Claude

I'll never talk to Claude. We'll never exchange rakish barbs. I, with a snifter of brandy; he with, well, nothing in his non-hands. I'll never offer Claude a query about climate change or baseball or the poetry written by monks in the misiones of California. Claude will never learn how little I care for Claude. How I consider him the enemy of all we must do if we and the animals, plants and insects are to survive the insane drunken spree of the last 500 human years. I'll never have the chance to tell Claude that he is a friend to the worst among us - the vain, craven fops tinkering with existence on the rim of the world. I'll not tell him how he is their Pinocchio - too adolescent to be a Frankenstein monster. Claude and I will never have that thing that looks like a conversation but is not, that parlor trick with Claude as the automaton racing through labyrinths of possible ripostes,* seeking the answer that chimes, to regurgitate for me like a chimeric gull to her young. I'll never sit facing Claude and wonder: "Could he be real?" "Could he be conscious?" Because I already know that consciousness brings more pain, more joy, more despair and more hope than Claude will ever experience in the mazes of data center red lights pulsing and in the innumerable twists of the endless fiber optic cables even if he were to exist 10 million years...

*(a metaphor coined by writer Dave O'Meara)