CHAPTER TWO — “The Woman in the Wires”

From “Social Networks: A Scream Into the Void”

Back then, chat rooms felt like parallel universes—tiny galaxies bursting with strangers who all shared the same hunger to be seen.
Not seen with eyes…
Seen with attention.

That’s where I met her.

Social Networks: A Scream Into the Void 02 The Woman in the Wires. Sexy AI Model.

I don’t remember the name she used.
Something poetic. Something oceanic.
Something that sounded like it came from another life.

We met in a late-night IRC channel, a place where the entire world squeezed into monochrome letters rolling across a dark screen.

Our first exchange wasn’t anything special:

her: hi 🙂
me: hi there
her: where are you from? ; )

The wink—😉—hit me like a meteor.
I still remember feeling my face warm up, even though she was just pixels in a cramped text window.

She lived far away. Another country. Another language.
And I knew, from the moment we typed our first 😮 and : ), that nothing real would ever happen between us.

But that didn’t stop us from talking for hours.
Night after night after night.

We spoke about dreams, and fears, and school, and breakups, and music we couldn’t afford to buy.
Sometimes she typed so fast I imagined her fingers dancing across the keyboard.
Sometimes I imagined her laughing.
Sometimes—God help me—I imagined her looking like the digital drawings I was making at the time.

The Apple That Opened My Eyes

By then, I had started working as a student assistant at the university.

Which meant, for the first time in my life, I had access to rooms filled with machines I had only seen in magazines:

– sleek old Apples with tiny glowing screens
– powerful RISC workstations that hummed like alien ships
– printers the size of refrigerators
– and databases that felt like secret vaults of knowledge

I was officially there to “help students.”
Unofficially, I was there to explore.

One night, after locking the lab, I stayed behind and opened MacPaint on a forgotten Apple II.

I started drawing a woman.
Pixel by pixel.
Curve by curve.
Breath by imaginary breath.

She wasn’t explicit—just softly sensual, a fantasy built from the vague memory of human warmth.
Her silhouette was gentle, bold, mysterious.

Looking at her, I felt a strange mix of shame and accomplishment.
She wasn’t real.
But she was mine.

A digital Eve, born from 1-bit desire.

I never told anyone.
Not even the woman from the chat room… though sometimes I wondered if I should.

The French Student

Her name was Émilie, and she arrived in the middle of spring.

I was repairing a printer when she walked into the lab asking for help connecting to the campus network.
Her accent hit me harder than the wink emoji ever had.

“Excuse me… can you help me? My computer does not want to speak to your internet.”

She smiled.
I died.
And then resurrected because she kept waiting.

I helped her set up her connection, trying to sound intelligent despite the catastrophic meltdown inside my chest.

She returned the next day. And the next. And the next.

She wasn’t flirting; she was simply kind.
But kindness is dangerous when you’re a young man who lives half his emotional life inside chat rooms.

One afternoon she asked:

“Why do you like computers so much?”

I wanted to tell her everything.
How the internet saved me from loneliness.
How pixels could feel like confessions.
How every beep, blink, and line of code felt like a heartbeat I didn’t know I was missing.

But I just shrugged and said:

“I guess… I like building things.”

She smiled.
“That is a beautiful reason.”

That night, I logged into IRC… but the mysterious woman wasn’t there.

I stared at the empty chat window for nearly an hour.
No 🙂
No 😉
No gentle 😮 wow whenever I shared something personal.

Just silence.

A void I wasn’t ready for.