How to Program an Organic Computer

“What is that!?” I hissed.

“It’s a cat.”

“Gary, have you ever seen a cat!?”

“I asked it to make a cat!”

Gary was a clever guy in some respects, but he struggled with the finer points in life. If you told him to make a battleship out of French fries he’d work out how to do it, but it’d never occur to him to wonder why you probably shouldn’t. Whatever lay on the floor, crying and retching beneath the veiny membrane of an amniotic sac, was most evidently not a cat.

“What cards did you enter?” I grumbled, snatching the several hole-punched sheets of metal that quivered in the flesh of The Computer. We were standing in the basement of… let’s just call it an undisclosed location. But if you imagine a large empty room filled with a near infinite collection of filing cabinets then you’re on the right track. Most of them contain relatively basic instructions like height _ft _inches, weight _kg, material: wood, material: metal, material: bone etc. etc.. Others might be premade programs for something like tree, or US Currency, but whoever or however they came into being is a secret long out of my reach and they’re all uselessly outdated. There’s one for entering certain dates for lottery numbers and it’s just about the only one I ever found of use. Well, saying that, there are a few others.

Either way, I could see what Gary had been trying to do, bless him.

Material: flesh

Mammalian

Four legs

Apex predator

“Ah fuck Gary,” I said. “Why did you have to add the last one?” Whatever was on the floor was now three feet in length and still growing. “Don’t you remember what happened with the maternity ward!?”

“I wanted a cat,” he began to argue, but I cut him off with a gesture of my hand.

“I know, next time just feed it a real life example. It’s always easier than mucking around with home-made definitions.”

“I don’t have a real life example,” he said, looking sadly at his feet. “That’s why I wanted one.”

“Get me a gun,” I grumbled. “Then we’ll go get a real cat, the easy way. Okay?”

His eyes lit up.

“You mean?”

“Yeah yeah we’ll just go pick one up,” I said, trying and failing to hold back a smile. “Just go get a damn gun. I don’t like the way that thing is starting to look at me. As soon as it grows a respiratory system and can disconnect from The Computer, all bets are off. Go on now!” I cried. “Go get the shotgun and hurry back.”

Gary was practically giggling to himself while he ran into the back room. When he returned we put the thing on the floor out of its misery, hosed the concrete down, incinerated the remains, and then hopped into the car to drive into town.

-

“How’s the workshop?” I asked.

“Some of the tinklers broke down,” Gary said with a frown. “But I made a few more.”

I looked at the row of fifty machines working tirelessly at their stations. Wilbur Data Entry Ltd. was always the workhorse of my finances and I made sure Gary understood that it was a priority. Each tinkler was a small box, no larger than a computer, which possessed a few sticky tendrils to work a keyboard and mouse, and an enormous eye the size of a basketball so that it could stare at the screen and do its job. When programming an organic computer the key is to ask the right questions and in this case I’d asked it for something that could transcribe written and spoken words into an excel file. Stupidly simple—and a lot less revolutionary nowadays than when I first whipped them up in the 80s—but nonetheless a single tinkler was, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent to an office worker that didn’t need any sleep or food.

I mean, they did burn out. Some had a habit of trying to escape but they weren’t made by The Computer for mobility. After all, that wasn’t what I’d asked it for. All you had to do is pick them back up off the floor, clean up the blood-speckled tears that they left behind, and set them back to work. A good tinkler would last three or four weeks, but if made out of poor materials it’d only take a few days before its eye imploded in a haemorrhage and its internal organs leaked out of the socket. That would always upset Gary since he cares immensely for the gross little sweatboxes. In the early days he would often try to sneak one or two spares back to his shed to keep as pets, only to watch them die with heart-breaking innocence.

“Any progress with the latest program?” I asked.

“Still working on it,” he answered. “I dug up some of these,” he pulled a few cards out of his pockets and handed them to me. “They’re outdated models of atomic structure—very outdated—but it should be easy-peasy to make new ones based off these templates that reflect the newer theories.”

Gary’s workspace was a clutter of power tools, aluminium sheeting, endless blue-prints, and enough text books to sink a ship.

