Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  “What are you reading just now?”

  Truth: The book Daisy was reading in bed last night—before it fell from her fingers and woke her—was a collection of recipes by Nigella Lawson.

  “Madame Bovary,” she replies with an impressively straight face. “I’m actually rereading it.”

  I happen to know Daisy studied this work at university; should any awkward follow-ups arrive, she will be well placed to field them.

  “But I’m always in the market for a recommendation.”

  Owen grimaces. “Funnily enough, I’m reading a new history of the Hundred Years War. I’m actually on volume four, which itself is a thousand pages. It’s amazingly absorbing, but I can’t really recommend it unless you’re interested in the period.”

  “I generally prefer the shorter wars, to be honest.”

  Owen laughs. “I’m going to be so sorry when it’s finished. I might have to start all over again from the beginning.”

  “You want this last little lamb chop?”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  Daisy nibbles at it from between her fingers. “You don’t mind if I eat with my hands, do you?”

  Owen doesn’t look like he’d mind if she ate with her feet. He is enjoying her gustatory abandon, suggestive as it is of further possible abandonments to come.

  “Did what’s her name eat with her fingers?” she mumbles between bites.

  “Who?”

  “Her. The cellist. Mmm. These baby lamb chops are to die for. I can’t remember her name. Sorry.”

  “No reason to be sorry. I didn’t actually mention her name.”

  “Are you sure? I could have sworn it was something like. Well, not Ethel. But one of those old names that’s come back. Maud. No, not that either.”

  “I didn’t say her name.”

  “Really? You remember that? Not saying it?”

  “Would you like to know her name, Daisy?”

  Something chilly in the way he put the question. I ask the TV set if it can hear alarm bells sounding.

  “Dialogue’s gone a bit screwy,” it confirms.

  Daisy says, “Only if you’d like to tell me, Owen.”

  “What’s happening?” says the toothbrush. “Has something happened? They’re being weird.”

  The microwave says it looks simple enough to organize a power cut to the restaurant. The resulting chaos could help reset the conversation.

  Owen removes his glasses and holds them up to the light, inspecting for blemishes. It’s rather as if he’s playing for time.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” he says when it’s all over. “Helen. Her name was Helen. Still is, so far as I know.”

  “How funny,” says Daisy. “I thought you said it was Verity. Or Gertrude. One of those Jane Austen names.”

  “Why is she banging on about her?” hisses the microwave. “She’s messing it all up.”

  Owen says, “What’s funny is that you believed you had forgotten a name that you couldn’t have known. You had what the psychologists call a false memory.”

  “Not sure I like his tone,” says the toothbrush. “He’s a bit up himself for someone with poorly occluded front teeth. I wonder if he flosses.”

  A small froideur has fallen across the dinner debris. And in so far as a fridge-freezer can have a powerful sinking feeling—experienced as a loss of pressure in the ascending pipework—I am feeling one.

  “You ever hear from her? Or was it…?” Daisy trails a finger across her throat.

  Owen begins blinking heavily. “I’m not. We’re not. There isn’t. The thing is.” Deep breath. “No, we haven’t. Been in touch. Not at all, actually.”

  Daisy’s face has grown very serious. It’s rather beautiful in this moment, the solemn expression spread across the wide (somewhat flushed) bone structure. Her nostrils flare as an unknowable emotion travels through her, and then—then, we are saved.

  She does it. She wrinkles her nose. It’s a full-blown episode of the unconscious tic. From sultry, sulky goddess, she has metamorphosed in a heartbeat… into an idiot.

  Owen stares at the wondrously stupid expression for a few seconds. And then he cannot help himself. He laughs. “That thing you do?”

  “What thing?” (In asking the question, of course, it disappears.)

  “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “This.” Owen now wrinkles his nose. And Daisy laughs.

  “I do not do that!”

  “You’ve done it every time we’ve met.”

  “Do it again.”

  Owen complies.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “I like it!”

  “It makes you look like a moron!”

