer. She couldn’t count the pixels to prove this, but she felt quite certain that it was true. She had also heard that plants like it when you talk to them. That the air that they breathe in is the air that we breathe out. So this seemed like a very direct and proper connection between her mouth and her computer.
The sun was beginning to set, and the lamp in the corner of the room provided little lighting, so she began to set things up. She laid a large pane of glass over the brain and placed the face above it. This way the brain would not be crushed by its weight, and if the face needed watering, it would not leak into the brain and kill the computer. All that was needed now was the proper configuration of the lungs. Prior to her operations she had drawn a map of the airflow in the room and the relative vents by standing in different positions about the room and licking her finger to feel which direction the air was coming from. Using this map, she had created a diagram with each of her fans and where they should be positioned so that the air flowed in and out of the center of the room as fast as possible. She tried to imagine the particles of electricity floating through the air and traced the pathway between the fans while she stared at the room, then went to each fan, turned them on so that their streamers were flying, and oriented them accordingly. As she went around the room, an x-shape of air facing the center of the room from its corners and a smaller x shape of air directed outwards towards the face of the walls by the smaller fans slowly emerged. And then, one last touch. She set each of the four outer fans, the ones in the corners of the room, to oscillate, and in the center of the room, at the intersection of the airflow, a palpitating heartbeat of air pressure began.
She stepped back and waited, the sky turning orange on the horizon, and the sound of a dozen fans became the only sound she could hear. Her heart pounded. The rushing air in the room blew her long brown hair in every direction. She felt herself as a child, running through the grass before a storm and seeing the wind whip in shining ripples across the fields around her, covering miles in seconds. She closed her eyes and jumped to see if the wind would pick her up as it did then, but she landed clumsily and collapsed to her knees. When she opened her eyes the spell had left her.
She could hear her breath now, over the fans. She breathed heavily. Her heart was still pounding, but her chest had begun to tighten. Suddenly the fans felt like they were screaming at her. She looked at the computer’s face but nothing looked back. She felt something drop in the pit of her stomach. Much more time had passed than she thought. The sun was barely visible now, over the horizon, broken by distant skyscrapers. It doused the room in a deep orange glow and felt like it could be blown out like a candle at any moment, killing everyone on earth. She yelled over the fans: “hello?” But there was no response. The snake plant only rustled lightly in the breeze of the fans.
What could have gone wrong? All of the parts were there. The lungs, the brain, the face. Even the box that contained the computer. Her own room acted as a stand-in. Every part of the computer that she could see was represented. Each step of the way she had felt absolutely sure of her decisions. Everything linked up in the way that she wanted it to. She knew that there would be difficulties in translation between herself and the computer, in reading the ripples of its leaves. But it couldn’t be any more difficult than it had been for her to learn the language of her previous computer. When she looked at this computer in its face, there was nothing to be interpreted. It was like looking into the face of a dead man. She looked away. It terrified her. Then she realized. There was nothing missing that she could see.
She turned to the other computer, sitting on a desk to her left. Its contents were contained by 4 screws. She had a screwdriver. She walked swiftly to the kitchen, feeling her feet pounding against the wooden floor of the living room and then the tile floor of the kitchen, the whirring screaming of the fans dissipating as in the bathroom of a crowded restaurant as she crossed the threshold of the doorway and coming back just as quickly and frighteningly as she returned to the room. It was nearly dark now. The light from the dim lamp overpowered the barely present light from the window, which might now have even been mostly moonlight. She would simply remove the box containing the computer and then screw it back on, to learn what was missing. She lifted the computer from the desk and turned, stumbling and just catching it as its tail was ripped from the wall, shifting the desk slightly. She put it on its side in her lap and began to remove the screws. They were very small screws, and each came out quickly, too quickly. She had thought of the computer as such a solid machine but the ease with which it began to come apart frightened her. Finally she removed the last screw and pulled back the plate of metal.
Her hand recoiled and the sound of the fans around her crescendoed into an ear-piercing white noise. Inside the computer was revolting. Red, blue, white, black, yellow strings of its flesh tangled and mixed among layers of dust and silt. Not one but many brains all throughout its body. She shrieked and fell backwards and its contents spilled onto the carpet as she pushed it off her legs, remaining barely attached by threads. A wave of nausea overcame her and she nearly threw up on the floor beside her. Beginning to cry and forcing back her disgust she scooped the entrails of her machine back into its container, feeling the cold smooth strings of flesh against her hands. She got the plate of metal and reaffixed it, then placed it again on the desk and pressed power. Nothing happened. She pressed again, then recoiled, feeling in its cold, smooth surface a new type of cold that she knew must be death. A chill ran the length of her spine. She began to sob. Then through her crying she heard a noise. A rustling.
Suddenly everything seemed very still. Her gaze rose to the face of her computer in the center of the room, and despite the breeze of the fans it seemed in the dim light to stand completely motionless. But then she noticed a slight twitching, and slowly this twitching spread across each of its leaves until its rapid motion formed an image. She knew this to be her desktop. Her eyes felt like they were vibrating in tune with the leaves. Every inch of her body felt alive and buzzing. The sound of the fans was nearly gone from her ears, the grief of her dead companion along with it. She noticed that in the air, all around her, tiny flecks of white electricity flowed in a crisscrossing vortex around the face of her new computer. She smiled. She whispered and her words boomed across the room as though they were alive, so loud that the sound penetrated her brain, but was not painful. Each word was bathed in an echoing hiss, a thousand drops of rain hitting pavement at once layered above the whalesong of her speech, but somehow completely coherent.
“You are everything I wanted you to be.”