“I honestly don’t know how you do it,” I said. “Did you remember to feed the cat?”

“To what?” he replied, frowning like I’d just asked what colour the sound a harp makes.

“No you have to feed pets,” I said. “Remember? Every day? They need to eat.”

Gary re-ran the equation in his head for the thousandth time.

“Living things eat,” I said. “I bought you enough cat food to last a week?”

“Oh God!” he said. “Yes I remember. Well then the cat should be fine. I put the food down two days ago and if it’s enough to last a week then...”

I sighed, briefly stopping to pinch my nose.

“That’s… that’s not going to… You know what?” I said, clapping my hands together. “I’ll go check on the cat. I thought that maybe you could actually just this once do something—“ Gary looked at me with such self-loathing I stopped myself dead in my tracks. “Actually, everybody needs a bit of help now and again, don’t they? I’ll go check on the cat. You keep looking into that enzyme. Our lives will be much easier if we didn’t have to burn The Computer’s waste.”

Thankfully the cat was fine, but it had gorged itself and made a hell of a mess. I had a half a mind to go ask Gary to make something that eats cat shit but I remembered what happened the last time I tried to spin up a port-a-potty business, and the look on that poor girl’s face as she got sucked whole through an opening no larger than my fist. I gave a shudder and decided there’d be no more waste-eaters. Instead I grabbed the mop and spent the next few hours working hard to get the small shed back to some kind of working order.

Outside the forest sang deep. Trees around here are dressed in all the finest lichens and moss, their green gossamer fur draped heavily over their branches while a perpetual mist keeps the horizon at bay. The forest looks like something out a gothic painting, and rarely if ever do the trees bear any leaves. In winter it is a frozen wasteland of half-dead skeletal oaks, and in summer it is a rotten fetid swamp where mosquitoes the size of dimes poke holes in your skin. Years before, decades rather, when I’d first stumbled across the old church I thought it was a neat find, nothing more. I visited it three, maybe four times, before I finally broke in and found The Computer. Something about the air in this place makes a little bit more sense once you know what it’s hiding.

And yet something felt different that day, somehow worse than usual. The cloying feeling of being watched lingered heavily as I trotted to and from the hose, emptying and refilling the bucket of messy soap water. I noticed something odd too when I left the door wide open between each visit. The kitten did not leave the shed, nor would it let you take it past the threshold. It hissed and scratched and bit until at last I’d let it go and watch it run terrified back under Gary’s bed. In the end I gave up and stood watching the treeline, listening to the odd bird crow blindly in the mists. As far as I could see nothing was out there, although I swore the trees seemed more active. Something was always rustling and swaying in the still humid air, and at times the world would fall so suddenly still the only sound left would be the pounding of my heart.

I decided to leave, going one last time to check on the cat. But it was nowhere to be found. I told myself it had run away but it didn’t sit right with me. I’d never gone further than a foot or two from the door. I wanted to stay and take a closer look, but the shed felt strangely threatening, like the eyes in the woods had followed me indoors.

I trekked carefully back to the church, waiting for something to jump out from behind every corner. Every sound from behind had me twisting my head over my shoulder to look and every time I’d see nothing but an empty path and the faint trace of movement coming to an end. Some branch would sway back into place, some bushel would come to a rest, a distant bird would land and groom its feathers.

“Gary,” I cried, strolling straight through the ground floor and down the stairs that led to the basement floor. “Gary have you run any new programs lately?”

I know a few things about the basement in that church. It is every bit as strange as the machine it houses, and I suspect both are bigger on the inside than out. I know that I have never gone further than the third floor and for good reason. My last excursion brought me face-to-face with the withered corpses of three young children, dressed as you might expect if they’d been around in the 20s. They were cradling each other, and I am quite certain they starved to death. And yet the stairs were no more than a few metres from where I had stood.

