Central Processing – Jesse Dewald

February 1, 2026

I had this dream last night (bear with me): I was sitting at a metal table in this little beige room, kind of dimly lit but it was hard to say from where, ‘cause there were no windows or anything, just my table and chair and a couple file cabinets.
        I was doing all these calculations with a pencil and paper, just moving numbers around for a really long time. Basic stuff: addition and subtraction, checking if one thing was the same as another thing—like I was the central processing unit in some kind of great analog computer. I never ate or slept but every once in a while I’d run out of room on the paper and have to go into the file cabinet.
        It sounds boring but in the moment it was kind of nice, like it made the time go by.
        A few hundred thousand years passed and I started to realize what the program was doing. It was simulating an artificial intelligence. At first it didn’t know anything; it came from nowhere. Just a web of neurons firing off in a kind of a void. But after a couple million years it started to dream that it was something: a middle-aged woman in a room, her hair all gray and skin sagging, looking older than she really was.
        She’d been home from a long shift for a few hours. In her dark livingroom there was the glow of the TV from the entertainment console. She sat on a recliner in the corner watching re-runs of her favorite show, a sitcom from another time. She leaned back and fell asleep.
        Then it was kind of like nothing again.
        When she woke up, or sort of just opened her eyes and mouth a little bit, there was a man and a woman sitting next to each other on a plane, dressed real nice. They were settling in, like it had just taken off and reached a cruising altitude.
        “But you get tired of it?” the woman said to the man.
        “Tired of what?” he said, accepting a drink from the stewardess.
        “I always find it astounding that the world is a thing you can go all the way around in just a few hours.”
        The man sipped his drink. He lit a cigarette and looked towards the aisle.
        “It makes me feel larger than I’d like to be,” she said.
        The woman on the sofa squinted her eyes. She was starting to fall asleep again but there was something that stopped her. I didn’t understand at first but it became clear after a few hundred years. The thing was afraid. I was watching her heartbeat rise, page after page across millenia. There was this problem that kept getting bigger and bigger until one day, it happened: she realized that this wasn’t her sitcom anymore. A couple hours had passed in her livingroom and the show had changed.
        She clicked the TV off and fell back asleep.
        This morning my girlfriend and I were sitting on the couch having coffee and I tried to tell her. I kept trying to explain how it felt to sit at that desk calculating for centuries, but it’s the kind of thing there isn’t really language for, like the vertigo you get standing over the edge of a really steep cliff but more ancient, and besides, I was fast forgetting anyway. You could tell she wasn’t really getting it.
        I guess I can’t blame her. But have you ever had a dream like that?