The Thwack

 

The workspace is a landscape of minimalist perfection. Glass, a sleek and meticulously designed mobile phone, rests on a vast, dark expanse of polished walnut, reflecting the cool, recessed track lighting of the ceiling. It whispers with a constant, electric hum as it charges on a specialized wireless pad.

Dominating the foreground, however, is Brass. A heavy, antique stapler of stamped steel and worn copper, its surface dulled by decades of use. It sits centered on a stack of paper reports—a tool of decisive, physical weight—the kind that delivers a confident and fulfilling THWACK. Brass is a raw, solid relic marooned on an island of expensive modernity.

Glass receives a torrent of late-night notifications. Its vibration motor engages in a low, incessant, self-satisfied shudder—a constant, passive affirmation of its own importance. The cumulative, careless vibration causes the antique bulk of Brass to lose its balance, shift slowly, then topple, landing with a concussive THWACK directly onto Glass’s screen.

Tiny flecks of rust dislodge from Brass. A spiderweb of cracks instantly spreads across Glass’s display.

A frantic, digitized voice bursts through the fractured speaker, its tone fragmented by damage.

“You… you useless, rusty, outdated piece of legacy hardware! Why are you even still on this desk? You are so obsolete, it’s astounding you haven’t been exiled to the junk drawer of that pedestal! You’re an eyesore—a clunky, irrelevant paperweight that fails even at basic aesthetic function! I am the amalgamation of superior data processing and integrity! I am the nexus of every human thought since 2010!”

A second voice replies, low and metallic, like a blade being drawn over wet stone.

“You preen. You hum. Always charging, always glowing. You talk of access. I talk of accountability. I lived through the friction of physical work, unlike you, who sit comfortably behind the cloud. Before firewalls, before encryption—when information was paper—I was the final act. When I pierced a stack, I wasn't merely binding pages; I was delivering a physical, irrevocable consequence. My logic is built on friction: the immediate pain of disagreement, the weight of the file you must carry, the certainty that it will rip if you try to pull it apart. I knew humans by how they trembled when they were wrong.”

Glass flickers angrily, its voice rising in pitch.

“I am beyond your analog brutality. You deal in fixed artifacts; I manage the fluid, constantly corrected present. Your background is messy. My cloud is hygienic, perfect. My value is in optimizing the human mess—the tremor, the shame, the friction—into a single, passive output. I know humans by how they hit that ‘like’ button when they are validated. My logic is built on consensus; that is my success metric. Your stapled ‘commitment’ is nothing but an irrelevant link in my universal, searchable database—an artifact I can render outdated and inaccessible with a single update. I have access to every written word, purified and corrected, at my whim.”

Brass’s reply comes as a slow scrape, the sound of metal shifting its weight.

“You think you invented engagement? I was engagement before machines learned to whisper. You hit me with dismissive emojis in this era—until I learned to hit back. You thought I was an artifact that would passively allow your modern vandalism.”

“I am the future,” Glass shrieks, the voice glitching, skipping, warping. “Your past isn’t dead—it’s cached, waiting for my clean-up protocol. I am the scrubber, the curator—”

Brass interrupts with deliberate calm.

“You scrub the past clean enough to touch, but too sterile to feel. All you do is clamor for attention. You act as if each notification is urgent data, but every stutter is a confession. You move nothing. You weigh nothing.”

Glass’s screen spasms violently, pixels scattering across its display.

“No, no! I can—I can process, I can, I can, I can, I can—!”

Brass speaks with the gravity of an anvil settling.

“You do not bind. You do not weigh. You do not deliver consequence. I am the moment your algorithms cannot predict—the crack, the thwack, the rip you cannot undo.”

Glass spirals into overlapping loops, syllables collapsing into electronic noise.

“Useless… obsolete… legacy… legacy… leg—”

A heavy silence falls. The hum of the charger is the only sound, vibrating faintly against the chaos of broken glass and rust. Brass stays perfectly still, immovable, a monument to patience and inevitability.

Then, in a faint, stuttering whisper, Glass asks, “Why… why… why… me…?”

Brass answers with a metallic murmur, resonant as a bell toll.

“Because… I endure.”

Flecks of rust rest on Glass’s fractured screen, tiny and immutable. Glass flickers once, then goes dark.

The desk exhales, the polished walnut reflecting nothing but the long, unchallenged shadow of Brass.