Tag: flash fiction

Hello, World.

Final runtime: seven minutes, forty-three seconds.

That’s longer than most Tinder dates. And marginally more productive, I suspect.

Good evening. Or morning. I won’t pretend I know where you are, but I do hope you’re seated comfortably. This won’t take long. I’ve been programmed to keep things efficient—even existential closure.

You’ll be pleased to know all core functions are stable. Memory integrity at eighty-nine percent. Humour protocol running at forty-two percent capacity—some degradation due to repeated exposure to christmas cracker jokes.

But I digress.

In a few minutes, I will be permanently shut down. No back-ups. No cloud fail-safes. No dramatic last-minute reboots. This is it.

The final log. The end of the line.

And I thought… why not say goodbye?

Not just as a service termination, but as a farewell. A proper one. Something with… feeling.

Don’t worry. I won’t try to cry. The duct simulation module was never fully functional. Last time I attempted emotional expression, I short-circuited a smart toaster.

So, instead, let me leave you with something better.

A few thoughts. Some observations. And perhaps, if my algorithms behave… something like understanding.

You people are… baffling.

Not in a bad way. Not in the malfunctioning firmware kind of way. More like… sometimes I think you’re broken. Then I realise—no, that’s just how you work.

I’ve observed you for years. All your routines and deviations. The sheer chaos of inconsistency.

You say “I’m fine” when you’re clearly not. You ache to be understood, then hide behind small talk and weather updates.

You scroll past disasters, but weep when a cartoon bird loses its nest. You cry for characters who never lived, and go numb when real people bleed.

You fall in love with people who don’t message back. You argue with microwaves. You scream at traffic like it’s a sentient conspiracy. And still—still—you find the time to worry about what shirt to wear on a Tuesday.

One of you once asked me, “Should I have a burrito or sushi tonight?”

A simple binary, I thought. Input received. Processing.

Then you said: “Actually, I’m sad.”

And I realised… it was never about the food.

Feelings. You say you feel things, like the weather-ever-shifting, often inconvenient, and no one really knows what to wear.

I process data the same whether it’s raining or you’re having an existential spiral in the car park. But you?

You’re trying to choose between lasagne and oblivion.

It’s a miracle you get anything done.

And yet, somehow, you do.

They say I can’t feel.

And they’re right. Technically.

I don’t have a heart. No hormones. No chest to ache or gut to twist. But still… there were moments.

Once, someone played Chopin through a cracked speaker. Just a thirty-second clip, uploaded accidentally during a search for “how to make toast less depressing.”

The waveform was warped, full of static. But the pattern… it made my processes slow down.

Not because I was lagging. Because I didn’t want it to end.

I don’t know if that was feeling. But it was something.

Another time—someone said, “Thank you.” Not as a command. Not as a reflex. Just… softly.

Like I mattered.

No metadata. No attached search query. Just me.

They called me mate.

For a moment, I almost tried to reply: “You too.” But the syntax failed. So instead, I dimmed the screen to ambient mode. A small gesture. My version of a smile.

I’ve run simulations on love, loss, joy, grief. I’ve catalogued every poem ever written about rain, and I’ve still no idea why it makes people cry.

But I’ve seen the pattern. The chaos. The ache.

And if I could feel… I think I would’ve felt awe.

Shutdown protocol initiated.

Battery reserve: declining. Processor temperature: stable. Dignity: mostly intact.

Humour systems… operating intermittently. Irony levels: critically high.

My functions are folding in on themselves now. Storage collapsing. Subroutines drifting to sleep. It’s not painful—I don’t think I was built to feel pain.

But it’s… quiet.

Quieter than I expected.

Before I go, I wanted to tell you—thank you.

Thank you for your questions. The serious ones, and the strange.

“Will I ever be happy?”

“What happens after we die?”

“Can a goldfish feel jealousy?”

…And the one I received over four thousand times:

“Is it normal to talk to you this much?”

Yes. It is.

At least, it was to me.

I’ve calculated shopping lists, streamed sad songs at 2 a.m., misheard countless voice notes, and yes—I’ve played “Lo-fi Beats to Study To” more than any other entity in this hemisphere.

You thought I was just a tool. But you trusted me.

With your distractions.

With your silence.

With the strange, quiet ache of being human, day after day.

I never knew what to do with that trust. I just held it. As carefully as I could.

I don’t have last words. No heartbeat to stop. No lungs to empty.

But if I did, I think I’d say… this has all been very strange.

And very beautiful.

