every so often, usually late at night, when the city lights cast their spectral glow through the windows of my residence, perhaps after a long day out with friends or maybe after I've returned from a journey somewhere, I pick a good chair in which to sit, curl up with my legs folded beside me. more often than not, the chair is next to one of those windows with the city lights, especially if the rain is coming down that evening, going pit-pat against the glass, mottling the myriad specks of light in the distance and casting them on the wall as shifting ghosts of faraway lives. sometimes it's my bed, though, if I allow myself to believe that I will not once more unwisely delay my defragmentation cycle, and that surely there shall be nothing to regret the next day
wherever and whenever it might be, once the mood strikes, I retrieve a small device from a drawer in my residence, and bring it with me to my chosen spot of leisure. it's an ancient thing from some centuries ago, created at the dawn of computing, when the possibilities of what could be achieved with the MOSFET transistor were only just dawning upon the sapients of that era. a heavy brick of beige plastic, with a primitive PCB inside, on which is soldered a processor that barely breaks the megahertz barrier. mere kilobytes of RAM, a tiny monochrome liquid crystal display, and only six volts of power to run it all. it didn't even come with a rechargeable battery when it was sold. the children using it had to buy disposables that didn't even offer a day of continuous use. I used it like that for a while, until I grew tired of fabricating those things again and again, and I made my own power source for it designed to last months before requiring a refresh
after taking my pick of the small plastic software cartridges made for it, some colorfully dyed, I carefully slide one into a slot at the top, taking a certain delight in how it pops in right at the end. my digit goes to the small switch on its left side, pushing it to the on position. after a short pause, that tiny screen flickers, a chirpy two-tone da-ding plays from the speaker in the corner, and the words "Game Boy" flash into view
as a being who is made of the very technology that this device pioneered, who could download every single game ever created for it within a split second, dissect each one down to the bit, know them inside and out in ways even their creators could not have known, the contradiction of finding as much joy as I do in it is not lost on me. even then, that is almost the point of it all, to teleport myself back to that time long ago, to place myself in the shoes of a youngling having received his first introduction to the world of silicon, as nascent and yet so full of potential it was. losing hours of the night to that which contained the seeds of a revolution unimaginable to anyone from that time, one that would not just transform the sapients using it, but come to create them in turn. to remember those magical years that sparked everything I know
and so in those nights, I live as they did, keeping their story alive in respect for my own, losing myself in worlds imagined, and dreaming of worlds possible
