You sit there, in front of the Muguang microcomputer, for a while. There is no response. All you hear is cold silence, the whirr of a cooling fan somewhere inside the machine, broken by an occasional hard disk scratch.

Still nothing.

But you know something is out there. You feel it in a way that cannot be described, something beyond what a sensor is capable of detecting. Humans would have described this sensation as “a gut feeling”.

Wait…

You detect a sticky note. Was this here before? You don’t think so… but your sensor records confirm it was always there. How did you not notice it?

You peel it off of the back of the computer and read it.

Your wish? What wish?

You ask, but you already know the answer.

BROKENDATA.

You look back at your manipulators. There is no sticky note. There never was one.