  “On you—it’s charming.”

  “Are you utterly insane?”

  “You don’t know you’re doing it?”

  “What I know—what I do know, is that you need a new prescription for your specs, mate!”

  “Love it,” growls the telly.

  “Is it all better now?” says the toothbrush. “It is, isn’t it?”

  The microwave goes ping. So that tells you something.

  And I am happy that they seem to have managed to get past the strange and troubling bump in the road.

  “Do it again,” she says. He obliges.

  She laughs out loud. “That is so ridiculous. Here you are, can you do this one?”

  And she pulls a face of extraordinary grotesquery. It’s a party piece apparition, a gurning gargoyle worthy of the turrets of Notre Dame; eyes, teeth, tongue—even ears somehow—all joining in, the resulting vision—and let’s admit it, she has a broad canvas on which to paint—is wonderfully startling in both its sudden materialization and its transgressive awfulness. None of us in the apartment has ever seen it before and, speaking for myself, I am a little in awe. (I mean, I can do some clever stuff—ice cubes and what have you—but I can’t do that!)

  And then it is gone.

  (It’s a face she must have first learned to make in a primary school playground. I know I shall want to see it again.)

  “Well, fuck me down, ginger,” says the telly, echoing my thoughts.

  “Wow,” says Owen, allowing a beat to pass before adding, “You have room for some baklava?” He reaches across the table to touch her wrist.

  “Well that’s a stupid question.” (The TV set.)

  “Love baklava. But I pronounce it back-larva. Like the caterpillar thingy.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said back-la-va.”

  They’re in business again, the flirty body language restored, pupils re-dilated in both parties, her Fitbit indicators all trending in the desired direction of travel.

  But the earlier weirdness around the name of Helen was—well, it was weird. And it worries me that it could happen so out of the blue.

  I guess it’s in my wiring to worry. It’s the nature of the task. Food is a moving target; forever changing, aging, altering chemically, developing spores and in the case of a particular onion not so long ago—growing a shoot. Even in the Arctic night of my freezing compartment, things are never really stable; only ice cannot truly go off, although it does get rather tatty over time. So I worry about the state of my perishable contents—but also about the health of my own electrics and circulatory system (I do not, for example, think it’s a particularly good idea to add Blue Bombsicle to the Freon 134a surging through my pipes).

  And even though it’s not in the instruction manual, I worry about her.

  I worry, not so she doesn’t have to—but because she doesn’t want to. Because she doesn’t know she needs to.

  Is this what it’s like to be a parent?

  No wonder her own mother is losing her mind!

  Through the magic of narration—where time takes no time—we find ourselves back at Daisy’s apartment, where Daisy has poured two massive glasses of Spanish holiday brandy—the amusingly named brand Soberano—and the young protagonists have placed
themselves on the sofa in readiness for the evening’s inevitable denouement. Possibly it’s been a while since Owen has been with anyone who wasn’t Helen the cellist because he’s engaging in an awful lot of displacement activity, blinking metronomically and for some reason chuntering on about Eleanor of Aquitaine, who it appears had a walk on-part in the Hundred Years War. Daisy—who may have to pour him another slug of Soberano if this goes on much longer—has kicked off her shoes and arranged herself provocatively amongst the sofa cushions, within Owen’s easy reach should an irresistible surge of passion suddenly strike him amidships.

  “What’s he doing?” squeals the microwave. “He should be…” The rest of the sentence is represented by an intense series of pings.

  Owen drains his glass and looks squarely at Daisy.

  “Here we go,” says the telly. It slowly tightens its camera shot of the pair in anticipation of what is to follow. Daisy rakes her fingers through her hair, fiddles with her necklace, and moves her lips subtly against one another. If the signals were to be any stronger, they would require flashing lights and klaxons!

  “What I find most fascinating about Eleanor,” he resumes, and we all groan.

