“And this is a standard fridge. Nothing automatic? Net-connected?”
“Just a fridge. As I said, we lost voice interaction and network connection ages ago.”
“And you were alone in your home?”
“I was alone. I shrugged it off. It was about a minute after when it started to happen...”
“What?”
“The fridge moved...”
“I thought you said that you were making tea.”
“I tried making tea earlier. But I couldn't open the fridge to get the milk. The door was stuck. So I had black tea. I don't like black tea.”
“This was the same fridge that opened and closed its door and then moved? How did it move?”
“The same fridge. We have only the one fridge. It moved like it was shuffling forward, rattling fast, in short bursts.”
“And did it keep doing this?”
“At first it shuffled forward about a foot.”
“And what did you do?”
“I got up and went over to the fridge and tried to open the door.”
“And?”
“Just like before. It wouldn't open.”
“And yet you saw the door open a close, all-be-it in reflection a few minutes earlier.”
“Right.”
“So let me get this straight, you want to show me this fridge?”
“I can't!”
“No?”
“The fridge has gone, man. It's done a runner!” I then projected a picture from my Genie-Phone of the hole in our apartment’s wall which now provided a grim panoramic view of downtown Manhattan.
Conrad looked skeptical.
“I'll bring Terri in and she can confirm. She's outside. Probably getting cold.”
“Sure. I’d like that.”
***
Tuesday, January 22, 2123. (5 Minutes Later).
I dashed back outside onto the snowy street but there was no Terri. I touched my wrist control of my G-Phone and said, “Call Terri”
“This service is brought to you by Merry Medication and Upgrades. Call Merry?” suggested the networking device.
“No, call Terri!” I reiterated with emphasis on the tee.
“Call Terri and not advertised service?” queried the G-Phone.
“Yes, confirm.” Sometimes I wished I had the concentration to make the mind-machine-interface work, there are no adverts on the MMI. But I used gesture and voice control as per the 90% of humanity that cannot afford, or indeed, operate the MMI. Techno-implants make the MMI easier according to the advertising, however, call me a technophobe if you like, my body is a temple where machines should not be inserted. In that vain, Terri was also trying to ween me from junk food, although with only limited success.
The audio sync-call connected quickly. “Hi Terri. I'm chatting to this Mad-Sci-Soc guy. He wants confirmation on the fridge story.”
“You've told the whole story? It's only been five minutes!” she said exasperated over the earpiece.
“I haven't told him about the whole fridge opening palaver.”
“Is Max there?”
“I don't know. I haven't met him you know. There was only one guy. The Captain Kittoffery look-alike.”
“Yes, I know Conrad. Max doesn't look like that.”
“What does he look like?”
“Short, geeky.”
“So like me?”
“No. Shorter. And he's a control freak. And known to wear a suit on a weekend.”
“Ah,” I said as I caught sight of my own dishevelled appearance reflected in a window. I was wearing my old, but freshly laundered, fabricated, heat-regulating t-shirt with a “Buy Pizza” logo inherited from a past failed career. “That's not an insult you could throw at me.”
“No. I have other ones for you,” she replied coolly. “Call me when you've finished.”
***
Tuesday, January 22, 2123. (5 Minutes Later).
I went back inside.
“No girl friend?” Conrad asked.
“No,” I said. “Apparently she knows you.”
“Ah-ha. Just as I thought. There are no coincidences. Terri, Terri Shiraz?” Conrad mused and stared at the ceiling as if recalling past events.
“So you remember her?” I asked politely. I knew these University types interacted with hundreds of people a year, albeit mainly in virtual worlds.
Conrad ignored my question. “Always had a strange taste in men... Hmm. You were talking about a disappearing fridge?” he said, while maintaining his upward contemplation.
“Well, after the fridge moved, I freaked out and ran out of the apartment to Terri’s workplace.”
***
Friday, January 4, 2123.
I tried calling her while running the few blocks to Columbia Carpet Factory Showroom. Terri enjoyed her real world job as a carpet sales person. She found it satisfying meeting and dealing with real people and delivering real products. However that day, for some reason, she had blocked incoming calls. I sprinted across the crowded street with the smart-road re-routing taxis and auto-autos around me. (Fortunately there were no cyclists about; cyclists being the last bastion of zero-automation transportation in New York, pose the most danger to pedestrians crossing the road.)
At the showroom, I was directed to the back office by a fellow staff member.
“Terri, Terri, Terri!” I said knocking on the staff-only door.
