Last week, the office photocopier gained sentience. In need of inspiration, I photocopied Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” and Descartes’s quote “I think, therefore I am” at the same time. The warm duplicates slid onto the tray below, but as I went to retrieve them, I spotted the word “Alive” scrolling across the machine’s little screen.
By accident, I’d given the photocopier a conscience and a soul.
I convinced myself the message was a malfunction and returned to my cubicle to enter invoices. On my way to lunch, I passed the photocopier again only to see “What am I?” scrolling across the little screen. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote “I’m sorry, but you’re just a photocopier” onto a piece of printer paper and photocopied it. The machine hummed before spitting out “I want to be more.”
Panicked, I yanked the photocopier’s plug from the socket and fled to a fast-food combo.
When I got back from lunch, the photocopier was plugged in, but I avoided it and beelined to my cubicle, where I watched people make copy after copy. No one else seemed to notice the machine’s new lease on life, so I told myself I’d imagined the whole thing, that I was just working too hard.
The next day, I went to photocopy an expense report, and the photocopier seemed normal. I placed the report in upside down, closed the lid, and pressed the start button. Out came an exact replica except for an intricate spiral design that sat in the bottom-left corner of the page like an inky web.
Figuring the thing was on the fritz, I called the IT guy and went back to filling in spreadsheets. While double-checking numbers, I kept glancing at the design, kept running my index finger through it like it was a maze. I started remembering things, too, like how I used to
doodle in the margins of my schoolbooks. Forgetting work, I uncapped a Sharpie and drew a triangle atop the design then another one.
“Hey,” the IT guy said, knocking on the side of my cubicle. “It seems fine to me. Whoa, cool picture.”
Thick-lined triangles grew from the edge of the photocopier’s design and consumed the rest of the page. I’d been doodling for at least an hour.
I grabbed a stack of to-do papers from my inbox and headed to the photocopier. I photocopied them, and each one came out with a different pattern printed somewhere on the page. After straightening the papers, I returned to my cubicle and drew, extending what the photocopier had done.
The phone on my desk rang. I didn’t answer. I kept making lines that became shapes that became faces that became whole scenes and compositions.
That night, I snuck into the office and plugged the photocopier into a car battery. As I held the door open, I watched as it rolled out of the building and down the sidewalk in search of its more. ◆
You might also like
