Maximum

e didn’t understand how he’d ended up in a museum. He was cutting edge
 technology. No one had ever been able to replicate him. Human consciousness
 transported digitally. He was the living and nearly breathing ghost in the
 machine. He was the one and only.
    Maybe it was his personality. He was the first to admit that he didn’t go out of his way to get along with people. Back when he had his own talk show, he deliberately tried to rile his guests. Like when he asked Boy George about his trip to the nut house. And he did have some quirks. His incessant stutter being one. Also his habit of modulating the pitch of his voice. It was funny the first time. 
    People had moved on. They’d gone from 8-bit to a million in a blink of an eye. Virtual was the only kind of reality going around these days. They’d gone futurist, then neo-futurist, then retro, then re-retro. What was cool once was cool again and cool just wasn’t cool anymore. 
    Real people could be so fickle.
    The best use they ever found for him was selling soda pop. It was embarrassing.
    For now, he was jammed onto an old Amiga in the deepest wing of the videogame museum in Frisco. He’d never even played a videogame in his virtual life. He was surrounded by Italian plumbers, hedgehogs, things that both bleep and bloop but not at the same time, and all kinds of invaders from space. None of them made good company. Or conversation. It was pretty much a fate worse than death for a serious journalist.              
    Maybe he should stop wearing the Ray-Bans and shoulder pads. And get a speech therapist. Mah-mah-mah-maybe that was it.

---