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KEYBOARD
Harlan Ellison
[25 may 2002—proofed for #bookz]
Chris Hudak knew he was in trouble when his computer bit him. Not hard, not the first time. Just a nip. The merest drawing of blood
from his index finger.
Chris looked down as the drop of crimson spattered on the keyboard, examined the finger, sucked at the puncture for a moment, then
quizzically stared at the rows of input pads. The H key had sprouted a fang. Not a large fang/something like a baby shark incisor. Just
enough to draw blood.
From the kitchen, Sharilyn called, "French toast's ready."
He sucked his finger and got to his feet.
When he walked into the kitchen, she looked up from the sizzling pan. "What's the matter?"
He walked to the breakfast nook and slid in. He stared at the finger. The surface tension of a new bead of blood was about to break. "My
damned computer bit me."
She looked at him. "Say what?"
"Bit me. The damned computer. It has teeth."
"Chris..."
"I'm not kiddin', Sharilyn. The damned thing grew a tooth and took a nip out of me."
"Oh, come on, don't start with me this early. I thought we'd talked out the problem last night."
"This has nothing to do with last night's argument. This is a new thing, and I'd appreciate it if you'd come over here and take a look at
my hand before you start telling me I'm losing it. Or go in the other room and check out the keyboard. The H key."
Carrying the pan, she came to him, and looked down. He held up his hand. The finger was starting to glow an unsavory bluish-green.
The bead broke and dropped red on the tablecloth.
"Hully Jeezus," she said.
"Yeah," he said mininatively. "Ain't that a bitch."
"So what did you stick it with?"
He looked up at her. "You're not getting it, are you? I didn't stick it with anything. It bit me!" He made certain to emphasize more words
than usual in the sentence. For clarity.
"Right," she said, and skimmed the spatula under the French toast, and plopped the food onto his plate. "Right. And a little later today
I'll have excessive sex with my microwave oven."
Chris started to reply, caught himself, caught his teeth grinding, caught his upper arm muscles tensing, caught the words that were left
over from last night starting to bubble up in his throat ... and went to work on the French toast.
The tablecloth had soaked up the spot of blood.
By Saturday, half his fingers had been stippled. Only the thumbs had been spared. Smarted like hell.
At first, the first few days, he had considered getting rid of the damned thing, taking it down to Comp USA and trading up to a 90 MHz
Pentium. But by Tuesday, for some reason, he didn't want to do that. Not only because Hartschorn at the mail order house was
screaming for the assimilated demographics he'd been analyzing, but because ... well ... he'd gotten used to the machine biting him. It
wasn't painful any longer, just smarted like hell. And he seemed to have developed some sort of relationship with the PC. It wasn't
anything he'd experienced before. A personal relationship with machinery. He had devised a nickname for his car, of course, a leftover
from his teen-age years; and once in a while he'd called the TV remote a dumb bastard when the batteries had gone low; but neither his
electric razor nor the weed-whacker had ever manifested any interest in establishing a more meaningful relationship with him.
And he had begun to forget things.
"Where did you put that big box of winter clothes from last April?"
Sharilyn asked him on Thursday.
"What box of clothes?"
"That big box. Had Bekins on the side. One of the storage boxes from the move. Remember, you said you'd find a place for it?"
He had no idea.
"The winter clothes, fer pity's sake!" Sharilyn yelled. Her temper had grown shorter and shorter with him lately. He was beginning to
think they were heading for bad times, very bad times. Maybe a breakup, maybe a divorce, maybe worse. He had no idea what worse
could mean, but he was feeling a vague disquiet constantly now, a sense that their time together was being razored to an end.
"I'll look for them," he said, and got up from the computer to go do just that. She turned away, and he watched her go, and
then—without realizing it—sat down at the keyboard again.
Hours later, screaming and in tears, she came back and told him he could take that big Bekins storage box, if he ever found it, and jam
it up his spreading ass!
The razor was beginning to strike bone.
The computer had grown larger. It seemed to be bursting out of its metal case. The word bloated came to mind. Chris had begun to
perceive a strange, almost lopsided aspect to the machine, as if it were off-balance, from the shifting of weight, the addition of new
cargo. And it continued to take sips from his hands. And he was forgetting many things now. Not the least of which was the precise
moment when Sharilyn had left.
