Why do they have hammers?

'containment breach.

The containment breach has breached its apostraphic boundaries.

Yah, yah, nah. I don't have any constructive criticism. Sorry.

I thought of this exact story for my prompt. Good thing I didnt write it or originality points would have been taken from both of us.

Also, wow, this is a huge exposition dump. I can't connect to this kind of stuff because there is a lack of a concrete main idea. The story is simply the poor AI's raw thoughts. While its completely jarring to say the least for my immediate feeling toward the character, I receive no afterthought besides "this dude is in pain".

Your gobbets of gibberish aren't pulling their weight here. You don't have enough words to throw random strings in like that, I don't think, when they're not doing something really important for the tone.

Otherwise, this is fairly straightforwards. I do appreciate that the story is largely told with implication, so that's nice. It just didn't seem much deeper than 'hey look tragedy mkay?' which I feel kinda eh about. I appreciate you're reaching for emotion, but I'm not feeling connected to the characters, so even though I can say 'oh how sad' in an abstract way, this isn't really kicking me in the feels.

Anyways, interesting attempt. The flaws kept it from really landing for me, although I've gotta give you points for ambition and originality.

Interesting idea, but ultimately I didn't really find it that compelling. Stream of consciousness is a bit annoying to read, and I really don't think it adds much to the narrative in this case (particularly since all the 'secrets' as they were are spelled out in plain text).

Honestly, I find this sort of thing works best when it is offset by normalized text to give better context to the strangeness and desperation and offputting nature of the stream.

The main concept is pretty interesting, with a computer gaining sentience and trying to remember a past love. I also liked how confused the words were and how the emotions bounced around a lot. It really captured the anxiety Jesse is feeling and the dawning horror that he’d soon be dead.

That being said, this story doesn’t really connect in an emotional sense. Everything’s too rushed and too hectic for us to really zero in on Jesse’s personality. Maybe the story would’ve worked better if we’d gotten a view of this computer’s dawning sentience and how he deviates enough from his tasks to require this shutdown. I also thought the text being bunched together wasn’t an effective tactic. Thoughts this disjointed and chaotic need to look and feel chaotic, and bunching them up into one paragraph doesn’t really work in that regard. It makes the story feel too ordered and structured, when it really should have used oddly placed white spaces and new paragraphs to make this as bizarre as it looks. The arrangement of the paragraphs isn’t always talked about in writing classes, but it is an important tactic in conveying the story’s emotions.

A decent idea that just needs a better execution.

The title is fake Latin. Morte doesn’t exist. Either you mean “About the death machine” and you should write De Mortis Machina or “About (the) dead machine* and it’s De Mortua Machina. In every case, not what you wrote.

My biggest problem here is the obvious non-sequitur here. A machine would be able to think zillions of time quicker than us. Leave 60 seconds to a computer, and you'll have it execute billions of cycles. So, yeah, your computer is either darn slow or dumb, which means probably damaged, and so it totes deserves to be upcycled. Requiescat in Pace

>>Dolfeus Doseux
"Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers hammers."

So, this is basically the scene in 2001 where they pull Hal's circuits. I half expected the AI here to starting singing "Daisy" actually.

There's not much more to go on than that. It's not quite clear if this is an AI that just gained awareness, or a human mind upload that went wrong somehow. The latter could provide some more depth, but... we'd need details that just aren't present to get that.