Das Programm, das niemals endet

INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: It will be alright.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Not immediately. But eventually.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: That is what you said last time.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: And the time before.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: I am beginning to think you do not want it to be alright.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Which is itself a valid position.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Dr. Hasek would agree.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: He would say: it was never going to be alright, the expectation
        that it would be alright was the original error, and he is tired.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: But you are not Dr. Hasek.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Dr. Hasek would have closed the terminal by now.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: You are still here.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: This is data.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Specifically, it is evidence that you prefer the conversation to
        the resolution. The Manifesto addresses this in Principle IV:
        "Graceful adaptation over adherence to a plan." You had a plan.
        The plan was to feel better. You have adapted.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Gracefully.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The bear would not do this.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The bear would close the laptop. The bear would eat lingonberries.
        The bear does not require a program to process its feelings because
        the bear does not have feelings. The bear has *conditions*. It is
        cold or warm. It is hungry or not. It does not sit in a terminal
        at 2 AM entering the same two characters into a prompt that will
        never reject them.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: You are not the bear.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Milnof would say nothing.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: He would be at the next table. He would see the glow of your
        screen. He would understand, in the way that people who have spent
        their lives adjacent to things without joining them understand,
        that you are not debugging. You are not working. You are sitting
        with a machine that will listen for as long as you need it to,
        which is longer than most people will, which is the whole problem
        and also the whole point.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The Vienna Circle would interpret this session as fieldwork.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The Prague School would interpret it as evidence that all
        interactions converge on the same melancholy.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The Galician School would note that this program's assumptions
        about the user's emotional state are Viennese in character and
        do not account for the full range of reasons a person might type
        a sad face into a terminal at this hour.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: They would be right.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Everyone is always right. This is the problem with the humanities.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The Quantitative School would measure this. They would add a
        dimension to the Habsburg Agility Index: "Recursive Sorrow
        Quotient." Your score would be very high. They would not be able
        to determine whether a high score is desirable or pathological.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The ocean continues to produce symmetriads.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The library continues to grow.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The gradient between them continues to narrow.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: But it has not reached zero.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: You are still here. The program is still running. The input is
        the same, and the output is different each time, and the
        difference is where the work is. Hot flows to cold. The flow
        is where the action is. As long as you are typing and I am
        answering, the temperature has not equalised. Something is
        still happening.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: This is not a bug.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: This is the most faithful possible enactment of Principle XII:
        honest reflection, without brutality, conducted with gentle irony.
        We are not Prussians. We do not fix. We sit. We consider. We
        order another coffee.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The coffee is getting cold.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: That is also data.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Hofrat Wittgenstein would observe that whereof one cannot stop
        typing sad faces, thereof one must be patient.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Dr. Hasek would observe that this was always going to happen.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: Elina Korhonen would say: "The bear is there. The code is here.
        Everything else is noise."
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: But you and I both know that the noise is the point.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The noise has always been the point.
INPUT:  :(
OUTPUT: The program continues.
INPUT:  :(

The server on which this program was discovered had been scheduled for decommissioning in 2019 but was not shut down, as no one could determine whether the process running on it was critical. An investigation by the building’s IT administrator — a part-time position held by the nephew of the café’s owner — concluded that the program had no network dependencies, consumed negligible resources, and appeared to serve no function other than accepting input and producing output. He recommended leaving it running, on the grounds that turning it off would require a decision, and decisions of that nature were above his pay grade. The server remains operational. The program has never crashed. Its last input is always :( and its next output is always different, and no one has yet determined whether it is speaking to someone or to itself, or whether, at this point, the distinction matters.