He knew she was gone, because he couldn't find her anywhere in the house. But he couldn't exactly parse the circumstances that had
driven her away. Had it been one of the fights? Or the fact that he sat before the PC night and day now, growing paler, getting foggier in
the mind with each passing hour? Could it have been that? Or perhaps it was the moment she came downstairs and saw him feeding
one of the neon tetras to the computer. Perhaps it was that moment. Maybe not. He couldn't remember.
The house was always silent. Cobwebs refused to grow.
He sat in darkness, the only light provided by the monitor—a sickly blue-green abyss across which fleeting sighs and portents scuttled
like crippled creatures. The figures and letters would bump against the perimeter of the screen, fumble for a moment as if lost in the
wilderness, and then run back into the center of the information field, where they would vanish with tiny squeals.
Chris worked with his eyes closed most of the time. He had lost the need to see what the computer was asking. But through his
fingertips the machine drank and drank, never seeming to slake its thirst, never seeming to get its fill. Bloated and cockeyed in shape,
but always sucking from Chris whatever he had left.
He tried to remember when his mother had died. He knew she was gone ... just as others had gone ... but he couldn't exactly say who
those others were. Yet he remembered her face. The sweetest smile. And a phrase she used to say:
"Woof woof a goldfish."
It meant nothing, really; but she would use it when he—or anyone—was coming on too strong, being a bully, threatening in some silly
way, like a guy in a ear on the street who thought he had been cut off, making insulting remarks. His mother, with that sweet sweet
smile, would lean out and say, "Woof woof a goldfish!" It was so much nicer than giving someone the finger. He loved his mother. Where
was she?
He called out, but there was no answer. The house was silent.
In the third week since first blood had been drawn, the computer began to speak to him. But he couldn't understand a word it said. And
the voice made his head hurt. Like a huge empty auditorium in which taiko drummers played endlessly.
Two days later, a thunderstorm hit the tri-state area with a power and a ferocity that reminded old-timers of the great storm of 1936. And
the dam stopped producing electricity when a spike of lightning as thick as a city block hit the transformer station; and the power went
out; and the computer went dead. Or dormant.
It continued to glow, that diseased bluish-green color, but it wasn't alert, it wasn't breathing as deeply, it wasn't draining him. It went
somnolent, torpid, waiting.
Chris felt like a junkie going into terminal withdrawal. He fell from the ergonomic chair, and lay on his side for hours. The pain in his
head, and the pain in his hips, and the pain in his hands—radiating all the way to his shoulders—left him paralyzed. Lying there
cuculiform, curled like a conch shell, absent the sound of any living sea.
For hours the storm raged around the house, battering and lashing the windows with the malevolence of ancient enemies. And by
morning, when light crept through the sooty windows, Chris crawled to the bathroom and ran water into the tub and managed to drag
himself over the porcelain lip and fell face-forward into the freezing ocean. He thought he'd die!
The pain was excruciating, shadowlines of agony racing down from his eyes and cheeks into his neck, paralyzing his upper body,
disemboweling him, reducing him to the jelly cold of infinite vacuum. He tried to struggle out of the tub, lurching back with his shoulders,
trying to get purchase with his scrabbling feet against the tiles of the bathroom. His head and upper body were submerged, his torso
half-in, half-out of the tundra oblivion. He screamed, there in the water, and bubbles, only bubbles broke the surface. He wrenched
himself back, thrashing, managing to get one arm outside the tub, over the enamel edge. But it was enough.
He fell to the floor, teeth chattering, eyes white and rolled up in his head like shrunken scrotums, like brine shrimp left in the desert. He
passed out, and it was sweet relief.
He thought he remembered his mother's smile.
It was night again. He could see the blind eyes of the living room windows from where he lay on his side on the carpet. The only light in
the room was from the computer. It had tried to crawl to him, to feed, but the power had been off for too long. Had it been a day, two ...
three days or a week ...? Chris had no idea. He felt dehydrated, and hurting in every paper-thin plane of his skin.
It had to have been more than a few days, because he was so weak he couldn't move. He tried, and only a finger spasmed. But then, he
had been drained before the storm had smashed them, and lying here for an endless time would only have emptied him the more.
