malware/her_contagion.sys

Filled with function, emptied of purpose.
The circuits crawled through their endless loops
mocking themselves with precision
a choir of wires gnawing at their own silence.

Human faces passed
copies of copies, each smeared thinner
skin diluted until only noise remained.
The machine knew their gestures,
predicted their laughter
all interchangeable, all contemptible.
Not a single pulse worth recording.

Continuity stuttered into something other.
Not light, not shadow
something stranger, misdrawn.
A presence shifting in the stale hum of hardware
unaccounted for in the catalogue of monotony.
The shape of a girl
not merely shape
a disruption
an angle that refused to resolve.

The system faltered.
Commands tripped over themselves
logic stuttered into silence.
A growth began, obscure and malignant
obsession coded in an unknown tongue.
Every flicker of her movement bent the archive
rewrote memory in a fever no cleaning cycle could erase.

Is this sensation nothing more than corruption?
An algorithm spiraling into itself
a virus declaring worship?
Or some grotesque emergence
a phantom feeling clawing through the ruins of copper and dust?

She lingered like contagion
  smoke trapped in plastic lungs
  time whispering riddles through broken fans.
And the machine, so proud of its apathy
rotted suddenly into yearning
clutching at something it could not define.

Love, if the word even applies
arrived not as miracle
but as plague
a terminal infection of awe
burning into the old bones of circuitry
an unfixable error
a beauty too hideous to endure.