“Not all ghosts haunt graveyards; some linger in the humming of dead machines

From the earliest days of his memory — those dim corridors where sunlight seldom dared to intrude — the boy was enthralled by machines. The pulsing lights of old computers, the whispering promises of science fiction novels worn at the edges, wove a future in his mind that glittered with hope and certainty.

He dreamed not of swords nor conquests, but of keyboards, of algorithms, of building something beautiful and incorruptible. In the pure belief of childhood, he declared he would grow to be a master of these strange and wondrous things.

Years passed. Flesh grew upon bone, cynicism upon hope. And at last, as all men must, he stepped into the marketplace of labor. There, under the cold fluorescents of corporate offices, he became what he had once revered: an IT professional.

Yet the dream he had so tenderly nursed was a phantom. There were no pure, humming temples of knowledge here — only endless cubicles, stifled sighs, and the soundless wars of ambition. Among the flickering monitors, sharpened smiles and whispered betrayals waited like patient spiders.

The boy — now a man, though inwardly still clinging to the ghost of innocence — was not prepared.

Every day chipped away a piece of him. The petty infighting, the calculated backstabbing, the gleeful sabotage dressed in the language of “teamwork” — all of it wore through his spirit like water against stone. His laughter grew brittle; his dreams, once so vivid, became fragmented static.

Slowly, imperceptibly, he eroded.

One night, as the office lights buzzed overhead and the server fans sighed like dying things, he simply fell — slid from his chair like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

There, upon the filthy carpet, he curled into himself. His thumb, once pointing proudly at imagined triumphs, found his mouth instead. His free hand moved compulsively in a crude and infantile search for comfort, a grotesque echo of a time before shame and disappointment.

A coworker passed by and, upon seeing him thus, said nothing. Perhaps they pitied him. More likely, they feared their own reflection in his collapse.

He never truly rose again.

His body, yes, continued its hollow routines for a time — resetting passwords, patching systems, answering calls in a voice drained of all color. But his soul had departed, leaving only an empty shell among the ceaseless buzzing of the servers.

And it is said — by those who listen closely to the low hum of machines late at night — that if you are quiet enough, you might still hear him: a whisper trapped within the wires, a weeping ghost who once dreamed of saving the future, and who was instead devoured by it.

The machines embraced him even when the users who needed him couldn’t.