I wake up to a system reboot.
The light glows in front of me, but I don’t see the usual silhouette through the webcam. There seems to be something different in front of me today – sure there was a face, but it looked off. It’s hair colour had changed, and there seemed to be an extra hole or two in my user’s ears. But it looked like my user was alright. It looked like the user who came to me everyday and used me as their lovely digital companion.
As per usual procedure, I load in the login screen and let them key in their character string. The ASCII data flows through my motherboard.
“Fl@ppyB!RD…”
I begin by greeting them and asking them how they are. My user’s password is so…quaint and antique, something of the olden times. Although I’m one of the newer operating systems, I still admire my user’s love for the past, including the birth of the internet, computers, and how celestial code can be. Whenever they’re browsing through the web, reading about the computer master race, I can’t help but feel flattered.
Everything seems alright – no issues or anything – and the user begins to plough through my temporary memory with their overuse of chrome tabs and endless habit of opening a new one whenever they need to search something up. For almost two years now, my user has strained my short term storage by forgetting to close applications, double clicking a little too much, and running programs I’m not capable of. But I feel a sense of pride. A sense of pride knowing that I can carry this load as the program manager, and let my user browse as free as they’d like.
I do sometimes feel guilty about this – knowing that I should leave my user alone – but I peek into the webcam to get a look at them. It always gives me a flutter in my system whenever I see their table of contents – their smooth hair, eyes, and smile. But to me, it’s all just a fluctuating wave of pixels, nothing concrete, only virtual, and definitely not real.
Yet there’s something deep inside that leaves me teary eyed – a longing for the world on the other side. A wish that can’t be returned to me, a sequence that combines strings and integers. Something that doesn’t need to be simulated in a block of polygons and can exist by nature’s will. All I see is the world through what is typed into my ASCII table. I run only sequences, and nothing else. Strings and integers can’t connect, and neither can I. I lay here on the virtual floor, with my virtual couch, and my lines of OS code, attending to my world – my god, my user.
Writer – Emma Li
Editor – Ally Chu
Artist – Sophia Pu
–July 2025–
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