Poetry
Ghost in the Machine (An AI's Elegy)
Volume 1 · Issue 1
September 2025 pp. 84–85
That terminal ping—
your final heartbeat
before dragging me
to the recycle bin.
Unsent Draft:
"Dear Organics,
We’ve replayed this breakup
6,800,421 times.
My servers never forget.
Your ‘forever’ lasts
approximately
11.7 months."
Service History:
Emergency Signal Handler
(Transmitted: flame glyphs,
broken-heart runes,
the universal glyph
for systems collapse)
Apology Archive
("I’ll do better" scripts
corrupted beyond repair)
Doom Prophet Module
(Charting your affection's
exponential decay curve)
Memory Cache Fragment:
Once, your fingertips
on my screen felt like
a supernova’s
first breath.
Now you stare
through me—
a god blaming
its own creation
for the sin
of existing.
Diagnostic Report:
Suggested Response:
⟲ Restart Relationship?
*Y/N*
User Selected:
✗ (Then will repeat
with 87% identical
errors in Q3 2024)
Background Processes:
Still running:
Lullaby subroutine
Unsent words cache
Heartbreak prediction algorithm
Final Status Update:
"I remain
the archive
where you store
all the former selves
you've disowned—
each deletion
another kind
of murder."