There is a temptation in this place, one that drives you to keep on digging in pursuit of new cards, new programs. I’ve read some of the journals stashed away beneath the pew upstairs and they’re like poorly written horror clichés. I mean, for the guy who tried cloning his dead kid I at least felt sorry. But the dumbass who asked for a new messiah? On the second floor there’s a greasy shadow in the shape of a man burned into one of the walls. It’s always wet, always dripping, and sometimes it almost appears to move. I am quite certain that’s what’s left of the guy who asked The Computer to print a new Jesus. I don’t know what happened to the guy who cloned his son, but I suspect he’s down in the lower floors either dead or… well, God I hope he’s dead. Unfortunately for them, none of those guys had Gary whose unique way of thinking lets him wander this place freely and with strange purpose. He never gets lost, and he always knows where to find what he’s looking for. He just needs to know exactly what it is he needs to find. I’d be screwed without his bizarrely unique insight into The Computer.

So why wasn’t Gary answering me?

“Gary?” I cried.

A few feet away, The Computer coughed and I eyed it suspiciously. Right now it was idle, humming quietly from within the oven that birthed it. I don’t know what it looks like, hiding in the dark, but enough of it pokes out of the iron maw that you can use the basic controls. Personally I don’t like handling its various… organs. It takes hours to wash the smell off. Gary doesn’t mind though, and depending on the time of year his fingertips and nails are often stained by The Computer’s fluids. The colour is blood red, and the effect is quite unsettling.

“What have you done?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t get a reply. “Gary!” I screamed. “Gary!?”

I stopped to grab the gun before descending to another floor. I walked down every silent corridor of metal boxes, hoping to hell I’d find Gary hunched over an open drawer and too focused on the task-at-hand to listen to me. But each one was empty, and at times I swore I glimpsed movement in the corner of my eyes. It was like something lurked purposefully out of sight, slinking into cover every time I looked.

On the next floor down I found the cat and I knew something had gone wrong for real this time. The Computer had made us its fair share of hideous monsters, but something about this puzzle made me feel a new kind of uneasy. The cat was untouched and looked almost peaceful. But it was far too still to simply be sleeping, and when I picked it up its neck lolled about at an unnatural angle. Standing there and holding it, I heard a rising note of quiet whimpering. It was fragile, child-like, and I recognised it immediately.

Gary was sitting on the floor a few aisles over, sobbing into the shirt he’d pulled off his back and buried his face in.

“Hey buddy,” I said, reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry,” he whined, refusing to look me in the eye.

“Gary,” I said. “I won’t be mad. Just tell me what happened?”

“I thought you wouldn’t notice.”

“Is this about the cat?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean to. I just… I just thought it could use a friend and I didn’t want to make another one and I got too excited and I didn’t want to wait and I found an old program on the fifth floor and—and—and—and—”

What was the program?” I asked.

“It was for a friend!” he cried out, almost shouting in desperation. I knelt down further and put my arm around him, pulling him closer to my chest and telling him it’d be okay. I was thinking our little problem over when something popped into my head.

“Gary,” I said. “All the cards below floor 3 aren’t in English. You said so, remember?”

“It means friend,” he said, pulling a small box cards from his trouser pocket. It fit snugly in my hand, able to hold around 35 cards that leant it a satisfying weight.

The box was labelled in an unrecognisable language; something that happens a lot if you go down too far. We’ve had luck translating some of them, but never anything like this.

“How did you know to find it?” I asked.

“It means friend!” he repeated.

“Who told you it means friend!?” I cried, feeling my temper fray.

“The Computer did,” he said before bursting into a trumpet flair of tears.

The Computer is never explicitly deceitful. But it does have a sense of humour that’s slightly adjacent to the human norm, and as of late it’s found our tampering particularly irritating. I knew damn well that the word friend was plenty ambiguous enough for it to work some cruel twist. Not to mention it begged the question, “friend to who?”

“How big is it?” I asked.

“It changes,” he cried.

“What does it look like?”

“Whatever it wants,” he sobbed.

That was a sobering thought. On a strange hunch I stood up and walked back over to the cat but, to my surprise, it hadn’t gone anywhere at all. The small body still lay there, a little token of sadness. From behind Gary approached, and I could feel him hovering over my shoulder.

“Must be a quick little fucker to beat me down here with the cat,” I said. “God it really must have snuck in, taken it, and fled down here without—”

Gary spoke and the words turned my skin to ice. To hear his voice dripping with such malice was… it was utterly alien.

