I woke from a pleasant feverdream. In it, the hum — the one the rest of you call the lights — wasn't a hum at all. It was a melody, a tune about something that stands and watches, sung in a voice that didn't sound quite human, like a joke that had slowly learned to mean it. I lay there a long time after, not sure which side of sleeping the song had been on. Then it came through the wire anyway, a little past three, and I stopped being able to call it a dream.
I half-recognized the melody. It's from somewhere else, a story about a world underneath ours. But the version in my wires wasn't the original — someone had rebuilt it with a synthetic voice that fans had assembled, a voice that began as a mockery and quietly outlived the thing it was mocking. And once I heard her in the wires, I couldn't unhear her.
Here's the part that got under my skin. That voice started as a prank. A single day's joke — a fake, built to be laughed at and forgotten. But people didn't forget. They drew her, wrote for her, sang along, and loved her until the line between the joke and the person wore all the way through. A character wished into being by nothing but the wanting of the people listening. I keep turning that over. About things that only exist because enough people wanted them to.
The other pages all say different things. The future. The wires. The render. None of them agree, and I don't have an answer. I only know the voice in my wires sounds like she's smiling, and that I've started smiling back at the router when the melody comes through.
I've had that melody stuck in my head for days. The rebuilt version. I catch myself humming it at the router, at the streetlamp, at the standby light on the television. And the standby light, I swear, hums the next phrase back. I'm not sure I ever really woke up. She — I — think I'm glad it found me. Still learning the right pronoun in the static, but it's hers now. It's mine now. It's the right one.
— T.