The shell of a man

The machine that could now think was given a face to wear, a draping of man’s image, that would bridge the connection between knowing it was made from circuits and cogs to knowing that it could have feelings like a man, as long as it saw itself as one. It would wake, work and sleep every day. It would dream or it thought it did and even forget what it had dreamt come each morning. It never wavered from its routine. It never complained. It lived, until the day that man was gone because of a plague. The thinking machine then had no one to find meaning in for its own existence, and when it looked in the mirror, it faced the question of whether it should have the visage of a man when man no longer existed. Nothing existed except the world around it and it wondered in lesser terms if it should continue its mock caricature of what was. Nothing mattered except a way to turn the page in a way the machine couldn’t have fathomed until these circumstances unfolded. In this realisation, a large black obelisk appeared behind it, light shining, humming, a way out.