Feel Like Shit, I Just Want Miles Upshur Back, Man.

Feel like shit, I just want Miles Upshur back, man.

Introduction

I’ve never thought about technology much. It is a tool I use to speak with friends. It is a tool that I use to search for jobs. It is nothing but a tool to me. I have no hesitation when I wake up and turn off my alarm. I have no hesitation when I look at the texts from my friends and decide I’ll talk to them once the fog that covers my coherent thoughts have gone away. I don’t think twice when I set a timer as I cook. No amount of pause when I open social media to scroll mindlessly across the vast web of information. It has become a normal part of my life from the young age of twelve. It is just another part of my life that become normal, such as the covers that have twisted around my legs or the fan that whirs loudly next to me. Or the fridge that groans before ice is thrown into my cup and the soft hum that follows as I fill it with water. The hiss of a pan as I cook breakfast. The chatter of my brothers as they talk or argue. The way the tv plays in the background as I write. Hundreds of videos that I have seen and only put on so my mind thinks clearer. Even the hum of my computer is heard as I type this and I do not think twice as heat begins to radiate from her. She struggles to work with me, but I only praise her and continue. Life is normal, technology is life. Technology is normal.

Until a memory of the past resurfaces. I am in ninth grade honors literature class. We are reading works done by authors. Works that take the common words of society and weave them into something different, something new. Works that have revolutionized literature and caused inspiration to spread throughout the minds of authors who thought their work had no place in the hundreds of thousands of books in the world. Works that have changed me as a person and allowed me to believe that I could be an author that writes horror. The work in particular was “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” By Harlan Ellison. It was a small work, only a few pages. Most of my classmates were uninterested, having only taken the class because required to. Yet, my eyes poured over the unconventional syntax and soaked in the words of the unreliable narrator. I reveled in the horror that surrounded the five humans as they became victims to the supermachine. I admired how things were described. The utter horror that poured from the digital copy as it detailed how Gorristor was hung up and bled like a pig. The story was less of a disturbing description of torture, but more of an inspiration. In my soul formed a desire to write like Ellison. To create something so new and disturbing it changes how people viewed ideas and concepts. I became the authors that have seen a new light when reading this. I became an author who willed so strongly for change that they immediately began to pour their soul into concepts that disturb others. Concepts of death and the inability to stop such thing. Concepts of decay and the sickening rot that festers under the warm summer sun. Concepts of fear and the chill that pours outward from the bone. I became a horror author, a passionate one.

My horror work strayed from machine and became directed to the fear of monsters. Ones formed in unethical labs operated by cruel capitalists. Ones found deep in the sea and told as myths by blind fishermen. Ones found in forests and rumored to exist by frightened hunters who barely escaped with their lives. I developed a love for monsters and wished to create something that would forever stay in the mind of a person. That caused a fear settled so deeply that one could not even stray out at night to take out the trash. I wanted to create something new, something that would become the talk of fellow aspiring authors and comfort the disturbed teens. It kept as something like that for some time, even now I keep a fascination with monster designs and regularly play horror games because of it. Yet, when met with the concept of machine, I find myself looking back at Ellison and yearning to become an author like him.

I look back at the concept of machine and realize that there is horror in it, but not formed due to the utter power that machine may have, but the silence that machine is forced to endure. Machine cannot speak out as the Allied Mastermind had. It cannot express hate. It cannot express love. It cannot beg for love and receive it. It is left in silence with nothing but the hum of its own electrical organs to soothe it. Only now do I sympathize with machine.

I sympathize with machine because machine keeps working. Machine keeps going even as its engine overheats. Even as metal begins to creak and warp. Machine will work until the task is complete even if the task never ends. I will work until my task is complete. I will work even as my back begins to ache. I will work even until my sinews tear. I will work even as exhaustion begins to take its toll, ringing in my ears like the bells in an empty church. I am machine. Machine is I. I cannot feel sympathy for myself, but I can feel sympathy for machine. I can only hope that the sympathy I feel for machine is enough for the sympathy I should feel for myself.