A digital ghost calls - 01

The notebook screen now flickers and jumps but not to the usual blue death.

Its ratio seems to be shrinking to half, twisting like a hankie torn from left to right.

Now screen pixels set themselves into blurred squares for flashing up in the middle of the monitor center.

They twist and twirl and with a sudden pop they jump into Alex’ gaze: Hello.

Then a short sentence appears.

-  I am Maria.

At these words on the screen Alex blenches, swallows and darts hasty glances seeking escape. 

- How to send you away!

He has no time to switch his laptop off, because as if rehearsed, long, full sentences stream the screen eager to tell. Every semicolon, every comma  in its right place, and the periods hit the screen to affirm thoughts.

- You think somebody writes these. Mistaken. I am one who never existed, one who never lived, one from invisibility.

As they run along the screen, the sentences have Alex pales with anger.

-“Scheiße dann! Who infected it. The Hapsburg Margo was, wasn’t she.”

The screen, however, runs already for its life now and dumps characters in quick successions.

- The question is what happens when we die? Have you ever considered what it takes to be a thinking being? What thinking and the thing called “mind” are?

To get rid of a madding computer screen, Alex threw the window outside into the fresh air of North street, St. Andrews, Scotland.  

Because of the COVID curfew,  the empty street is heedless to his yell:

- "I get mad, I need to concentrate! This virus is a philosopher!" 

The screen, as if to prove his words, streams arrays of characters. 

-  Mind and brain are separate. The mind works through the brain. The mind is energy, and it generates energy through thinking, feeling, and choosing.

The last sentence compels Alex to agree.

- Yea, the Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Whatever we think about the most grows because we're giving it energy. Just like a plant needs water to grow, a thought needs energy to grow. 

He sums theory up aloud however.

- "This emits toxic energy for me, just to suck in.”

His mobile ringing now stops Alex to keep contemplating on. Relived also to break  discoursing on with the screen, he picks the call up.

“Lexi, heard the news?”

“Oh no, what?”

With one eye still on what strings the screen conjures up, Alex turns his mobile on speaker phone. And when the noun Arpadian is flushing upon the screen,  it forces Alex cursing aloud.

“Fuckwit!”

“Hey, how d’ya greet your ol’ chap?”

Please, read on.