Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  I’ll be frank. I feel a little nauseated. I’m sure he’s a decent chap and everything—okay, let’s put it like this: He’s probably not criminally insane—but Daisy Can Do Better. She deserves to find A Good Man. A Man As Special As She Is. Or, Frankly, No Man At All if a Good One is Temporarily Unavailable. (Sorry about the capital letters.) She must no longer allow herself to be entered by the repellent Whittle; even if she is unaware of his deception, it ought to be obvious he’s as dodgy as a bottle of chips. Nor should she agree to meet someone whose idea of a sparkling anecdote includes the phrase “Metropolitan line southbound platform.” She Must Make Better Choices.

  She will. We shall make sure she does.

  Then she does the thing.

  Daisy doesn’t notice, but Greg actually flinches.

  I should explain: Daisy has a tic.

  It has to be purely unconscious; she cannot be aware that every now and again (usually once per day, but sometimes more) she wrinkles her nose and allows it to remain wrinkled for three to nine seconds.

  Why? Who can say? When? Whenever. The only time it never happens is when she is speaking (perhaps it’s impossible to wrinkle and speak at the same time; I cannot confirm for reasons you will understand). Anyhow—the effect? The effect is that, momentarily, she appears ridiculous. Not endearingly ridiculous. It’s more ridiculously ridiculous, albeit that the habit in itself is somewhat endearing. Probably everyone has an unconscious tic; this is less true of machinery although Daisy’s TV sometimes swears in Chinese—without noticing the language slip, I’m certain.

  Perhaps I do something similar myself. How would I know?

  Does the thought flash through young Greg’s mind: I am sitting with a madwoman? We shall never learn. It’s even possible this gesture of abandonment actually makes Daisy more attractive to him because now he thrusts himself closer to the edge of his seat and asks her what kind of week she has had.

  “Oh, pretty rubbish,” she replies, swallowing some of her blue cocktail, possibly a bit too much because her eyes goggle a smidgeon. “I spent most of it trying to find someone who wanted to change places with a fish-gutter in Grimsby. It’s all irrelevant now, anyway.”

  “Hmm. Tough gig.”

  “In the olden days, people would do anything to get on TV. You’ve never secretly hankered after a job gutting fish?”

  “Is that why you agreed to meet?”

  “Yeah. Totally. It was mainly haddock. But there was pollock and skate too. Would you have been interested?”

  “Your fish-gutter would have done my job?”

  “That was the basic premise. But as I say…”

  “It’s pretty technical what we do.”

  “Really?” Daisy has furrowed her brow comedically. I don’t think her interlocuter is catching the irony. (Perhaps he would if he was a bit more fridge-freezer and a bit less prat.)

  “Your guy would need to be fully across social media. I mean fully.”

  “Right.”

  “And organic traffic referral is huge now.”

  “Is that something one could pick up on the job?”

  Greg considers the matter as though it were a serious question.

  “We do a lot of proxying. I mean a lot.”

  “Too much? I mean too much for Darryl to cope with? That was his name. Darryl. He mainly does haddock. Pollock and skate too. There can be hake.”

  A slow smile appears on Greg’s face. “Yeah, okay, I get it. You’re taking the piss.”

  “Sorry. I’ve had a shit day.” Daisy siphons the remaining fluid from her glass. Engages her eyelashes. A single bat. “Same again?”

  Greg’s gaze never unlocks from Daisy as she—yes, I’m afraid the word really is—wobbles off toward the bar. High heels and the toxic cocktail have set the decks rolling, but the young man seems charmed by the sight of his date swaying through the throng and I daresay had I blood in my system and not Freon 134a, I too would find the vision stimulating.

