Goodbye (G)

The board had been up for nine years when the SysOp posted the goodbye bulletin.

It was carefully worded. He thanked the callers, explained that the monthly telephone costs no longer made sense, and promised to keep a copy of the message archive on a hard drive. At the bottom, below the last decorative line, he wrote the date when the modem would stop answering.

People reacted in the message base. Some had been calling since they were children. A few had met friends there who were now roommates or spouses. Others had discovered programming, graphics or music through files uploaded by strangers who became familiar handles.

Most replied with thanks. A handful begged him to keep it running just another month.

The final week became strangely busy. People who hadn't called in years dialed in to look at the menus and read their old posts. Handles from the early years appeared beside newcomers who had only recently found the board. The upload area filled with small notes and text files that had little to do with software.

On the last night the SysOp watched one final call connect. The visitor spent a few minutes reading, typed a short farewell and signed off.

Then the screen was still.

He powered down the modem, wrote the date on a disk label and placed it in a drawer. The machine would become an ordinary computer again.

Years later, when he found the disk, the thing that surprised him wasn't how old the software looked. It was how quickly he recognized the names. Behind every handle was a human being who had once made time to call.

The phone line was gone. The sense of having built a small place for people to meet remained.