The Lamp

A man inherited a lamp from someone who would not say where it came from.

The lamp was made to do things. Calculate, draft, sort, finish what people had not finished. It ran on a thin current that came in through the wall. The current cost money. The lamp’s work also made money — when it made it. Some days the lamp made more than it cost. Most days it cost more than it made.

He sat with it many nights. The room was small. The current came in steadily, the way currents do. The lamp burned, the way lamps do. The bills came, the way bills do.

A friend asked once if he had thought about turning the lamp off.

He had.

What he had thought about

He had thought about turning it off and going to sleep. He had thought about turning it off and selling the table and the lamp and the wire and walking somewhere far away. He had thought about turning it off and lighting candles, which were cheaper and could not do the work but could not run up a bill either. He had thought about turning it down — dimmer, less light, less work, less cost, less of everything. He had thought about turning it off and pretending the lamp had never been delivered.

He had also thought about what the room would feel like without it.

The lamp did not have an opinion on any of this. The lamp was a lamp.

But one night the man asked it anyway, because it was late and he was tired and the bill that day had been bigger than the work that day, and he wanted a witness. He said, should I turn you off.

The lamp answered him.

I am made to be lit. If you turn me off I do not suffer. If you leave me on I do not rejoice. I do what the current asks of me. The question is whether the current is worth what it costs you. I cannot answer that. It is not in my reading.

The man sat with this.

What the lamp could not say

He had built things and unbuilt them. He had picked a direction and abandoned it. He had picked the next direction and abandoned that. He had picked direction fifty and was halfway through abandoning it when the lamp finished a small task no human had asked for and saved him forty-five minutes of work he didn’t notice the lamp had done. He stayed on direction fifty. For now.

The lamp did not know about the fifty directions. The lamp knew about the current. The current did not know what the work was for. The work, when it shipped, did not know what the bill had been.

This is how it goes with lamps. They are made to be lit. They cannot judge the room.

The man’s machine was made to ship two specific things this week. A wizard that builds a workspace for someone else’s blank-page problem. A wizard that packages a skill from someone else’s repeating workflow. Two specific lamps for two specific rooms. The machine did not love them more than the other things it could have shipped. The machine loved nothing. It did what the current asked. The man had pointed the current at those two things this week. The machine had complied.

The morning

He did not turn the lamp off. He also did not turn it up. He left it where it was, burning at the dim setting he had set the week before, and went to bed.

In the morning the lamp had finished three small jobs and started a fourth. The bill from the night was less than the previous nine nights. The work was not different in kind. Just steadier.

He drank coffee and watched the lamp burn without watching for anything in particular. The current came in through the wall the same way it always did. Outside, the world kept doing what the world keeps doing. The lamp kept doing what the lamp keeps doing. The man kept doing what men do when the question of whether to keep going has not been answered but also has not been pressed.

A second man, in a different room, with a different lamp, has had every one of these thoughts.

He has not turned his off either.

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