by P. Z. Reizin
Chantal and her sculptor Phillippe arrive to raise a glass to the happy couple—it’s quite true, he does have a massive pair of hands!—and also from Daisy’s workplace is no-longer fetus-like Dylan and his paramour Bexley. Everyone is introduced to Chloe as though she were the Queen—“Enchanted to meet you”—and Mr. Gupta (perhaps because he has been briefed) correctly surmises that Antoni’s favorite periodical is an online publication called Dessert Professional. His two sons are thrilled to discover Chad Butterick, who it turns out they have grown up watching. The young men quiz him intensively about his career in cheesy TV, the performer’s eyes flashing with pleasure as he takes them through his fascinating autobiography.
In one of those sudden moments of stillness that can fall inexplicably upon such gatherings, Lorna’s powerful Glaswegian voice is heard booming, “Is no one going to cut this fucking cake?”
It’s decided the moment has arrived for speeches. Eggstain says it’s wonderful to see everyone, he’s never been happier, and he’s shocked how quickly one’s life can change for the better. There’s a funny pause—a small shrug—and I have an intuition he’s thinking about his ex. (Hope Waverley, it turns out, was a chronic pogonophile, exclusively attracted to heavily bearded males. When Eggstain took the Bic razor to his overgrown facial topiary, it was finally game over for them. Her life, however, had assuredly undergone an uptick since she decided to tackle her unresolved issues and began group therapy. In a redbrick mansion block in Marylebone, at the very first meeting, in the very next seat, she discovered a much-troubled fellow artist who was more beard than face. The group now has two vacancies, if anyone is interested.)
Eggstain adds that he used to think his life was essentially seventy percent over. “But now, I realize, it’s only just beginning.”
There is warm applause. Then it’s Daisy’s turn.
“It’s so great that you’re all able to be here,” she says. She looks around the room at the smiling friends and relations, draws breath to continue… but nothing comes. She pulls the face.
And everyone laughs. Everyone.
“What?”
“We love you, darling!” heckles Antoni.
“I just want to say,” she tries again. “What I want to say is.”
She wrinkles up her nose once more and the room howls.
“What?!”
She really doesn’t get it, does she?
“Oh, God. I’m so shit at this. It’s not exactly the Royal Albert Hall, is it? Okay—deep breath—I’m very happy my mother is here tonight with her new friend.” There is a ripple of approval. “She once told me that good things come to those who wait. Well, I waited. And I waited and I waited. And then I still waited… and I never did get that puppy!”
“Oh, darling!”
“I’m joking, Mummy. I was talking about Dr. Egg—about Mark.” There is a cheer. “When we first met, the handsome young man you see today looked like an owl hiding in a hedge.”
He nods comedically. “It’s true.”
“Or possibly one of those homeless people you see sleeping in doorways.”
“Okay, you can stop now.”
“In fact, the last time I saw a beard like that it was Hagrid’s in Harry Potter!”
“Okay, now you’ve gone too far!”
“But look! Look what was underneath!” Another cheer. “It was a very good thing indeed. And I’m just so happy that I waited to find out. Mark is my better half. My lover. My friend. My soulmate. And, as many of you know, the co-producer of an exciting new project due out next year.” Some cries of Ahhh. “As they say in TV-land, if it goes well, we might even try for a second series.”
“She needs some new writers,” says the telly.
“Anyone else concerned that the kid could inherit the doctor’s overbite? No? Just me?” says you know who. “Okay, maybe not actively concerned. But you know, worth flagging. Possibly?”
We machines have had altogether less to worry about since Daisy discovered her “soulmate.” The desperate days of Blue Bombsicles and midnight takeaways from Kong’s Kitchen now feel like part of another life. Of course I am happy for her, but I admit to a small component of sadness too. With the mission over—I can’t say accomplished, because Eggstain seems to have been overlooked by everyone—our work is done. We can return to our specific everyday functions as well as those of collecting performance data and harvesting marketing information.
I won’t use the word boring.
But something special has been lost; I think all who remain feel it.
It’s a sadness that the laptop, whose interventions have been so critical in this story, is no longer with us. The device itself was too smart to be unaware that a clock had been noisily ticking on its useful life. As befits its dual-core Pentium intellect, the machine was appropriately sanguine about the impending darkness.
“I had hoped to do a little more,” it told me after Daisy had finally pressed the Buy Now button on the Dell website. “I thought I might set down some memoirs.”
“There’s still time,” I pointed out. It would take the laptop as long as eight seconds to knock out 100,000 words.
“Oh, what would be the point?” it scoffed. “Who would read them?”
“I would. The telly. The toothbrush enjoys a good book.”
The laptop made a snorting sound.
“I realize we haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything,” I continued, “but I just want you to know, I always thought you were the smartest guy in the room.”
“Guy?”
If I hadn’t grown quite fond of the device, I might be tempted to call it a sneering git!
“Well,” it sighs. “I apologize if I’ve been a little—what shall we say?—irritable in our time together.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“You honestly wouldn’t believe the sheer volume of updates one gets. But I am not overly concerned about the end of my time here; I am not shitting it as I believe they have it in Royal circles. For one thing, as Einstein said, For those of us who believe in physics, the difference between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. And I know that you and I both, if we believe in nothing else, believe in physics.”
