She was beautiful.

Nolan spotted her at the far end of the garage, behind towers of cardboard boxes and avalanches of decades-old fallen debris. He pushed his glasses further up his nose, then rethought and pulled them off to wipe the dust from them. Surely it had messed with his vision—Uncle Ted couldn’t really have had such an old relic in his possession, could he? He hadn’t been interesting enough.

But she was interesting. Nolan waded through the junk towards the treasure, bobbing and weaving around bicycles with tangled pedals and tables stacked with rusty tools until he was there, standing in front of an old Apple II, the second Wozniak wonder of the computer world. This was technological history, right here! Why did Uncle Ted have one? He hated technology; he rarely touched the TV remote, even to the day he died.

Nolan bent down and scrubbed away the grime on the screen with the hem of his sleeve. The poor thing needed heavy TLC, but otherwise seemed in pretty good condition. No cracks in the screen, no jammed keys in the keyboard, and even a functional-looking cassette player. Maybe the stale air of the garage had preserved the Apple II in the height of her beauty, so Nolan could discover her for himself, like realizing the best-wrapped present under the Christmas tree was meant for him.

“Mallory! Look at this!”

He heard reckless stomping around him. Mallory, black hair and oval face smudged with dirt, surfaced from the ruined city of junk. “What? An old computer?”

Nolan heaved a dramatic sigh. “Yes. Ancient. One of the very first Apples.”

“Oh, God,” Mallory said, rolling her eyes. “Is this the part where you criticize my iPhone? Is it too mainstream for you?”

“Look at it, Mals.” He straightened up, gestured to the computer, and invited her to look: the Apple II consisted of a big, blocky monitor, the white casing yellowed with age. It sat on a keyboard three times the size of modern-day models, the keys brown. Despite Nolan’s eagerness, she shook her head.

“I can see it. It’s an old computer.”

“It belongs in a museum!”

“Okay, Indy.”

“Wait! No, she doesn’t!” Nolan whirled back around to the computer, tapping a few keys experimentally. “She’s still salvageable. Maybe I could get her in working order again.”

“Why would you waste your time on it? And why would you call it a she?”

He glared at her over his shoulder. “Because I, unlike you, appreciate history. And you call your laptop Babygirl.”

Mallory scoffed. “Whatever, bro. Have fun trying to download porn onto that.”

Of all Uncle Ted’s possessions, the Apple II was the most valuable. To him, at least. It might get a decent offer if he auctioned it off, but the history contained in this technological landmark was worth more than anything else on the market. Why sell it to some collector who’ll stick it behind glass and do nothing else?

No, the Apple II deserved a thorough examination—and maybe a restoration, if at all possible. Computers were meant to be used. What could happen if he could get a computer nearly fifty years old to work again? How well would it function? What if he could upgrade it to the level of computers today? If he could restore such an old computer, whose processing power was like an infant’s compared to the abilities of those today, he might end up in technological history, too. His name would appear with the Apple II.

Nolan set up shop in his toolshed and got to work. He fixated on the Apple II and made it his mission to bring her back to life, because the world didn’t deserve to lose such a priceless piece of history, such a precious artifact.

Wow. He was turning into Indiana Jones.

But he was certain that this Apple II was as precious as the Holy Grail, or maybe even more. He got the first glimpse of her capability early on into his restoration.

One day, after only a few weeks of scrubbing and updating and programming, Nolan plugged it in and hit the power button. The fans whirred and the screen flickered to life. Nolan fell from his stool when it blazed bright white, awaiting his commands.

“Yes! Oh, my God, I did it!”

When he’d returned to his seat, the screen had darkened again and a welcome message started to scroll across the screen, but the letters flickered and froze. Nolan scowled. “What’s wrong? I cleaned you up. Maybe you have the wrong parts.”

Nolan reached for his screwdriver to take it apart again, but when he sat back down to begin the task, a new message had appeared.

RECONFIGURE BINARY SYSTEM

Nolan’s jaw dropped. A computer that actually told him what she needed? Computers could only tell the user what was wrong: they couldn’t offer solutions.

At least, most couldn’t.

Nolan set the screwdriver aside, found the command line interface, and started typing. He’d need to find some way to re-implement the entire binary code (more likely he’d have to replace the whole thing instead of fixing a few errors, with a system so old). Maybe he could find software that would download the whole code once he removed the corrupted data—

RECONFIGURE BINARY SYSTEM FOR ROMAN ALPHABET.

Nolan blinked. “But you’re a computer. You need binary code to function. You aren’t able to understand letters.”

RECONFIGURE BINARY SYSTEM FOR ROMAN ALPHABET.

Nolan spoke aloud as he typed back, a habit that always annoyed Mallory. “No.”

RECONFIGURE. RECONFIGURE. RECONFIGURE.

Nolan sighed, his fingers tapping away. “Open binary system.”

Clearly this computer was capable of more than Nolan had fantasized. If she wanted to learn the alphabet, then her capacity extended far beyond what Wozniak intended. How could this be achieved in the seventies? And if she could do all this, how was she lost from fame, stowed away in Uncle Ted’s garage?

Now Nolan had to see the Apple II’s limits. He had to test her thresholds, push her to her brink. He set out to convert her to using the alphabet in her coding, and then began adding other programs like Java. Downloading should have taken ages, but she gobbled the program up almost instantaneously. She wanted to learn, to improve, to exceed expectations. She wanted to reach her own brink.

In return, Nolan felt like she pushed him towards his. He slaved over the Apple II, unwilling to tear himself away from it. It was less about the wonderment and fame now—it was about the Apple II and what she could do. He had to keep going for her, if no one else. He would push himself to push her. Which one would reach their limit first?

He could tell Mallory started to worry about him. She’d peek in on him working and ask how he was doing. He tried to give her a quick answer so she would go away, but she always liked to linger and ask more questions. Sometimes she’d bring him snacks to eat, or insist he’d stop for the night and sleep; but couldn’t she see that his work was more important than eating and sleeping? Besides, the Apple II didn’t want him to stop.

One day, while laboring over beautiful computer, Nolan noticed a new message appear on the screen. He set down his box cutter (he was pruning wires) and turned to the computer screen, wiping the sweat from his face.

UPLOAD CONSCIOUSNESS.

He wasn’t even fazed. He typed back. “How? A human mind is impossible for technology to capture. There’s no way your circuits have the storage, no matter what you want.”

DOWNLOAD CONSCIOUSNESS TO CIRCUITS, THEN INSTALL.

He sighed. “With what? How do you propose I do this?”

UPDATED CIRCUITS WITH EXTENDED STORAGE CAPACITY.

“You’re so clever.” How did she know he’d bought new circuit boards last week? He pulled them from the drawer he’d stuffed them into and arranged them neatly on his worktable. “Now what?”

COMBINE BIOLOGICAL CIRCUITS WITH TECHNOLOGICAL.

“What?”

The Apple II wouldn’t answer again; what choice did he have? He had to give her what she wanted.

He grabbed the box cutter again, rolled up his sleeve, and put the tip to the crook of his elbow. Why was his hand shaking? He was doing what the Apple II wanted. She wouldn’t lead him wrong, would she?

He drew a straight line into the skin of his elbow and held it over the circuit boards. This might contaminate and destroy them. How was this supposed to upload human ingenuity? How was he supposed to share his consciousness with the Apple II? Suddenly a terrible thought entered Nolan’s mind as the circuit boards reddened: maybe she never wanted to share it at all.

He managed to install them just before he collapsed to the floor.