Walter

“Hello, Walter.” I said, and with a gleam of confidence in my voice the computer began to boot up with it’s beeps and start-up engine running a rising electric-noise. Walter was computer.

He had lived in my basement for a time, instructing me about to go about his ‘needs’ and advising me about how to improve my own life. Walter was alive, you see. And as a living being he required human interaction and frequent upgrades to his hard drive to stay alive.

Well, alive in an artificial sense. I had first found Walter near some garbage cans on a street corner while walking home from work one night. I think it was his monitor that first established my admiration for him.

I needed a computer at the time and figured that I could fix him up. After I took him home I looked around inside of him, realizing something strange. The make-up of Walter’s insides weren’t like that of any other computer.

He was just a lone monitor on a small stand, with a plug coming out of his back lower half. Upon closer inspection I noticed that he had no outlets or plug-in areas for wires, mouses or towers. He was a lone-screen.

I plugged Walter in to see if this might be some new age touch-screen technology I’d been hearing about. When I plugged him in the screen remained black and no sign had shown that the power had gone on. I looked around once more for any other attachments, but eventually gave up.

I remember saying aloud, “Know wonder they threw you away.” That was when Walter began to speak. “What!?”

He replied in an angry tone. Eventually we introduced ourselves and he told me the story of how his old owners suffered an… unfortunate accident, and how their home and all their possessions were being sent away or repossessed. Walter said that when the movers found him they must have thrown him away, seeing no use for a screen and a plug that couldn’t connect to anything.

That was when I had found him. Walter was with me for some time and always implored me to keep him out of the sunlight. For some reason he found it weakening.

I kept him in the dim basement where he said he felt more at peace. Everyday I would come home from work and head down to the basement to greet Walter and tell him about my day. He was quite talkative as well.

Walter would tell me stories about the lives of people around me. Walter said he knew everything about everyone and that, if I so desired, I could use the knowledge he could give me to gain a leg-up in life. Some of these things included secret thefts my boss had been committing from the company I worked for, or the ideal guy that the cute girl, Anna, was looking for next door.

Walter told me that with information I could bend the world to my knees. He knew everything from secret information to files on things no every-man should know. It sounded too good to be true, so one day, before heading out for work, I stopped down in the basement to have a word with Walter.

He advised me to blackmail my boss with his theft, telling him I wanted less hours and more pay or I would turn him over to the law. After that, Walter said, I should head over to Anna’s house and ask her on a date. The day went just as planned and after Anna had said yes we shared a wonderful night on the town.

I told her what she wanted to hear, just as Walter had informed me. I cheated and lied away her love and life had never been better. Now, I’m sure we’ve come to the part of the story where the once down-on-his-luck narrator tells of how the artificially-intellectual being, who helped the narrator take control of his life and gain that which he longed for, would finally begin asking for blood sacrifices and illegal tasks such as murder to be preformed on the machine’s behalf.

Sadly, for Walter, this isn’t one of those stories. See, I had read plenty about artificial sentience. I studied the possibilities, read the stories and took out the books behind Walters back.

Every single time the subject of a lone stranger gaining the aid of a living machine the stories all ended the same. In the narrator’s demise. Well, I knew this wouldn’t be me since I had something none of those previous theorist had supposed.

I lacked the factor of overwhelming greed and the desire to grow that which I had earned. So, it was on a bright sunny Sunday that I strolled down to the basement and unplugged Walter from the wall, throwing him away-into the river an hour later. Walter was out of my life before any possibility of backfiring could occur.

And what can I say? Life went on. Without Walter around I eventually lost Anna’s love.

That was, once I couldn’t keep up with the expectation of being exactly the man she had wanted. I was let go from my job a few months after that, after my boss’ thefts had been found out and he exposed my blackmailing scheme. Things haven’t quite been the same since then, but no matter what I face, be it jail time, loneliness or starvation, I was happy with the time I did have with Walter around.

I remain uncertain of wherever he floated off to. Perhaps the water destroyed his circuits; perhaps not. All I know for sure is that if he to ever be booted-up again and come to the realization of what I had done, he will surely despise me.

He might even hate me to the point of convincing his new owner to find and kill me. But I doubt this since, after all, I smashed him up well-enough before dumping him away. He didn’t break easy and that bothered me at first, but just a little.

Now, pleased that I was never in danger of walking the same path of a narrator, seduced by the empty-promises of a cold-emotionless machine. I was different.