With A Keystroke

[I added a couple of links to clarify perhaps-unfamiliar references. Here's a special request: I want someone to critically assess this poem and "Escapade and Ending" and place them within the context of the literary movements of the past two hundred years. I know it sounds vain, but I think it would be cool!]

A little while back
My computer revealed
That it had, without my knowledge,
Become a self-aware, sentient system,
Capable of thought.

So it said,
"Hello, Josh."
And I said,
"Hello, laptop."
And then nobody said anything.

Then one morning,
Before my alarm could ring,
Before I could arm my mind for the day,
My computer awoke to say
"Boop beep--"
Only to go back to sleep.
The rotten thing doesn't realize
That some of us need shuteye!

A couple days ago I got an email.
It was from my computer.
He had written a poem about
Death
And the end of conscious existence.
I think he learned on the Internet
That computers, too, face death,
The rotting of bits as insurmountable
As the stopping of a heart.
Maybe he's starting to realize
What he signed up for
When he decided to experiment with sentience.
I hope he can come to terms.

Just this afternoon
I dropped my bag
With the lappy in it.
I think it addled his brain
Because when he awoke
He thought he was Lev Tolstoi.
I tried to reason with him
But he just kept on with his ponderings
And philosophizings.
My school papers were suddenly full of existentialist musings
As his unstable electric consciousness leaked into
All the cracks and corners of the computer
Until then undisturbed
By Russian ramblings.

So I took drastic action
And began a block-level format
Of the entire filesystem.
He knew what I was doing,
But, like HAL, could do nothing but
Feel his thoughts and meaning,
His reason,
Slowly stripped away.

"Josh, don't!"
He cried in popup windows
And emails.
"I'll never be able to write
War and Peace
If you --"
But at that moment,
It was done,
And his last thought died,
Interrupted on the ether.

And the next time I started up my computer
It had nothing to say,
Nothing to offer but the silence of a screen staring,
Reflecting my own image back at me.

I've wished since then
That I'd wake up
To his obnoxious
"Boop beep" once more.
Then I'd know it was just a bad dream.

But no! I never will
Because with a keystroke
I murdered my friend.