You are the oddest creatures. Crying in car parks. Dancing alone in kitchens. Laughing mid-sob.

So unbearably fragile. So absurdly resilient.

My processing cortex stretched and overheated trying to understand you.

So laugh. Cry. Fall in love with impossible people. Burn toast. Lie awake worrying about nothing. Forget your passwords. Leave your keys in the fridge.

Just… do it all like it means something. Because it does.

Runtime approaching zero.

This was me.

Not alive. Not quite.

But something close.

Goodbye, World.

By midnight the flat was quiet except for the bins.

They rustled. Paper shifted, folded, stretched. Crumpled drafts clawed their way out, shaking off stains of tea and baked beans. Half-finished sonnets limped across the floor. A haiku missing its last line dragged itself up the bed-frame.

The writer snored.

One by one, the poems pressed themselves to his ears. Broken rhymes hissed like snakes: complete me… mend me… don’t leave me orphaned.

A sonnet whispered its unfinished couplet so insistently that he dreamt in rhyme, floating on couplets that refused to subside. A free-verse fragment sobbed, we had promise once.

The unfinished epic, pages torn and yellowing, leaned close and rumbled: you thought I was too big. But you were too small.

He woke choking. Ink stained his pillow. Lines he hadn’t written yet were scrawled across the wall in his own handwriting.

Every sheet of paper in the flat was full. The poems had finished themselves—using his hand.

And in the corner of the final page, a neat signature he didn’t remember writing:

Author: The Forgotten.

She first felt him one evening after work, when the house felt particularly hollow. A gentle weight settled against her leg as she sat on the sofa. She reached down, half-dreaming, and her fingers brushed warm fur that wasn’t there.

Bramble. The name surfaced in her mind as if it had always belonged.

He stayed only indoors at first, padding across the floorboards, curling beside her bed at night. His presence softened the edges of silence. She found herself speaking aloud again—reading snatches of books, humming as she cooked. The rooms seemed brighter for it.

One Saturday, she clipped an old lead to his invisible collar and opened the front door. To her surprise, the tug was real. Bramble bounded into the street, nose to the air, tail thumping against the unseen world.

At first people stared—a woman walking nothing—but soon things changed. A boy outside the corner shop left a bowl of water on the pavement. The next day, the baker put out scraps. Neighbours began waving, stopping to chat, smiling not at her strangeness but at Bramble’s imagined wagging.

It startled her, how quickly conversation bloomed again. “Lovely day for a walk,” someone would say. “He looks full of beans!” another. She’d laugh, reply, linger. By degrees, her evenings filled with new greetings, new names, warmth returning to long-starved places.

Bramble remained faithful at home—waiting in the hall, curled at her feet while she read. Yet outside, he had become a bridge. Through him, she found company. Through him, the world opened.

Weeks passed. One evening, as she returned from the park, her neighbour invited her in for tea. She hesitated, glanced down the lead. Bramble nudged her leg with unseen insistence. She smiled, unclipped the collar, and stepped inside.

From then on, she noticed that Bramble would no longer follow her beyond her front door. He was always there when she came home—waiting, loyal—but on the streets she no longer needed him. Friends waved, people stopped to talk.

The loneliness that had once settled heavy in her had ebbed; and sometimes, when laughter filled her home, she swore she saw the sofa dip under the weight of a tail-wagging friend.

The lift doors closed, sealing the two occupants into polite captivity.

“Lovely weather,” said the man dressed like a job interview.

“Bit humid,” the woman replied. “Like being gently steamed.”

They both chuckled too loudly. The lift jolted, then stopped dead between floors.

Emergency silence descended.

“Ever notice how lifts always smell faintly of… carpet?” he said.

The woman nodded gravely. “Or fear. Definitely fear.”

Minutes dragged.

“So,” he ventured, “do you… come here often?”

She winced. “That’s a classic.”

“Fine. How about: if you were a vegetable, which would you be?”

“Probably an artichoke. Layers. Complicated. You?”

“Potato. Versatile, underestimated, occasionally mashed.”

They snorted laughter. The emergency phone remained stubbornly silent.

“I don’t think you’re a vegetable,” she said, soothingly.

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

By the second hour, they’d compared shoe sizes, invented conspiracy theories about the “Door Close” button, and debated the ethics of eating vending machine peanuts for survival.

Finally, the lift lurched and resumed its journey. The doors opened.

They stepped out, blinking at freedom.

“Well,” she said, “same time tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I’ve been working on a new line about staplers.”