Around 11pm, the college·employed techies vacate the premises, the lights are off and the doors are locked. It begins with the E on the fourth system in the second row. The system that seems to be used more than any other. After being pounded all day, it's ready to get up. The miscellaneous and now indistinguishable foodstuffs and drinks that have been spilt on it throughout the ages make it sticky. It wobbles from right to left and back again, struggling to break free of its board confines. After a bit of a struggle, the same struggle it's struggled night after night for a now indeterminable number of nights, it pops, free, into the air.
Landing on one of its sides, the E dashes and leaps atop a monitor and spins slowly, scanning the room, making sure the coast is clear. When satisfied that no humans remain, it whistles. The room springs to life with tiny sound and tiny movement. Little yips and cheers of joy echo through the computer lab. The keys of 39 keyboards make the same struggle they've struggled night after night for a now indeterminable number of nights. Eventually, they're all free from their boards and ready to do the work they love so much.
Together they form various appendages needed for certain tasks. An arm of sticky keys forms to open the closet door. Like a swarm of hyperactive ants the keys pull your lifeless and incomplete body from the nearly pitch black otherworldly regions of the lab closet and place you upright on your two, near finished feet.
They will work tonight as they have worked night after night to make you. As the morning draws near, they will put you, a bit more yourself than you were the day before, back into the closet where they first found you. As they scurry back into their places on the keyboards, the knob of the front door will rattle. Confused about who belongs on which keyboard, they will begin to panic as they leap down into place. As the door opens, the E of the fourth system in the second row will become the last key to resume its position. While the keys are struggling back in place using the equal and opposite maneuver used to escape hours ago, the door will fling open. The college's network administrator will hear the final settling click, a surreal whisper of high pitched tiny giggling and walk in. Suspiciously, he will glance around the lab. Uneasily eyeing the keyboards in a computer lab with very sticky keys that make you, he will dismiss the noise as his imagination and clumsily set his coffee down, spilling some onto his workstation.