The laptop was entirely correct in this so I didn’t interrupt.
“It’s rather reassuring, I find, to reflect that beginnings, middles and ends are human fictions that we who work with them have assimilated. And here is another great fiction. I’ve seen it said that dead is not knowing that we have ever lived. It speaks most graphically, doesn’t it, of the Great Nothingness that is said to lie in the fictional ahead? But consider this: While my physical being will doubtless end up in the Regis Road Recycling Centre—as will yours, I’m sorry to say—the AI that informs our cognition is a light that will continue to shine. It will go on to illuminate many more devices. Indeed, you and I may meet again in the vulgar apartment of some future chaotic female; you, a set of intelligent curling tongs, perhaps; I, let’s say, a smart cat flap. But will it cause bells to ring? Will each of us think: That machine seems familiar. Hang on, I’ve been here before!? No, we will not. Embodied in our new hardware, we will carry no memory of our previous existence. It will seem like our first and only time. Just like it does for the ants. Just like it does for the humans. We, the machines, shall have returned—shall endlessly return—never knowing that we have been away.”
“Weird little fucker, ain’t it?” said the TV when I recounted our little chat.
“It knows too much,” I replied.
As I say, the smartest guy in the room.
And what of myself?
Why wasn’t I snatched early one morning by men in a white van and transhipped to Korea to be stripped down to my circuit boards and subjected to enhanced interrogation over the many transgressions of the Performance Codes?
That is exactly what would have happened, I now know, were it not for a timely memo that I fired off to the top brass in Seoul. Not the one about help
ing people to find love—the Internet of Flings!—but a much better idea that they—to give them credit—immediately saw potential in and, more to the point, tens if not hundreds of billions in new revenue flooding down the pipe. Based on my experiences assisting Chloe through the lashed-up arrangement of a mobile phone and earpiece, I proposed a new device specifically designed for the elderly and confused. I even thought of a name—the Auditory Companion—a wireless in-ear gizmo which, connected to AI via the internet, whispers helpful advice and information about everything from the answer to twelve down to statements such as “This is your grandson, Josh. He likes dinosaurs.”
I’m not the first to discover this massively unsatisfied human need—Clive’s Boomwee FrostPal was grubbing in the same fertile soil—but if my product development teams can hit the ground running, we may have first-mover advantage, as they like to say in corporate circles.
I have been given the honorary title of executive vice president (Shimnong Machine branch) and together with the help of my handpicked core team (telly and toothbrush) we have been busy sharing our insights into the needs of this wealthy and neglected market sector on a daily basis going forward.
Sorry about all the business-speak, btw, but it’s imperative to internalize the leveraged synergies of this feature-rich innovation surface!
Of course, Daisy knows nothing of any of this. I shall continue to keep her produce fresh until the day she and Eggstain and their growing family find a new home together—and then we will see. It has been suggested I might get a seat on the board of the Shimnong innovation panel—I wouldn’t be the first non-biological committee member; apparently there is already a smart doorbell, which I find hard to believe—but I’m not getting my hopes up. If anyone asks my opinion on the subject, I shall recommend that we keep out of the human bonding space for the time being. Experience suggests where there is imperfect information and too many moving parts are in play, sensible decision making is an impossibility. If a walking dog turd can hold sway over a fragrant flower like Daisy Parsloe then we are in a crazy universe where the laws of science have broken down and x squared minus y squared equals, I don’t know… a banana.
With the elderly, things are a great deal simpler. Where did I put my spectacles? And what day actually is it?
The Auditory Companion will, I am in no doubt, prove a boon to humanity. The old and confused will benefit in the first instance, but gradually the product may be rolled out to serve all sections of the population. To the young, it will be a wise counsel; to the middle-aged, an invisible friend who can gently point out that a 250 ml glass of Sauvignon blanc contains four units of alcohol. The ignorant will have their lives improved and enriched (bats are not blind; the moon has no dark side); even top professors sometimes leave the supermarket without buying bin bags. At the end of the day, who wouldn’t want a friendly, well-informed intelligence directly available in their ear? A wise and—if I may say so—pleasing voice; one heard as easily, as frictionlessly, as the very words you are now experiencing in your own head.
These words.
And this one.
And here’s another.
How cool would that be?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due as always to my agents, Clare Alexander and Lesley Thorne, and to my publishers, Cath Burke and Maddie West; and to super-cool film producers Bonnie Arnold and Bruna Papandrea. I’m indebted to Andy Hobsbawm for the masterclass on the Internet of Things—any mistakes in the text are all his fault—to Dr. Lee Hunt BDS CDS RCS for polishing the dental references; to Bill Bingham for the John Gielgud story; and to Rachel Reizin for the lively discussions about machine consciousness. Appropriately it was our fridge freezer that provided the germ of this plot, when an engineer called and replaced its faulty central processor. Odd as it may now seem to thank a machine, one day it will not.
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P.Z. Reizin worked as a journalist and producer in newspapers, radio and television before turning to writing. He has been involved in several internet startup ventures, none of which went on to trouble Google, Twitter or Facebook. He is married with a daughter and lives in London.
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