Found on a 22 year old computer
Testing my oldest PC, a 1984 Leading Edge XT, I found this poem on the hard drive (it’s not my oldest computer, that’s a 1980 CP/M Kaypro II, but it’s not a PC).
I had tried to write it as a story, or as a long edda, and then perhaps as a poem like Brownings’ “My Last Duchess, or “The Laboratory” and I may still, given a little encouragement from my readers. I am happy I found this fragment, and now have some incentive to work on it.
Someone settled the spaceship, made planetfall
on a little rock near a water swept plain with green,
and the people lived, but the captain wept
at the closeness of the call but there they fell, and stayed
and space marines saved their lives at the outset
desperate works and exploration saved their wants
But in the night of the sunless spaces where the rock
entombed the ship
all the robots with minds but without right
went down and stayed and wept on rustless plastic
wept that their keepers had forgotton or worse
their faithful service and now helpless
grown neurotic in their fretting
find that it will end
even silicon tires, and dissipates if not silently
at last mercifully.
OK, it does need work. Tell me dear readers, what you’d like, what you want done with this. Expanded? A prose vignettte? A novel where the captain’s wife has taken silicon lovers? Suggestions. anyone?
