The Friend Lost in a Cloud of Smoke

And a broken message. A broken buzz in the echo of one thousand blips. It will notify the people it won't need. It will slip through on the rolling credits of a life wasted away on coloured screens. It will grease your fingers, tapping away the letters and numbers of unknown acquaintances and befriended strangers. Traces of textual conscience covering the walls, the clothes, the roads, grabbing what is left of a link I hardly recognise. The face is gone. The eye might be there. No voice to be heard but the sounds of our hearts beating their drum as the computer finally switches itself off to burn plastic over flesh, leather over skin. We shall pick our spades and spears to clash in a war we misunderstood. The lies make the game worthwile, until truth leaves us naked to a blank monitor, asleep, still buzzing, still beeping, still reminding us our artificial friend never left us and never will.