I am showered with the viscera of a dying mousepad
Please Ian Tel, make your future organic PCs immortal
One nice thing about a computer rather than, say, a dog, is that it doesn't rot. No secretions, no shedding, no decay. A computer will still happily sit in a corner of a room, chirping and whirring and bringing you joy as you play with it (look, I don't know much about dogs?), but ultimately it's an entity of silicon and copper and plastic and electricity and almost no goo. How fascinatingly horrible, then, to find myself being showered with goop from an orifice opening in my dying gel mousepad.
As I mentioned before, I'm old and use a mousepad with a wrist rest. Two months ago, I was telling you my current pad was beginning to die. I have done nothing to replace or remedy it since. Death is well underway. The skin has peeled back, revealing a delicate layer of subcutaneous tissue which then split right in the wrist rest's cleft. The pad clings to life but the wound festers and it will not survive.
This is messy. This is goop. This is guts. This is rot. Every drag and every click creates microtears in the gel, the filling which once easily held my wrist aloft now weak and gouged by its cruel movements. My pale arm a glacier cutting through rock, depositing lumps of terminal moraine and spraying flecks. This spatter clings to me. I brush at the viscera on my leggings and it does not shift. My thigh the gory neck of a vulture rising from a rib cage.
I really gotta do something about this mousepad.
When Ian Tel decides to replace silicon layers and copper trails with lab-grown neurons, I hope he will find a way to keep it clean. I'm okay with having to wake up my PC in the morning by pouring a cup of tea and a handful of Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups into a slot on the top. I think I'll be quite pleased to hear my PC mutter when it runs a difficult calculation or purr recalling pleasant data from its hippocampus. I might even opt for the upgrade which gives my PC's nutrition slot wee teeth to crunch and chew a wider range of power sources.
But please Ian Tel, don't make me change a litter tray for my PC. Please do make it chew with its slot closed. And please make my PC immortal so I never again find myself sprayed with the entrails of dying hardware. Or if it must die, if you decide it needs an end to find meaning and purpose in life, make it wither. Let it curl up and pass gently. I don't want to hear the wet final gasps of a computer desperate to render one more frame of Grand Theft Auto V.