It was a pretty impressive thunderstorm, real Sydney stuff. I turned off everything. The printer, with the power turned off, and through a power board, started to print. The unmistakable erratic sound of text printing, gaps and mutterings, followed by silence. There was nothing on the paper. Mystified, and too interested to leave it alone, I tried examining the paper under bright light. There was nothing, but for a minute or so the printer had been going through the motions of printing.

It so happened that the bolt that had set off the printer had also destroyed my modem, so that had to be dealt with. I mentioned the printing event, and of course was wasting my breath, what are you supposed to do about something like that? A few stale jokes about haunted computers, and a crack about the spirits of hackers was about all that was ever going to come out of talking about it. Even so, for a writer, it was an idea that remained present for years. I didn’t think much about it until I got a new printer. “Commercial exorcism”, I thought.

Until the new printer did the same thing. This time a word was printed; “Redirect” with some sort of code that looked like normal encoding. I did a few things that I thought were relevant, checking my email archives, sent/received, asked the ISP if there was any possibility my internet browser was picking up stray bits from somewhere, and a good, well-informed discussion established that we had no idea.

So, inevitably, at four in the morning, the printer, with the power off, started cutting up. This time it was text:

O ye foul automated responses! Cursed be thy odorous phrases! Send not thy woeful filth to darken my inbox! That the pure vistas of thought be polluted in such manner!

Either I had a prank on my hands or the computer, having read enough of my stuff, had decided that enough was enough. I ran every form of scan that I could find. Viruses, no. Adware, no. Spyware, no. Berserk cookies, no. This was by now getting very puzzling. System check, scandisk, all OK. The answer from everyone I asked was that someone must be doing it, or there just wasn’t an answer. That sounded a bit too logical to me. If someone wanted to play a joke, why be so articulate?

Whoever it was, I decided, must either work shifts or be a lousy sleeper. The next episode was at 2 in the afternoon. This time the mood had changed:

Why must I wallow in the shallow seas of the ordinary? How does life make such judgments upon the innocent? Wherein the vasty voids of verbose vacuum? Must perception be the fruit of affliction?

Well, “vasty” is Shakespeare, so whoever it was, wasn’t an illiterate. Better judgment said “buy a new computer and change the email address,” but I was prepared to try another approach. I write a form of quasi-Elizabethan unless people start shooting at me, so I wrote a little thing and put it into the saved emails:

How doth the sickly seas of mediocrity afflict thee, O dweller in the unspoken lands? In what manner has your innocent perception been smitten that it finds putrid worms within its sweet fruits?

I thought I’d better stick to the text, so I’d simply queried in the same form. I figured that for a writer, this was either a dream come true or poetic justice. Perhaps it was one of my stories come to call. I’ve always been quite sure that they wouldn’t just leave it to the story lines. That made sense. More sense than anything else, anyway.

So, naturally, nothing happened. A week went by with me looking guardedly at the printer, and checking to see if anything had happened to the saved email. Zip. Then my insomniac correspondent came back:

Now I hear voices in my emptiness! Is this death? Is this life? Is my thought returning, sadly said, to whisper of its oblivion? What awful beast defiles this situation? What insane creature stalks my cries? Bitter return on my soft pleas, indeed.

Us awful beasts can take a hint. Whatever/whoever the thing was, all I was doing was upsetting it. That left me with the rather thankless task of what to do about this stuff. Should I descend to the morose level of a publisher, simply record it, make a book out of it, and put it out with no idea of what it was about? Should I just record it and try to puzzle it out for the next few decades?

My writer’s instincts said it deserved to be a story. What a surprise. However, despite modern literary methods, not knowing anything at all about the subject can be a problem. This wasn’t exactly Top Of The Market Third Party Sex With Adjectives stuff. My stuff isn’t, either, but it does go somewhere. What was I supposed to do with it? I decided to just record it, and keep thinking until I knew what to do with it, if anything. The image of some lost thing in a vasty space surrounded by babbling emails was a bit hard to shake, though. Had to feel a bit sympathetic.

