The good machine™

Not every machine is the gray one. A pinball machine is a machine too — lights, flippers, bumpers, a tilt you earn — but it never bluffs, never pretends to score your soul, never asserts a plausible lie. It asks for nothing but your hands and gives back pure play: you against physics, in the light. The gray machine drafts and guesses and feels nothing doing it; the good machine exists only to make a human light up. So when the house says the machine paints, only humans score — remember there’s one machine that’s all gold: the kind whose whole job is your joy, and your own reflexes do the rest. (Belongs in a basement, someday, when the funding lands. Why not.) (His coin — born at 9 a.m., dopamine and all.)