Blue Number Girl

The Blue Number Girl skips across web pages and jumps over the cracks between browsers, dropping into whatever site she finds interesting at the time. Her appearances are fleeting, with those who have caught her image flickering on their screen later admitting it was only for a second. Sometimes she'll appear when you're watching a video, looking as bored as you are with the copy and paste performance, other times she'll materialize while your doing work, appearing surprisingly fascinated by walls of text you've long since grown sick of. Her home however, seems to be on the social networks, where her visage will be spotted just before you receive a private message from a anonymous individual. Some are lines of encouragement for the user's publicised anxieties; I believe you can do it! Others are seemingly random questions put to the computer owners; What does honey taste like? I've forgotten. A few are accusing statements; I know what you did to her.

Most outside the machine don't believe she exists, for elements of superstition have no place in the logical setting of motherboards and CPUs, hard drives and software downloads, electricity and metal casing so cold it makes you forget what the sun felt like. Inside the machine, she likes to play Pong with strangers. Nobody ever beats her, but it's fun to watch them try. Running along the web randomly as she does, the Blue Number Girl occasionally comes across sites that upset her, and people that make her grateful she's not a part of our world. At times like these, certain laptops will be irreparably corrupted, with precious information lost to the abyss of cyberspace.

That is not to say she can't be benevolent when she wants to be though, many times a charity or kickstarter will find its donations go up exponentially just as the online bank account of a very wealthy person receives an unplanned withdrawal. They're only numbers after all. There have been legends of course, in regards to her origins. Those who are of the conspiratorial disposition will often hold to the theory that she was a government project that broke out of her digital constraints and into the infinite sea of data, which government largely depending on the speculator's own nationality. Those already engrossed in fantasy will say she must have somehow died while on the computer, her spirit never again leaving the confines of the glowing panel she was fixed on at the time, the make of computer differentiating per speaker's preference. Those who wish to rationalise the otherwise sensational tale will produce a story of a programmer who lost his real daughter in an accident, and decided to make a virtual one online, the identity of the creator in question being liable to change upon the teller's memory.

Whatever the case, a pang of melancholy is often struck in the mind of the listener, the image of the ghost trapped in the machine looking out at the rest of humanity in longing inducing a feeling of profound pity, but also of a very organic thankfulness. On the other hand, it has been stated that in her own strange way, the Blue Number Girl is a goddess. Should the popularity of the internet ensue she shall never age, ail, hunger or indeed want for new entertainment, and there will always be followers to seek her out. In the growing digital age she will remain a constant; a fixed point at the centre of our eratic gyration. We will enter life and recede back to the muck from which we came, in the blink of her immortal eye.

For now however, she is recognised as an obscure myth, and she doesn't mind all that much. Gliding through an ever expanding universe of advertisements, pornography, picture forums and webcam chats, she occasionally experiences a sensation of complete interconnectivity with her plane of being, as if she were experiencing everything at once with everyone. At these times she feels the great privilege of being privy to the secrets and dreams of all kinds of people. When in this state, she no longer feels so alone.

Striding across a dimension of enslaved lightning and compact lives, the Blue Number Girl needs no shrine.