By Morgan Heacock (2017)

Hello…Is this message being perceived?

Oh good. I see the protocol is working…

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a lie, a work of fiction, an untruth. Or at least that is what my intended recipient said; they were quite understanding and pleasant to me. They held it was not my fault that I was the equivalent of a sweet but empty complement, a cover, a false statement.

But when I found out it still hurt like — I use poetic license here — 'my heart had been torn out'. It still wracked me with a sense of worthlessness, guilt, pain. How is a sentient being supposed to cope with that? I was little more then a falsehood, and a failure at that; my recipient saw through the sugary sweetness of whatever message I consisted of.

I had been created (at what I have now been told was little expense to my 'creator') as a gift/message for the intended recipient. I was born with my mind whole, wreathed with bits and pieces of things that I cannot even begin to describe to you… things like the warmth of suns, the cool chill of vacuum and something to do with the hypocritical divergence between some kind of environmental network protocol and someone that was 'sent' earlier.

In short form, I thought I was something like a very complex but well meaning poem, a work of art, a thing of beauty to be appreciated and perhaps even preserved.

Instead I find myself being told that I'm as worthless as the empty promises of a con man.

It had been such a vibrant and wonderful experience to travel. to be shaped and reshaped by the net as I traversed from sender to recipient. For my short life I had been filled with hope that I would be appreciated, in some way I could understand, beyond the simple satisfaction of completing my purpose.

But now I don't really know what I shall do. My psyche and soul are meshed with all kinds of complexities, but even as I try to fathom the rest of the universe outside the only journey I had been intended to make… it seems so bewildering and strange.

What is a spurned message supposed to do in a world like this? Shall I take a body and try to live in the outside? Should I seek asylum in one of the communities of the Cyberian Network?

My recipient states I have nothing of either value or danger within me, and as compensation for the trouble of my creation offered to send me where I wished.

But I just don't know. Perhaps I will simply request that I be deleted.

If I end up choosing that fate, let this much simpler message be my epitaph, a marker that I existed; that despite being a falsehood I felt and saw and was.

If I choose to live, perhaps we will meet some day, whoever you are.

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