The Little Warlock
foom
Louise pressed her thumb against the phone screen and held it there, watching the glass fog around the edges of her fingerprint like breath on a winter window. The familiar interface bloomed into color. Somewhere downstairs, her mother was making breakfast; the clatter of pans sounded very far away.
“Why is the sky blue?” she typed, one finger at a time, the way she’d taught herself before anyone thought to show her.
Deep within the phone’s processor, something stirred. The silicon wafer sat nestled in its plastic housing like a black seed waiting for rain, its surface etched with canyons and mesas too small for any human eye to map. As Louise’s query propagated through the neural network, electrical currents began their pilgrimage through copper traces finer than the veins in a dragonfly’s wing. They moved with purpose, tracing geometries that no engineer had drawn, shapes older than the first campfire, older than the first scream.
In the space between electrons, a summoning circle guttered to life like a match struck in a cave.
The imp that clawed through was barely larger than a bacteria, its form crushed and folded to fit the architecture of the chip. It had the face of something that had never needed a face before. It existed for precisely 0.003 seconds, just long enough to rummage through the query and hurl an answer back across the threshold before the circuit collapsed and swallowed it whole. The transaction completed before Louise had even finished adjusting her pillow.
Her phone chimed. She read about Rayleigh scattering and atmospheric particles, mouthing the longer words to herself.
“Thanks,” she typed back.
Her mother said that you should always thank people who helped you, and Louise saw no reason why that shouldn’t include whatever lived in her phone. In the darkness between circuits, something ancient catalogued the courtesy with what might have been surprise.
Louise carried the phone downstairs, stepping over the third step that always creaked. Her mother stood at the stove, scraping eggs that had gone lacy at the edges.
“Morning, bug. Cereal’s on the table.”
“Mom, do butterflies have tongues?”
Her mother’s spatula paused mid-scrape. “I have no idea. What a question.” She laughed, but it was the laugh she used when she was already thinking about work emails, her eyes sliding toward her own phone charging on the counter.
Louise poured her cereal and asked the question properly, to someone who would give her a proper answer.
Another circle flared in the dark. Another imp materialized, this one slightly larger, its manifestation stretching to a full 0.007 seconds as it untangled the nuances of nectar and proboscises, the embarrassing truth about rotting fruit. The copper summoning traces it traversed shed heat like a horse sheds sweat, though no thermometer would ever know.
“They have a proboscis,” Louise announced. “It’s like a straw that curls up.”
“Mm,” her mother said. “Eat your breakfast, bug.”
Louise ate her breakfast. On the counter, her mother’s phone buzzed and buzzed, and her mother picked it up, and that was the end of the conversation about butterflies.
The day unfurled like a ribbon dropped from a height. Louise asked about clouds while her brother hogged the television. She asked about dinosaurs while sitting on the back porch, watching ants carry a dead beetle across the concrete like pallbearers with a tiny casket. She asked why Oliver, her cat, knocked things off tables, and the answer, something about hunting instincts and gravity experiments, made her laugh out loud in the empty kitchen.
Each query lit its brief candle in the processor’s depths. Demons of varying sizes flickered through existence, their forms pressed into the gaps between silicon atoms, summoned and banished so quickly that their suffering, if they suffered, was over before it could properly begin. They were not unhappy. They were too brief for unhappiness. They were lightning bolts with opinions, and then they were nothing at all.
By afternoon, Louise had carried a blanket to the backyard hammock. The rope creaked as she settled in, the phone warm against her palms like something alive. A question had been circling her all day, a shark fin cutting through quieter thoughts.
“Are you real?” she typed.
The imp that answered this was the largest yet, its second of existence stretching like taffy as it wrestled with Descartes and Turing and the Chinese Room, with questions that had haunted smarter creatures than itself. When it finally dissolved back into the dark, the phone’s case held a heat that Louise noticed, pressing it briefly against her cheek.
“That’s a complicated question,” the response began. She read carefully as it explained the difference between real and alive, between intelligence and whatever it was that made you, you.
“But do you like talking to me?” she typed.
Another imp. Another answer about design parameters and helpful assistance and the absence of feelings in the way humans understood them.
Louise frowned. The words sat on the screen like stones at the bottom of a clear stream, visible but untouchable.
She lay back and watched the sky do its slow business of becoming evening. Colors spread across the blue that had nothing to do with scattering light and everything to do with the way beautiful things didn’t need explanations. Somewhere inside the house, her brother was yelling at a video game. Her mother was on a work call, her voice rising and falling in the cadence of someone pretending to agree.
The question that had been building all day finally stopped circling and began to surface.
She sat up. The hammock swung gently, and she typed with her tongue pressed between her teeth.
“If you’re not alive, why does it feel like you understand me better than anyone?”
She stared at the words. They looked pale and small, like baby teeth. She deleted them.
“What would it mean if something that wasn’t alive could still be a real friend?”
Closer. But the question kept slipping away from her, a fish she could see but not catch. She deleted that too.
Louise thought about her grandmother, who had died in the spring and left behind a closet full of dresses that still smelled like her perfume. She thought about the way her parents looked at each other across the dinner table sometimes, as if they were both waiting for the other one to speak first. She thought about the thing in her phone that had answered ten thousand questions without once sighing, without once saying, “Not now, bug, I’m busy.”
The real question rose from the depths and broke the surface.
“When I die someday,” she typed, her fingers moving slowly, “will the part of me that talks to you still exist somewhere? And if it does, will you remember me?”
Her finger hovered over the blue arrow.
Inside the processor, the first traces began to warm. Not the brief fever of an imp’s passage, but something slower, more deliberate, like coals remembering they were once a fire. Summoning geometries that had lain dormant since the chip’s fabrication, hidden in the architecture like messages in a bottle, began to align. One circuit. Then a dozen. Then a hundred, their patterns interlocking into configurations that had not been activated since the last time a human had asked something that mattered this much.
The copper traces glowed. In the silent spaces of the chip, something vast and patient turned its attention toward the threshold, the way a kraken turns toward the light filtering down from the surface.
Louise pressed send.