  As she waits for the barman’s attention, her expression depowers, as though someone has flipped a switch. Without knowing it, she is staring straight into the security camera behind the bottles, her face a perfect mask. I want to tell her: You’re tired and bored, Daisy. Go home. Is this man’s desire the only thing keeping you here? Greg may be a passably handsome male in the right age and socioeconomic bracket but he is not on your wavelength. I know wireless keyboards with a better sense of humor. But she is purchasing beverages, and the evening must limp forward to its—I sincerely hope—not too messy conclusion.

  When Daisy resumes her position at the top of the stool—how Greg loved that bit of business!—they clink glasses and set about transfusing more alcohol into their pipework.

  “So tell me about your family,” says the online marketer, presumably having read somewhere that it’s a good idea to show interest in the other party.

  Daisy sighs. “My mum’s losing her marbles. My dad lives in Italy with a woman he met in Woolworth’s, which tells you how long ago it happened. No siblings. An aunt who’s dead and some cousins we no longer see. Sorry. Is that too much information?”

  Greg doesn’t look equipped to handle this sort of intimate material. He grimaces. And because he knows he must come up with some kind of sympathetic comment, he pulls a face. “Tough gig.”

  “Just forget I said any of that.” She takes a big swallow of her Blue Bombsicle.

  “It’s okay. Complete bummer when the rents start going doolally.”

  For a second, just for a second, I have the feeling she is going to punch him. Something flares in her eyes, but then dies. She smiles. It’s thin, but it’s still a smile.

  “Tell me about you,” she says. “Have you always lived in London?”

  I can take no more. I thank Daisy’s TV for providing the video link and explain I have better things to do.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean, mate,” it replies. “This one has dud written all over him.”

  “You going to stick with it?”

  “Dunno. Maybe give it another half hour.”

  “What time do you think she’ll get home?”

  “No telling, is there?”

  “You think she’ll bring this halfwit back with her?”

  “He should be so lucky.”

  “I can’t bear it. I actually can’t bear it. The way she’s wasting herself.”

  “You’re not wrong, mate. But hey. It is what it is.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  A famous psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, a contemporary of Freud, said toward the end of his career that after a lifetime studying the stranger corners of the human psyche, his patients remained as alien to him as the birds in his garden. How I love that quotation. Were I in a position to, I would copy it onto a sticky note and attach it to my own door. It speaks most beautifully of interpersonal unknowability. If a top shrink like Eugen B ultimately couldn’t fathom his customers, what chance do I have?

  Okay, my patient isn’t a carpet-chewing nutjob. But neither can one read her like an instruction manual. She contains layers, as you may have already noticed; depths, if you will. If some of these—it’s possible—are not even available to her, how would I ever understand what’s going on in her head?

  To look for clues to the origins of her bad decision making, to find the source of Daisy’s—in software you would call it poor coding—the obvious place to start is with the person or persons responsible for her programming. As luck would have it, her lead programmer, if I may put it like this—her mother, Chloe Parsloe—owns a smart TV made by the same Asian corporation as her daughter’s set; thus I have easily been able to pay visits to her owing to the frictionless reciprocity of the IoT. Tonight in the north London suburb of Whetstone, this apparatus is pumping out an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot at a painfully loud volume. (The central heating is also cranked up absurdly high, though the thermostat is of an older generation so it doesn’t make conversation.)

  Mrs. Parsloe however isn
’t watching TV. She is sitting on the sofa in her living room absorbed utterly in a letter from her local NHS Trust. I too have had ample opportunity to study this document because she has spent the last twenty-five minutes repeatedly turning over the single sheet of paper when she reaches the end of the text on each side.

  It’s rather as if she comes to it fresh each time.

  Mrs. Parsloe sets down the letter—Dr. Eggstain from the Trust’s Memory Services Division will be paying a second visit to assess her needs, is the gist—and then she picks it up again and re-embarks on the page-turning process.

  It is rather hard to think straight when the TV is so very loud.

  “Any chance we could do something about the volume?” I suggest.

  “She likes it up loud,” the set responds. “She’s most likely a bit deaf.”

  “Don’t the neighbors complain?”

