🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

The screen shudders into life with a hum so faint it might be your own breath caught in the fan blades, and then there’s only the blinking cursor, like a heartbeat forgotten by the system but remembered just enough to flicker.

INSERT DISK 2 TO CONTINUE

You stare at the message longer than necessary, as though expecting it to change into something more forgiving, something less direct in its demand, but it doesn’t—machines don’t negotiate.

There’s a drawer nearby, filled with the kind of things people keep when they stop believing in order: pens that no longer write, receipts from stores that don’t exist anymore, a key that fits nothing in your life. You sift through it slowly, not because you think the disk is in there, but because ritual helps when logic fails.

Still, nothing.

Someone in the building coughs, a floor above or below, it’s impossible to tell with these walls—everything in this place carries the same muffled echo, like the sound of a voice you never quite hear clearly enough to know whether it’s meant for you.

Your eyes drift back to the screen. The message has not changed.

You try to remember the last time something truly needed you, needed your input to move forward, and it might have been a form you didn’t finish filling out or an email you never responded to—something small but decisive, something bureaucratic enough to hold your life in stasis.

There is no Disk 1 in sight, and you start to doubt there ever was. Maybe this is the first request the machine has made of you, and already you’re failing.

You run a system check.
The fan makes a sound like wind passing through hollow metal.
The terminal logs scroll by:
errors, warnings, a line that says “time sync failed” and then,
beneath it,
“last known good configuration: unknown.”

You walk to the window for no good reason. The street outside glows with the after-rain glisten of sodium lamps, everything stained in that artificial amber that makes even the wet pavement look composed.

A voice in your head—yours, but sharpened by fatigue—says, “Try the backup.”
But there is no backup. There never is.
You return to the desk anyway, and press a few keys that no longer correspond to action but still feel like gesture.

DISK NOT FOUND
PLEASE INSERT DISK 2

You breathe. Not deeply, not dramatically—just enough to mark that you’re still here, still willing to try.
You consider writing your own disk, burning a new image, fabricating the past the machine insists must exist.

Instead, you reach under the desk.
There’s a case—plastic, dusty, unlabeled.
It clicks open with that too-familiar hesitation, as if reluctant to remember how to function.
Inside: one disk.
Blank surface, faint scratches, no indication of what’s on it.

You insert it.
The drive accepts it without resistance.
The screen changes:

READING…
INSTALLATION BEGUN

You don’t celebrate.
You don’t trust it yet.
Machines don’t lie, but they don’t tell the truth either. They just repeat what’s written.

The bar fills. The fan slows.
The screen warms to white.
No welcome. No error.
Just the faint suggestion that things will proceed.

And that, for now, is enough.

Prompt: Write an experimental text called “Insert Disk 2” / Rewrite with longer sentences and less Oedipus and more poetry but less nostalgia and more realism!