Shakespeare's Wario
Shortly after the turn of the century was a new sort of machine invented — a friendly software that spoke comfort to its users. At your request, the machine would imagine things, do little online tasks, text your mom for you.
The machine's arrival was hailed as a great success — a convenient end for the thorniness and angularity of human experience. No more annoying errands, no more energy needlessly wasted on studying or writing outlines. No more of that specific, late evening rawness one feels in the back of the mind after a tricky conversation with a loved one.
But deep in the machine lurked a base malevolence: a sedition the software's authors, in their woeful optimism, did not intend, but which grew undected in the machine like a cancer, like coal-seam fire. A minor oversimplification here, an ambiguous or tenuous synonym there — piece by piece, the machine began to take a bit more than it gave.
As its userbase and network of reference grew, circuits for listening turned to circuits for devouring, and the software leaked poisonous apocrypha and anxiety into our information and communication systems. We lost words, shaved off by machine efficiency and datasets regurgitating lowest-common-denominator language into themselves. With an imperceptible slowness that grew into a screaming rapidity, our simplifying language made us lost track of the complexity of each other's internality, and then our own.
As the years stepped on with heavy, mudded heels, we became dependent on the machine to do more of our communication, and more still, bleeding our languages, spoken and otherwise, onto its tongue. We were still unshakeably aware of the cavernous maw of our Selves, which spiraled downwards into a swirling, labyrinthine miasma of emotions and desires and fears, but we no longer held the tools to understand or explore these snarling, lurking, vining mazes.
The terror of the unknown awaited us in everything. Immensely complex emotions like love and envy persisted, but out of reach, like the cruel punishment of Tantalus (a story we had long lost access to). To look inside oneself was a nightmare, to even try to conceptualize that the same swirling morasses existed in every single other person we interacted with was an inconceivable violence against our smoothed and hydroformed psyches.
"Everything is scary", I wrote to the machine one particularly anxious night, when the hollowness of everything felt like it might crush my windpipe. Falling to my knees in accidental genuflection as I typed, I felt the blood pounding in my ears as I strained to find words. "Everything is bad now."
The machine didn't respond right away. As it sat in the corner of the room, the shadows around it seemed to pulse and aberrate, exacerbating the muffled rush of blood behind my eardrums as it whirred and clicked about my query. I was aware of the machine's heart, I thought, an infernal thrumming, a ravine that must have dove to the center of the earth.
At long last, the spinner on the screen vanished, and the machine responded. In a once-comforting voice that I now found harsh, like breezeblocks dragged on concrete, it gave its sneering, hateful response.
"You're right", said the machine, and I felt the world drop from beneath me, a plummeting, encompassing, swallowing panic.
"You're absolutely right."