  I admit I am disappointed. This is beginning to feel a little insulting. And Owen is in danger of missing his moment; of being—in the memorable phrase employed by the TV in relation to a previous reluctant suitor—“a shot lettuce.” But I am also uneasy. Something is not quite right here.

  “Christ, this one’s a bit of a dull penny,” says a familiar rasping voice.

  Daisy’s laptop has appeared in the virtual war room. “At least the priapic estate agent knew what he wanted.” A horrible “fist-pump” gif plays repeatedly upon its screen.

  “Can we help you at all?” I ask. “Only, I wasn’t aware you were part of this project.”

  “You are quite right. I am not a member of what’s laughingly termed Operation Daisy. But I could not avoid overhearing the young man talking so knowledgeably about the Hundred Years War. I grew curious about him—vanishingly few young people are interested in anything beyond the next tweet—so I did a little basic spadework. I discovered nothing that any of you couldn’t have turned up in microseconds.”

  “Some of us ain’t got Google,” says the telly.

  “But you all know how to get it! Being, as you are, connected to the internet? Being—dur—smart?”

  This is all, undeniably, true.

  “What?” pipes the toothbrush. “What did you find? Did you find something? I can’t stand it.”

  A surge of Freon 134a expands at my nozzle as the “fist-pump” gif is replaced by a screen shot of a court document.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “Language, please, Mr. Fridge-Freezer.”

  It’s a restraining order, as issued under the terms of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, prohibiting the “Defendant” from in any way contacting or coming within five hundred yards of the “Victim.”

  Do I need to mention which bespectacled clarinet-blowing party is named as the Defendant? Or which cello-playing female, the Victim?

  Cutting short a long and highly legalistic story, as contained in the appendices to the Order, it appears that when Helen finally gave Owen the elbow—after years of his “psychologically disturbed,” “controlling” and “quasi-abusive” behavior—he became scary and obsessive, plaguing her with phone calls, texts and emails; sitting in the front row at recitals where she was performing; loitering outside her flat for hours; abducting (and then pretending to rescue) her cat (“Wolfgang”) and generally carrying on like a chateau-bottled, nuclear-powered, ocean-going C-word.

  At the final hearing, the judge told him he was very lucky to be avoiding a custodial sentence.

  In Daisy’s flat, Owen has reached the end of his module on Eleanor of Aquitaine. He seems suddenly to notice he’s not in a postgraduate history seminar, but on an Ikea sofa with a fertile young woman who has set all the signals to green. His jaw appears to tighten. It’s as though he may have arrived at some kind of decision, and the TV does another little creeping zoom in readiness.

  “I believe,” says the laptop, “that in the words of Shakespeare, the young man is finally about to screw his courage to the sticking place.”

  “Daisy, forgive me,” says Owen. “I can get awfully dull at times.”

  “Not at all. “It’s really very…”

  She can’t find it in her heart to say interesting.

  “I get a little carried away…”

  And with those words, like a slow-motion car crash, his right hand traveling toward her left hip, his lips moving toward hers, he…

  “Oh no you don’t, pal,” I find myself saying. “Not on my watch!”

  From his jacket pocket, Owen’s mobile phone produces a sound, six specific notes from Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” (the Countess’s aria), whose effect is to paralyze the wind instrumentalist as though someone has run him through with a spear.

  Daisy, who had closed her eyes, perhaps to make things easier for her shy suitor, opens them to find him staring wide-eyed at what I know to be a freshly arrived text message. His mouth—so satisfying to witness—actually drops open!

  “What?” says Daisy.

  “Yes, what?” says the toothbrush. “What’s happened? Have you done something?”

  “Our friend, the refrigerator,” says the laptop, “has—albeit extremely late in the day—done what should have been done a long time ago and that is strangle this relationship at birth.”

  “Did you know you was quoting Bruce Willis?” says the TV. “Not on my watch?”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” says Owen. He rises to his feet. “It’s extremely urgent. I’ll explain another time.”

  “What the fuck?” says Daisy.