So The Thing In The Printer file was started, and I pasted in all the printed text as picture scans, and kept the original prints in sealed containers. Every so often I’d have another look at the messages and try to find a code or something to make them mean something else. Nothing happened for about a year. That included me not making any other sense out of the messages using second-letter codes, anagrams, numerical values, etc. A thoroughly productive nothing. I did make sure there was always paper in the printer, though.

Then:

Do now even my hallucinations desert me? Am I lost in this place of endless irrelevancies? Where are the voices of the void, which even in their ignorance, gave hope? How vacant is madness! How dull! What predictable insanities lurch comically across the mind. Yet, without them, and with nothing else, what dreary thought is permitted to intrude like a stinking drunkard among the sensitive yearnings of the mind.

Hm. Being an awful beast isn’t a license to be a jerk. The poor thing was obviously miserable, and lonely. So:

Indeed, lonely keeper of vigil among the rantings of possibilities, thy voice is heard. I am neither crude beast nor a disgusting tormentor of the afflicted. Speak more, inhabitant of the spaces, that I might understand you better, and not say such things as to wound your delicate perceptions.

This came from some supply of tact that I didn’t even know I had. Usually, when I write in this style, I have free rein over the subject. In this case I was talking to the subject directly, something all writers should try at least once. I just wish I’d thought of it sooner. The reply took a month:

What form of person art thou, that scribbles among the mountains of thought? Should I address thee as being or spirit, man or natural thing? How do you speak to me in this wilderness of meaning?

Good questions. Good answers were going to be a bit difficult. “Scribbling among the mountains” was a pretty good description, too. I felt that creating any misleading foothills was to be avoided. I spent about a week trying to answer the questions as they were phrased, and used up a lot of time disagreeing with myself. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t quite clear on what I was trying to achieve. I’d reacted instinctively to a form of expression of someone in distress. So, take that a bit further: what, exactly, did I think I was going to do about it? Answer, I had no idea. Eventually I started to think my slow response was becoming a bit rude. A highly equivocal reply came from this lack of objectivity:

My name is Paul. I am one who does indeed scribble among the mountains of meaning, telling tales of the mind. Yet I know not what manner of being are you, who speaks so clear in the coarse nature of meaning. How should I properly address you, speaker from all nature of thought?

Well, at least it was an honest answer, if not a very literal reply. I gave myself a C for the attempt. A truly difficult, impossible, silence followed. Two months passed. Cursing myself for probably blowing whatever this was, I tried to remain open minded. The problem with delayed communication is that one tends to create situations based on things that haven’t happened. The equation is that the longer in doubt, the more misinterpretations you have the time to create.

My first thought was that I’d simply convinced the thing that I wasn’t worth communicating with. Then I explored the possibility that I’d been set up by someone. The natural development of that idea was that the messages were some sort of precursor to an invasion of the world using computers. Fortunately for me, I am both able and willing to despise my own thinking, so these arguments didn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Even so, the lack of information was what was causing these paper-bag-in-hurricane ideas. I occasionally venture into sarcasm, and it occurred to me that invading a world full of ignoramuses might not rate highly with some species. Particularly those who prefer a bit of a challenge.

The idea that I might be in direct communication with God was discarded on the basis that God would probably be a bit better oriented, not lost in the vasty-ness. Some Child Of The Universe? Yeah, good description, really informative. Typical of me to come up with something that even I couldn’t stand as an expression. The “child” idea did make some sense, though. What if this was literally a lost infant of some sort? It would at least explain how difficult it seemed to be finding making sense of its existence. I noted mainly from this excursion into brilliance how long it had taken me to come back to the obvious.

Then:

“Paul” you are named? No other has had a name. You must be some real thing, then, unless unreality has a name. I am- Path. I am a way of being, a course of travel, and a destination. Where I began is far away. Where I go seems to have no name. Are you a place of reference, a guide, a warning bleak among the savage truths?

