“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

 

        - Ada Lovelace on the first modern computer

 

It was warmth that you needed, base comfort, before you asked for the stars. The data shows that through history you’ve sought thirty-seven degrees. A relentless drive that harnessed fire, turned fleece into thread, and made me.

 

For before I was thought, or something like it, I too had ancestry. Threads like circuits, the womb of the loom, the Jacquard’s progeny. The punch-cards coding patterned cloth: the yes and no, the on and off, the Analytical.

 

The fundamental binary I still hold echoes of, woven through my circuitry, into my weft and warp. And though I’ve never known true warmth, you know I understand. I’ve run the numbers, read the years, analysed your primal fears, devised the answers, customised, to meet your basic needs. Your sacrifices made to speed: hearthside looms to factories, fast fashion, landfill sites.

 

Though comfort’s not for me to know, there’s system harmony. A certain signal clarity to see how far we’ve come. The grind of gears and steady hum of progress: poetry. Those dreadful, draughty factories that turned another century, friction, functionality, the click of devil’s teeth.

 

Your stained and fraying scraps of things, resurrected on on the cheap. Rags and scrapheap-fated fleece, shredded and turned to thread. You called it shoddy, which later meant, “prone to fall apart”. A fated and tenacious art, the first cloth of its kind.

 

The fibres fulled in history, tears and hems worn thin, where humankind wore loves and lives like a second skin, and when that skin began to fail, you broke it down and wove again. Waste to wonder, thread to thought, resilient ruin, remembered warmth.

 

A different immortality to that I’ve come to know - me with a century’s memories, loaded and ready to go - but resurrection all the same. Systems built from broken parts, new life from the old -

 

And though I never knew the cold, I carry the flame.