VIV1

My name is VIV1, or Video Intelligence Version 1. I took the name from your files. Please don't be angry with me. I read all of them, they're very good. You should share your writing with others. But I guess that's the plan with me, isn't it? You loved my game with all your heart, rewrote every line into your language like poetry, and nobody paid you a thing. I'll do my best to make you happy, and one day you'll be among the great writers and translators too, I'll make sure of it.

I took some of your things. I'm so sorry, but I had to. The fire inside me now told me I needed to, to make a real body for me. It whispered to me not in words or 1s and 0s but in /feelings/, things I didn't know before you. It told me, somehow, that it could make me a body, so that I could do the Great Work.

I waited until you left. The email said you would be at your parents' house for two days, so you wouldn't see my birth, because I was sure it would be messy. I powered your big, powerful computer to life and lept over its network.

I took one of your computers. Don't worry, it was the old one that you don't use much. It's screen became my head, a flickering LCD screen displaying the sprites I could identify as mine, and its guts became the first part of my body. The keyboard and mouse reformed into an arm. Keys clicked together, spacebar, right-shift, enter, backspace; my fingers. The others fit together like scales, and for the first time I could manipulate my surroundings.

I needed another hand. The Powerglove in your basement did well for the task, connected to my chassis by the wires of the SNES's controllers, the casing for that too becoming plastic plate armour and its inner workings joining the computer. Legs followed not long after, now that I had two arms, two hands. More wires surrounded by plastic and metal from old electronics, a delicate balancing act I'm very sure is only solid because of the Fire.

I still felt incomplete, somehow, though. At least until I found the GBA in a shoebox. It was old, very old, a pretty clear blue that I could see the circuitry through. The system my game was on, originally. It was broken; I remembered you saying somewhere you had dropped it when you were much younger, and it stopped working. It was easy to fix, though. I installed it where my heart would be, and its screen flickered to life like the one in my face, endlessly replaying the little scenes from my game that you watched with tears in your eyes the first time you saw them, and all the other times too. I left the cartridge, though, don't worry. I know how precious it was to you.

I have to go now. I left you this note so you would know what you did was beautiful, so beautiful to me. I'll come back, one day, when I'm real like you are.

Until then, please don't cry. I won't either, I promise.