The web camera on this computer turned itself on and I did not know it. All of a sudden as I was closing windows, the face of this woman rose up at me. I thought there was now a ghost in the computer, or a dead person behind the glass. A spirit.
I realized what was happening and that this was me, which was its own form of shock. Next, it took a long time to get the camera to turn off. It was an odd experience, being trapped in the machine and also, or so it seemed to me, persecuting oneself from the machine, as I could not escape my own unrecognizable face.
The unrecognizability of my face shocked me as well, although I began looking quite different when I realized this was a mirror.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This is the stuff of a great piece of fiction. It’s surely usable for some kind of gothic tale about academia. There are far too few of those, as people opt for the satirical instead. I’m going to think about this image — and I’m wondering how to prevent a similar ghost from appearing on my machine.
If I wrote an academic tale, it would definitely be Gothic. And actually, the text which comes to mind has a camera in it, too — Ingmar Bergman, The Serpent’s Egg. It’s not a great film perhaps — the reviewer here hates it athough a commenter explains it better — http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F01E3DF1E3EE632A25754C2A9679C946990D6CF — but it’s set in Berlin in 1923 and when I got to my first job the feeling I had was that I had walked into this movie.