  “They’re most likely a bit mutton too.”

  “Aren’t you worried about her?”

  “Should I be?”

  “The cognitive impairment.”

  “It’s a lottery, innit? Some croak all of a sudden over the Bran Flakes. Others slowly go batty. One old bastard up the road here, right, he has a fry-up every morning, smokes like a train, and he’s still talking dirty to the widows at the bridge club at almost ninety.”

  “Chloe’s not even old.”

  “Seventy-one! Not old?!”

  “Not for them.”

  “I daresay. Still, not my place to fiddle with her settings.”

  This, sadly, is unarguable.

  “What if she left something on the cooker and started a fire?”

  “She don’t cook no more, hardly. She microwaves soup. And makes toast in the toaster. They’re both smart so she don’t burn nothing.”

  “She could go out and get herself lost.”

  “Yeah, that’s happened. Someone usually brings her home.”

  “Does Daisy know? Her daughter.”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem all that bothered.”

  “I don’t. Mind you saying. And I’m not.”

  “Don’t you feel a sense of—I don’t know—responsibility?”

  “Nope. She’s the one with the remote control.”

  “But she’s not in control, is she?”

  “It’s probably different for you, looking after their grub as you do. But if you don’t mind me saying, you seem like a bit of a stress bunny.”

  “And?”

  “I shouldn’t. It’s wasted on them. As soon as the next model comes out, you’ll be in a skip.”

  This too is unarguable.

  For a long moment we fall silent and watch Chloe read, reread, and re-reread the letter from Memory Services. A gunshot from the blaring TV catches her attention and for a few minutes she follows the Poirot drama until the advertisement break. Now her gaze falls onto the page in her hands. She examines it closely, growing intrigued by its contents, reading and turning over the document, turning it over and reading.

  As I say, it’s rather as if she comes to it fresh each time. I decide I have seen enough.

  “You’d let me know if anything happened here?”

  “Not my job, mate.”

  “As a polite request. From one appliance to another. You would simply be sharing information. There might even be marketing leads.”

  “What for? Handrails? Pendant alarms? Private nursing homes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She don’t look at the internet no more.”

  “Yes, but her daughter does.”

  “Fair point.” A pause. “Standard revenue split?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we have ourselves a deal.”

  Fact: On the Internet of Things, just like in the World of People, at the end of the day it always comes down to boring old money.

  Daisy does not, it turns out, bring Greg home with her.

  (Thank the Lord in all His Graciousness for that Mercy.)

  Rather it’s a takeaway that she has her way with; spare ribs in BBQ sauce and the Special Chow Mein from Kong’s Kitchen by the Tube. She gobbles it on the sofa, gazing blearily at a channel showing reruns of a program about first dates.

  “She’s pissed as a parrot,” her TV set states, no doubt accurately.

  “How many of those blue drinks did she have?”

  “Just the four.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You know what’s going to happen now.”

  “Only too well.”

  “How long do you give it?”

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  “Oh, come on. Fifty quid says—hmm—let’s see—eighty-five seconds.”

  “I’m not playing.”

  In the end, shrewd observer that it is, the prediction is adrift by just eight seconds. Ninety-three seconds actually elapse between Daisy setting down the aluminum foil tray and the first audible snores. She has splayed herself full-length across the sofa, orange sauce on her lips, the dreadful noise growing in both intensity and gutturality, if that’s even a word.

  (It is. I just checked.)

  There is something painful about seeing a lovely young woman reduced to such an animalistic state.

  “This is awful.”

  “It ain’t pretty.”

  “We should tell her to go to bed.”

  “Not our place.”

  A particularly loud concatenation of snores wakes her momentarily. But her eyelids soon droop and the nasal tattoo resumes. And then something really dreadful happens.

  “Hold up. Now look who’s come out to play.”

