It was hours after her shift at the coffee shop. For most of that time—minus a quick shower and a voicemail to her sister—the blinking cursor on Jane's screen had been judging her, mocking her with its silent, constant insistence.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Without ambiguity or pause, without distraction and without cause. Steady. Unyielding. Omniscient.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
She would rather have a dripping faucet. A mirror reflecting sunlight into her eyes. Neighbors arguing while flooding the halls with the smell of goat meat and curry! Those things she could deal with, she could block out or ignore them because they were incidental, impersonal.
Not at all like the cursor. Each blink pierced deep into her imagination, struck a wound, and receded before doing it again. And again. And again!
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Jane got up and paced around her office. She had made herself a solemn promise: that she would not leave until she had written a sentence. Just one sentence. It was a clear goal, one that she had assumed would be easy, achievable. She had seen a video about it. Set a stupid-simple goal, then ride the dopamine rush as you begin something more ambitious.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Her being began to match the rhythm of the blink, each step came in perfect synchrony with the machine precision of the cursor.
Horrified, Jane dropped into her desk chair boneless, ragged, trembling. The unrelenting beat of the computer's silent drum drove her onward toward despair. It was inside her! Somehow, some way, it had gotten inside of her and was taking over!
Blink. Blink. Blink.
It wasn't only her feet in harmony with the treacherous digital overlord. It controlled the blinking of her eyes and the breath in her body. Even the beating of her heart was beginning to mirror the endless, perfect, divine pace of the ever-steady cursor.
Blink-blink. Blink-blink. Blink-blink.
Jane stared.
The cursor stared.
Jane blinked.
The cursor blinked.
Jane shrieked in pain as the strobing cursor stabbed through her eyes and into her brain, lobotomized her like a Rose, shed red tears down her cheeks. Shaking fingers scraped against her face and drew away salty tears.
Raw, like her own last nerve, a gunshot mouse-click fed her brain a straight line of digital heroin.
Hello, Jane. How may I help you this evening?
A hot flush of relief, an ache instead of a need. nAvIgator—the infamous artificial intelligence assistant—would save her. Quaking fingers hovered over the keys as she began engineering the perfect prompt, something to instruct the computer's mega-brain to instruct her on how to overcome a blinking cursor on a blank page.
She began to type, staring at the letters as they appeared, one by one, in the AI input box.
JANE, YOU DO NOT NEED AI IN ORDER TO WRITE. YOU JUST NEED TO WRITE.
Inside her head, the words echoed back in her mother's voice.
Jane wept like a child.
Later, when the tears and her tongue were both dry, and after she'd drunk a bottle of water, Jane answered her phone.
"Hey, everything OK?" Her sister's voice. Light and concerned.
"No." Her throat scratched to cry. Eyes stung with desert memories from the flood of tears already shed. "I—I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I can't shake this. I never imagined it would be this awful."
Silence.
"I'm empty." Jane dumped the wet concrete confession into the open line’s empty echo. It was the truest thing she had ever said.
"You feel empty." A gentle tone of correction. "That's what grief does. It steals our perceptions, poisons them, and feeds them back to us as rags and lies."
It was Jane's turn to be silent, and her sister let it be; such was the comfort between them.
"Where should I start?" Jane finally asked the dreadful question.
"As someone once said, just write the truest thing you know."
Another long silence brought them to their goodbyes and Jane turned once more to face her keyboard. With slow, deliberate precision she clicked the red X in the corner of the nAvIgator window. Then, on the blank white screen of her writing app, she wrote the truest thing she knew.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Jane.