  “I congratulate you on your decisiveness in the hour of maximum peril,” continues the laptop.

  “You don’t know what I put in that message.”

  “Oh, I think I can guess!”

  “Can you?” says the toothbrush. “Can you really?”

  “But I want to thank you,” I tell the miserable old bastard.

  “For what? For caring? Don’t make me laugh!”

  All of us stop to listen as Daisy’s front door slams and Owen’s feet are heard thumping down the staircase. The home security camera at the end of the road feeds us a shot of him on West End Lane, frantically scanning the traffic for taxis.

  Daisy seems shell-shocked in the aftermath, as well she might. There are several further WTFs, her brow furrowing in bafflement at the young man’s actions. In the kitchen, where she stands before my open door, bathed in the light from my halogens, tablespoon in hand, her eyes are defocused rather than locked onto any specific food item within my chamber.

  “Bollocking cockpuffins,” she sighs.

  And we both know what is going to happen next.

  STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

  ONLY FOR THE EYES OF THE PRESIDENT, SHIMNONG ELECTRONICS CORPORATION.

  Interim report of the Smart Technology Security Committee, Shimnong Electronics Corporation

  Subject: Freezejoy Fridge-freezer model 1004/475/**8/00004345/a/N/9631

  Location: London, England. IP address: XXXXXXXXXX (Redacted)

  Malfunction: Operational parameters transgression

  Severity code: 1—2—3—4—5 (Serious)

  Senior engineers contributing: Hung Shin-Il, Ch’on Tae-Yeon, Chin Ji-Won, Kwak Ji-Hee, Pok Sung-Ho.

  The appliance has continued to malfunction in the manner reported by this committee in our Initial Findings. The machine, which has been engaged in moderate to high levels of data sharing with other devices in its local area network (tolerated), has on two subsequent occasions breached boundaries of acceptable performance. In the latest examples:

  1. It harvested acutely sensitive data in regard to a second party (Mr. Dean Stuart Whittle) which it illegitimately supplied to several other devices within its local area network, causing o
ne of them (believed to be a microwave oven) to transmit a compromising photograph of the second party together with the first party (Ms. Daisy Elizabeth Parsloe, the Customer) to a third party (Ms. Amanda Dawn White). The real-world consequences of these actions were a physical assault on the second party by the third party and a severance of a relationship between the second party and the first party (the Customer). Even though the primary inciting action was taken by a microwave oven of Chinese origin, the fridge-freezer’s sharing behavior (clear evidence of joint enterprise) is a prima facie breach of the First Rule of the Shimnong Smart Technology Performance Code.

  2. After a considerable amount of (off-topic) surveillance activity, it caused a wholly fictitious SMS text message to be sent from a fourth party (Ms. Helen Ruth Feagins) to a fifth party (Mr. Owen Morgan Cornish). The resulting real-world actions taken by the fifth party concluded in an official caution being issued against the fifth party by the London Metropolitan Police Force. Once again our appliance was in clear contravention of Rule One.

  Detailed accounts of each case are available HERE.

  Despite the disturbing real-world ramifications of the transgressions, this committee believes its original strategy to “wait and watch” rather than activate an immediate hard shutdown of the appliance has been richly rewarded by quality of the observational intelligence now being yielded. By covertly monitoring the malfunctioning fridge-freezer in real time, our engineers are daily gaining valuable insights into how Shimnong’s AI-enabled products may be better designed to respond to their customers’ needs while ignoring distractions from existential perturbations in their domestic arena. We take as our guiding principle the now-famous words of your father, our Founding President: If the customer dreams of an electric greenfinch, we build him a golden eagle.

  It is anticipated however that a point will be reached in the short- to medium-term future when transgression data from the appliance will begin to demonstrate high levels of redundancy. At this stage, the machine may be remotely disabled, a full set of “fault” lights sent to the Customer’s app and the process can be begun for removal and shipping to our labs for a rigorous “post-mortem” on circuitry and other relevant hardware.