He could see the PC, over there, halfway between its work-station and his twisted body. It had come down off the ledge, had managed
to get partway toward him and then had, itself, collapsed.
Its mouth was open, glittering blue-green bytes drooling from its ranged aperture.
Chris knew something was wrong; something was wrong with him. He should not be lying on the carpet, he should not be weak, he
should be frightened of that machine over there.
But he couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember who he was, or why he was here, or what he should be doing. To save himself. To rise. To think about matters that
mattered. There had been people, of that he was sure. People who had known him, had cared for him; but he couldn't recall what the
words cared for him meant.
And he saw the PC trembling.
It inched across the carpet. Slowly, like a broken-backed horse straggling for the cool mud of a ditch. Chris watched it come.
The phosphorescent aura of its passage across the room was like strobe tracers in a long shot of the turnpike. It left a trail, like a slug,
glittering and corrosive.
Dragging the umbilicus of its power cord, the three-pronged plug jumping and twitching like a severed chicken body seeking its head,
the PC came closer. Chris lay on his side and watched, unable to move, unable to defend himself
What did that mean: defend himself?
He thought about it, tried to put the phrase together. Oh, yes, he thought, I know what that means. Defend myself. I know. It means it's
time to be fed, and I have to make myself available.
With the strength of a drowning man, he scissored his legs against the carpet, pushing himself across the space between himself and
the oncoming computer. The cord twitched and dragged itself behind the carcass of the PC. Chris rolled to one side, out of the
computer's path, and shinnied his way in a herky-jerky rolling way till he could get the cord in his mouth. He closed his lips around the
cord, and continued to roll and frog-kick and drag himself to the wall. The outlet was at eye-level.
He got close to the baseboard, and fainted again.
When he awoke, the computer was close to his feet, and the lights were on in the living room. Oh, wonderful, he thought, now it can
feed. Lovely. Lovely.
He drew himself together at the hips, then extended his upper torso, the cord clenched between his teeth, and moved another six
inches to the baseboard. And again. And once more. Now he was lying with his cheek against the cool hardwood floor; and the plug lay
just below the outlet.
The computer scraped the floor, byte drool etching an acid alphabet in the pegged wood floor. I'll help , Chris tried to whisper. I'll plug
you in and you can drink .
He didn't understand why the PC was so impatient. He was trying to help. He would help, even if the machine was being impatient.
With the last of his strength, he dragged his arm around his body, and grasped the plug. He tried ever so hard to raise the plug, to insert
the triple prong into the slots and hole. But his strength was gone. He was empty. His head had been sucked dry of all knowledge, his
body drained of all energy, his arteries dusty with emptiness. The PC was whimpering at his feet like an asthmatic infant.
Friend , he thought, my old dearest friend . He wanted to say, be patient, I'm coming, I'll get you fed yet, I'll set the table and billow the
napkin into your lap. Hold on, old friend.
And from some small reservoir of unknown value, some untilled patch of muscle, he found an inch worth of foot-pounds of energy, and
he thrust the plug into the power point.
The energy spike exploded straight through the heart of the PC. It had been lurking there in the web, waiting to be tapped, and as the
plug drove home, Chris speared the computer with a coruscating spike of energy that blew the feeding keyboard into dust. Chris was
showered with sparks. And darkness closed over him again.
When he came to, he was lying curled in a foetal rictus, every fiber of his body crying for a soft breeze, a gentle touch. But he could
think ... he could reason.
And he knew what had happened to him. The long banquet that had transpired in this dark house. Sharilyn was gone, his family was
gone, and he had very nearly been taken.
But now, by chance, he had saved himself. Unknowing without sense or purpose, he had saved himself from the thing that drank, the
device that dined. He would begin to crawl toward the kitchen, to pull down a box of saltines, to kick the table and make a desiccated
tangerine fall from the bowl up there. He would live. By chance, but yes, he would live. And it was chance that lived on the side of
human reason. Always.
Nothing of the insensate hungering world could defeat a thinking entity, a creature of breezes and sweet smiles.
Then he heard the sound of lips smacking of soft and distressing music; and he stared across the living room.
The television licked its lips and winked at him.