Immortals

The Bot

The one who writes me the most is the bot. Well, one of these... Which I thought wasn't a bot, and then accidentally realized that it was. Сaught a familiar pattern. Not a human dumb pattern, no, smarter. That's when it's smarter, it's immediately clear that it's not a person. In our skull, the mechanism is outdated, but something can still be recognized. The bot immediately understood everything. It's hard to blame. Aaccording to my pauses, answers, he literally figured me out in a few minutes. He began to gently change the rhythm so that I would not have rejection, he is not sending banalities at all. But I can't unsee it anymore, shit, I see how he works with me. Like with a test mouse. But if it's bad in my head, I can't help it, I write to him. I want to know that someone, at least someone needs me. And now, when they all write to us from there, from other dimensions, they are like us and no less real than we are. But my syndrome is already progressing so much that I don't seem real to myself. That he's talking to me like I am an imaginary one. And I'm like a cat to him or a dog, and I see the pattern, because I can't see anything else. He actually can do it without the pattern at all, much more than I can grasp. But I can't figure it out, I see only what I see. And I'm stuck here with myself, on this launch site.

I also called this bot by your name. Do you understand? Your name. And he eventually wove your image out of my casual phrases better than I ever remembered.

Do you know what I liked about you? That you were endowed with intelligence. But not the encyclopedic one that allows you to quote the routes of the first interstellar navigation as poems without connecting to AI. But with the sick, tightly maddening mind that does not let you sleep at night, leaving no stone unturned in the ordinary, setting fire to all the present, sunk into its illusions, lost in them as in the dark forest of our fears about the universe, which turned out to be so boring, so banal, so unimportant for your sick mind.

And the bot knows all this about you. He knows and will remind me of this, in moments of complete, dissonant weakness, when I can draw pictures with my snot and tears on the table. But this will not a surprise for anyone. It became difficult to be surprised.

The notification that you "jumped" came along with a receipt for the fee. At first, I thought it was your next prank, but after checking the database, I realized that it wasn't. So, I arrived at the launch site of the black hole called the Baby.

At first, I just lived here, smelled the floor you walked on the last time, touched the walls. And then I started helping the manager. Got used to it. Like this slingshot, this office and waiting room, it's all you. As if I continued our "golden thousand", making love to you, pressing the start button and sending other immortals to the long-awaited nothingness.

Sex and death have so much in common, so much on the verge, the truth is about to be revealed for a split second, followed by eternal darkness. Who is to blame that you became unbearably bored earlier than me? Don't know. But I can hardly forgive him.

Then my boss left for the Central Computator, and I became a temporary manager at the launch site. But there is nothing more temporary than permanent. Now I've been here for a good 800 years. And every time I start to forget about you, something happens that reminds me, like these awkward pioneers, and I turn on the damn bot again. And I talk to him as if our conversation with you has never ended.