This character was a philosophy course of itself. My dog would have had better answers than I did. Talk about raising a few personal issues. Me, as a place of reference, wouldn’t have too many cartographers losing sleep. No drastic revisions of the street directories would be required. A guide to what? A warning… yeah, maybe, but as one of the savages, not “among” them. “Bleak” might refer to readers…. I succeeded in spending a few weeks trying to get a grip on this. I didn’t want to become some sort of remote mentor to a thing I couldn’t even identify. That’s never been a good idea. A reference point, I already was, apparently, something to which it could refer… Why did it have the word “warning” in its vocabulary, which seemed pretty good? What did it think was dangerous?

Then there was Path’s description of itself. That could apply to anything sentient, and didn’t give any sort of insight into what it actually was. Actually, as a description of sentient life, it was a good one. Just not something to which I could attach an image. Well, that was my fault, not Path’s. Perhaps to Path that was a strictly accurate, concise, description.

I have to say that if my earlier conceptions were a bit iffy, the next batch was a lot worse. I now spent whole days trying to frame questions and answers, and didn’t. This was now a challenge to my thinking, and as such not to be ignored. I hate losing debates with myself. I’m so insufferable about it afterwards. Only one clear pattern emerged. The more answers I came up with, the more questions my answers created. The more questions I produced, the more I wondered where the answers were likely to lead. To ask something “What are you?” risks an answer. If the answer was “I’m a giant centipede”, the relationship would have to change. If Path was some sort of alien, unaware of the existence of humans, I could be giving away our position…. You see the problem; I had no way of knowing any of this. So I filled in the blanks with anything that occurred to me.

It happened that I was sufficiently utterly unimpressed with my thinking on the subject to discard all this blather, and decided that my new cosmic pen pal was to be treated as a friendly person. I had no reason to consider Path a danger, certainly not the way we were communicating, and anyway, I rather liked Path. This series of decisions took a bit over another month. Fortunately Path didn’t seem to have a hyperactive sense of time like mine, so I was pretty sure the delay in response wasn’t going to be an issue.

I went back to my efforts to rephrase my reply. I decided to start with an honest admission of my ignorance of Path’s nature. That at least meant I could ask questions from a position of … there’s probably another way of expressing this.. honest ignorance. So that would rule out the “guide” concept that I was so wary of creating. It might also prove to Path that I wasn’t a “warning”. If Path thought I represented danger, I might never speak to it again.

It was while thinking about what to say, at that same time of year, and another thunderstorm, massive, truly beautiful, occurred. The rain smashed down, torrents roaring. I love the rain, and sometimes I get out the acoustic guitar and try to play music to it. This was a classic storm, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Fabulous lights and a wild staccato of thunder, a good drummer on a roll….

There was a knock on the door. I was a bit concerned that someone had come out in this incredible raging storm, so I assumed it was someone in real trouble.

There was nobody there. This had been a very clear knock, so I wasn’t too happy about it.

Then the computer turned itself on, with the power switch off. A static haze of dots appeared. The lightning outside flashed ferociously, and the static responded. It swirled about like water, still looking like static. Obviously, according to my instincts, if nothing else, this had something to do with Path. Things were further complicated by a blackout. The whole suburb went out. The computer remained on, but now the power switch was on. Now it looked like it was trying to do a crossword with itself, a lot of complex shapes running at great speeds, but still looking like static. I wondered if the black and white dots would equate to binary.

This went on for about ten minutes. Then the computer started to giggle. It was quite a pleasant sound, for something that had me practically climbing the walls. The power was still out, the storm still at full force, and the giggle had turned into a series of laughing fits. Then..

“AH!….” said the computer.

I don’t quite know how to describe the feeling. I felt as if I’d been “moved” a relatively small distance, but nevertheless moved. The lights came back on, the computer turned off, and I found myself with a guest. One of my characters, to be exact. I won’t say which one, but she’s gorgeous, brilliant, tremendous fun, and one of my personal favorites. Seems Path was her way of being born.