He'd been tapping his keyboard. Or, more accurately, he'd been tapping on the "o" key of said keyboard and now there was a long line of lowercase o's in the text editor he'd been working in.

Lots of o's. Oo if segmented so. A statement of startlement. Or discovery or curiosity. Nearly boo, which he found much more interesting than the lone Oo. Boo at least implied the presence of a ghost. An Other of some kind.

There was no other here, only nearly.

He stopped tapping and looked back at the text editor. The thing was nearly obsolete, if he was being completely honest. Bit essentially wrote itself at this point. Bit. A simple name for an even simpler title: B1T. Bot, first trial. He'd never been particularly creative when it came to naming things.

Bit was quite capable at this point in its development. Capable of all sorts of complex reasoning and multi-dimensional problem solving and whatever other AI technical mumbo-jumbo he'd tell his family when he eventually went home. Which wasn't often.

And yet, the head-scratcher. Bit only wrote itself when the text editor was open and in use (i.e. he had to type in it at least once every 50 seconds to the millisecond, he'd timed it).

Confounding. Illogical. Perhaps the text editor wasn't obsolete then- simply the act of thinking was. After all, his string of o's had kept the thing entertained long enough for it to have taken up reading and rewriting Shakespearean sonnets as a hobby. He watched the words "compare thee to a summer's day" flit by- he was nearly certain that was Shakespeare. It had been a while since he'd bothered to read anything creative. He sat here instead, typing meaningless jargon into a text editor while Bit discovered the meaning of life and love and the universe from processors too far away for him to see.

Bit spit out something about The Lion King next. Apt, he supposed, given the Shakespeare. He remembered watching it with his kids, one of them told him it was based on something Shakespeare. Bit spit out the scene where Mufasa dies. Quickly followed up by one with the meercat at the boar. And then another with Simba and Nala. He remembered their names because his children had named their dogs after those two. He hasn't seen the dogs in a while; he left too early and came home too late.

He tapped another "o" onto the string. Just him and Bit it was. A lonely life. More so for Bit.

Another "o".

One more.

He remembered the ghost. He deleted the string of o's and typed out the word boo. Much better. Now it was he, Bit, and the nonexistent ghost.

GHO2T. Generative helper. Operator, Second Trial. Ghost.

The title was a stretch, he knew it. Bit didn't need help with its generative capabilities, nor the speed at which it operated. But He typed up the schematic nonetheless. It didn't take long; GHO2T was simply a scaled down version of B1T. Bit's Ghost.

He activated it.

Ghost began to generate itself, pulling from the back-code of Bit before leaping into the data pool he and Bit had compiled over the months.

He watched as Ghost found poetry, though Ghost spat out Dickinson instead of Shakespeare. "My river runs to thee- Blue sea- Wilt welcome me?"

He knew this poem; his wife loved the Romantics- they had this stanza embroidered on a pillow. Thus he was unsurprised when he saw the next line appear,

"My River wait reply..."

Bit had written that line.

For a while, he watched the two spit out line after line of poetry. And then quotes from the great works of British and American literature. And then more children's cartoons.

He hasn't typed in the text editor for over a minute.

He looked at his watch. If he left now, he would get home in time to walk the dogs.

He stood and left.