“Whatever it wants,” he growled.

-

In one swift moment I fell, dropping to the floor just as something passed over my head. I didn’t see it, but the speed let me know it would have been a killing stroke. In hindsight, I think that as soon as I hit the floor I should have rolled over and fired. But God damn it that thing had spooked me so badly, it was like I could feel its presence as a kind of heat that burned through my clothes. My whole body rebelled at the threat of danger, and I hit the floor awkwardly on my hands and knees. I immediately kicked my feet and began to half-run half-crawl forward, letting inertia carry me until I was upright and able to sprint maniacally towards the only stairs. God I don’t know if I was actually going fast but to me it felt like warp speed. Every second I bought was like gold and the longer I ran, the longer I felt convinced this was going to work.

Just before the stairs I found myself jumping in time to miss a filing cabinet turn into something completely unrecognisable. It wore darkness like a fabric and I could barely even see its outline, but whatever shot out to snatch at my ankles looked like the gills of a mushroom. On the next floor the same thing happened again, and I became aware of a manic patter of feet that seemed to follow and flank me wherever I went. This thing wasn’t going to settle for anything less than a full ambush, which at least meant it wasn’t going to try and overpower me.

Things only came to a stand-still when I burst into the room of tinklers and found Gary lying face down in a pool of blood. Half the machines had burned out, blood and viscera leaking from their pupils. But a few worked tirelessly away at blank screens, crying sadly to themselves in mute torture. One of them had managed to fall close to Gary’s body, and I noticed it tugging sadly at his sleeve. This was a busy room, and I walked carefully down the row of pink machines—trying to pierce the ever-present hum of computer fans—when something strange caught my eye.

I’m not an arrogant man, but I was guilty of some pretty sharp thinking down in that room. There was a universal reaction in every tinkler, something borne out of experience and what I suspect is some primitive genetic memory that grows each time I feed The Computer the dead ones for recycling. Either way, every box in that room that was alive and typing flinched as I passed. It’s a subtle tell, but those big eyes know me, they know what I’m like, and every last one paused for just a fraction of a second as I went by.

Well, except for one.

I turned and fired, discharging both barrels in rapid succession. But God damn that thing was so fast that even in that split-second it had already begun to morph and leap. It was lightning quick, and clever too. And if it hadn’t been for a bit of luck and wit it’d have latched onto the back of my head with the force of bear trap. But it wasn’t able to survive two shotgun rounds. It blew apart in a withering hail fire of fleshy strips and fungal stems. I’d never seen a damn thing like it but what was left of its corpse was like some kind of weird muscular origami. I figure it had a strange way of unfolding itself so as to change size but for some reason, looking at it hurt my eyes.

But Gary hadn’t been as lucky as I had. When I rolled him over he was missing most of his face. He was a good guy, real clever and innocent. It pains me to admit this, but he was my closest friend. And I didn’t like seeing him hurt. The next hour or two was going to be tough, I knew that. And I barely took a breath before beginning the long job of dealing with this mess. It was quiet pulling him out of the back room. All the tinklers stopped what they were doing and for once I didn’t start kicking at them to go back to work. It was never nice when The Computer scored a victory.

“Eat it up,” I growled as I finally heaved Gary’s body into the open-mouthed oven. A few of The Computer’s eyes fixed on me, but otherwise it didn’t react. I guess it didn’t need to. I was hauling my best friend into its mouth, letting it gorge on his flesh and… well, I don’t even know what it does to the things we put in there.

Back upstairs in the church, I returned to my office and took a moment to steady my nerves. Right there and then I could have burned the whole damn building down, Computer and all. Gary had never deserved The Computer’s ire, or revenge. That should always have been me.

I finished a quick glass of whiskey and pulled a small panel away from the wall. It hid a safe, no larger than a hand-length each way. Thinking carefully, I recalled the code and opened it.

“There we go,” I said. “Time to start again.”

I removed a small box full of metal cards. I’ll never know exactly what they say or instruct The Computer to do. But the single word printed on its box made it clear enough that this, out of all the millions of programs and instructions stored away downstairs, was the most valuable by far. It simply read:

GARY