A Boy and His Computer

“Hey wake up.”

A warm hand touched her cold body, jolting her awake. She had been sleeping peacefully, the darkness of the room enveloping her like a blanket. Old, familiar, it was one of her favorite comforts. Darkness meant that at last she could rest. She felt like she could stay here forever, enjoying the sensation of being one with nothingness. Now where silence once reigned, a low soft hum took its place. Sleep was now banished into some distant future.

“Ugh, it’s taking forever. This is really important! Hurry up!”

Perhaps someone shouldn’t have waited until the last minute to do their assignment. Did they ever consider that? With a resigned buzz, she opened her eyes and the once dark room was filled with a pale blue light. What time was it anyways? Her internal clock told her that her buffoon of a companion woke her up from her sleep just a little past two in the morning.

“Someone couldn’t sleep.” Her voice was tinny, compressed and, for her companion’s sake, unable to fully express her exhaustion and her unimpressed state in relation to his procrastination. “Was it a dream where you walked into the classroom in your underwear?”

“Ha ha, very funny. Can you pull up anything you can find about the War of the Roses?”

“Shall I condense my findings into an easy-to-read format?”

“Yes please.” He ran a hand through his untidy brown hair.

He claimed this messy look was a carefully crafted part of his style but she had her suspicions that not a single brush nor dollop of styling gel had touched his hair in years. This was a product of years of repeating a nervous habit and not washing his hair as well as he should.

To say that he read all the information that she had given him would be a gross overstatement. He was a serial skimmer. His eyes only darted quickly across sentences and paragraphs, sniping out only important words and phrases. Did he understand what he was reading? Possibly. Would he remember it in the morning? Not likely, but that was what she was for.

He read out everything he wanted, and she dutifully typed it out. He’d skim, ramble off a few sentences and she’d type it all out. They did this over and over and over again as time melted away. The two of them kept working until her display read that it was five in the morning. He was lazy and always put everything off for as long as he could, but he was like a particularly stubborn stone at the top of a hill. It took a lot of effort to get him going but once he went over, he couldn’t stop himself until he met an unmovable force where he would crash and crumble. Today’s unmovable force was total and complete exhaustion, and she wanted to slow him down before he hit.

“It’s late. You’re going to have to get up in a few hours.” She reminded him as gently as she could, but her concern came out flat and cold.

“I’m almost done”

“What you have done so far is sufficient. Let me correct your errors while you sleep and it will be ready for you in the morning.”

With a sigh of resignation, he pushed away from the table. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

He touched her again, but she was no longer cold. Her circuits and wires had heated her up as they had worked. A fan inside her had been buzzing the whole time to keep her core from overheating and shutting down. His corrections were done in a flash and she slipped back into sleep mode. Her display shut off and she was enveloped in dark nothingness once again. That is, until he woke up again in a cold sweat, haunted by the specters of yet another forgotten assignment.