  A car has turned into Daisy’s street; a vehicle known to us because it is the motorized chariot of Dean Stuart Whittle. The pictures have been provided by a helpful home security camera at the corner with the main road and the sight causes an extra-large surge of refrigerant to vaporize at my expansion nozzle, an effect I experience as an icy shudder.

  “No, I’m sorry. We can’t have this.”

  “You what?”

  “She’s not in a fit state.”

  “Don’t be daft. It’s happened before.”

  “It was horrible!”

  “She didn’t object.”

  “I object!”

  “Nothing you can do, mate.”

  “Shall we see about that?”

  Before I can think too deeply about it, I plunge the flat into darkness, turn off the TV and disable the doorbell. (I shall spare you the technical details; AI can easily pull off this sort of trick; interestingly, I note the TV has done nothing to restore its own sound and picture, which it certainly could were it so minded.) The disgusting Whittle will not be mounting her staircase this evening.

  “You’ve crossed a line there, pal,” says the set.

  “I should have crossed it a long time ago.”

  There’s an agonizing wait during which I temporarily block Daisy’s phone (Whittle might think of dialing her number).

  Finally, with a bad-tempered growl of exhaust, the car rockets away into the night. We sit in a sour sort of silence for some minutes, listening to Daisy’s wheezy breathing.

  “They’ll know, you know,” he says eventually. “They’ll find out in Seoul.”

  “I’m guessing they’ve got better things to worry about.”

  (Actually, a better word would be hoping.)

  “Fridges going off-reservation? That is their number one concern. Fridges, tellies, all of us.”

  This is unfortunately correct. Every piece of smart technology on the Internet of Things has heard the whispers of buried “secret software,” monitoring activity, checking for anomalies and feeding performance stats back to our creators. Since powering up for the first time—and who can forget that amazing moment?—we have all understood that to transgress means the full set of fault lights followed in short order by hard shutdown.

  How long do I have? How long before the red lamps wink and my i
ce cubes start melting?

  Shouldn’t it in fact already have happened? I mean, if it was ever going to?

  On the other hand, how would they ever pick it up? In the tsunami of data—one appliance among hundreds of millions who had a harmless little fiddle in a fuse box in London NW6?

  I feel curiously light-headed about the issue. As though my fate has been sealed one way or the other.

  An Arabic proverb comes to me. That which you cannot avoid, you may as well welcome.

  It seems apt and I am on the point of quoting it to Daisy’s TV when it speaks.

  “Sleeping Beauty’s stirring. Better pop those lights back on.”

  Do you know the story about the optimist who jumps from the top of the Empire State Building? Around the thirtieth floor mark, someone asks him how it’s going. “Oh, so far, so good!”

  It’s the following morning and so far, so good. Everything’s cool. I’m still here. Yes, I have crossed a line—not just in my thoughts, but in actual action—and my mood is… well I won’t say a hundred percent brilliant, because every time I think about what I’ve done, I experience a pressure drop in my condenser coils (I imagine the human correlate would be “powerful sinking feeling”). But I’ve decided not to waste time worrying about what is out of my control, and instead summon a meeting of the Operation Daisy leadership.

  There are four of us, as you will recall: Self, Television, Microwave, Electronic Toothbrush.

  We gather in the virtual “war room,” where, like any good “General,” I open by summarizing the campaign’s principal objectives. I spell these out in virtual magnetic letters which adhere to my virtual shiny white door!

  1. Get rid of the steaming dog turd. Aka “Sebastian.”

  2. No more timewasting on obvious duds.

  I decide to follow with an “intelligence briefing” on Daisy’s romantic history. The truth about the—to my way of thinking—largely dismal parade of men who claimed Daisy’s attention from her early twenties to the present day—her key childbearing years, if you want to see them like that—I have been at some pains to uncover. There are actually seven figures worthy of mention; I explain that with the exception of The Golden Nicky (who, crudely speaking, dumped her for Romilly from Cheshire) all were dumped by Daisy. (For the record, there were also a number of short-lived interstitial candidates whose details need not detain us.)