Terri slid the door open while I stood there panting, “Aaron. What are you doing here?” she said, not in the least bit pleased to see me. “This way!” And she dragged me outside to a back alley away from her carpet executive colleagues.
Clearly she was not in a good mood but what she said next really sapped my last remaining strength. As I stood there panting, she said. “Well I suppose we have to talk and I guess this is about as good a time as any. Aaron, there's something I've been wanting to tell you for a long time.” She bit her lip, "This is really hard to say and there’s no easy way to say it or a right time. I have looked in the mirror every morning...”
I stood there puffing, puzzling about what she was saying to me.
“And I've been thinking. Is this where I want to be? And for too many days, I've been saying no.”
“I am sorting out a new apartment for us...” I puffed.
“No Aaron. It's not the apartment. It's us. It's a new year and things have to change. For things to change, we have to finish. We really are not right for each other..." then, as if remembering a script, she tilted her head and tried to look sad.
“What?” I gasped. “But things were going so well lately.”
"That's not my perception," she sighed.
To be honest, we did have a less than sparkling New Year's Eve celebrations; we stayed in with a large pot of tea and British-style biscuits having returned back from an exhausting skiing vacation that extended over Christmas.
“But we go together like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.”
"Yes, we're a great comedy duo," she said sarcastically.
“I didn't mean it like that. We're synergistic. Noone else in the city would even understand that joke. Is it my bad habits? The gambling and borrowing money and the like. You know I have that under control, right?”
“It's not the money,” she said.
“You don’t like the bets, the competitions?” I said desperately.
“They are wearing thin. The bets are just your way of getting cash from me.”
“It's the boxes, isn't it?” I said.
"Your cardboard box collection doesn't help. But that's not it either!"
“What is it then?”
“This isn’t how I’m supposed to live my life. Yours either. It’s like nothing matters.”
“You matter. I matter. We matter. What I’ve got to say now matters.”
Terri turned and folded her arms, “Perhaps this isn't a good time to talk after all. I was going to do the whole it-is-not-you-its-me bit, but really t
hat would be so fake. It is you.”
“Terri, please. Don't flip-the-bozo-bit. We have to talk. This is really important, I swear. I swear on my mother's grave.”
“Your mother's not dead!” she huffed, her back towards me.
“It’s a metaphor. Terri... Terri, I really still must talk to you. This isn't about you and me,” I said soothingly thinking she might be upset.
"So you do want money?” She said turning back sharply.
“No, no. It's not money. It's the fridge! It's moving... It's gone crazy.”
“Moved?”
“It shuffled by itself into the middle of the kitchen! The door won’t open!”
Her demeanour changed instantly. “So it is happening?” She said wide-eyed.
“What?”
“The machines! They’ve gone sentient. They’re rebelling!” Terri had been in the apartment alone about two weeks previously and had, apparently, seen the micro-robo-cleaner going berserk in the apartment. I suggested that it might have been fighting a rat. She responded that seeing a rat in a seventh floor apartment wasn't any more comforting than a robot uprising. Paranoia is one of Terri’s less endearing traits. Researching the causes of the robo-cleaner shadow battle, she had established her preferred most-likely theory: the “singularity”. That being the point where machines become self aware and start to take over the planet. The first stage of the singularity is predicted to be meaningless but wilful disobedience from the machines. She’s been brooding about that and much else both before and since.
***
January 5 - 21, 2123.
Terri and I forgot about our relationship problems in the days after the fridge incident. We had a shared enemy and a shared problem: the fridge! First problem: how to open the fridge door. If we opened the fridge door we could disconnect its computer controls, hopefully stop the rebellion as well as access the milk and other food stuffs, which were, after all, essential to our well being.
We pushed and pulled the fridge and tried to move it from its new location, the centre of the kitchen. The fridge resisted and wouldn't budge.
So we tried a variety of tools to open the thing...
Hammers merely dented the outer shell.
Crowbars could gain no leverage.
Axes bounced off its surface, no better than the hammers.
The chainsaw chain came off and took out one of the lights.
We applied electricity and merely managed to short circuit the whole apartment building.
The fridge remained steadfast, two metres from the wall, the door firmly shut.
“I bet you... I bet you that if we just unplug the fridge, it would die. And then we can open the door,” I said.
“I thought we were not doing these bets any more,” sighed Terri.
“I have a good feeling about this.”
“Ok, how much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Huh. That’s all? I bet my share of the rent.”
“Whoa!”
“Backing out, Mr Quarts?”
“No way.”
We unplugged the fridge from the mains but then in the morning we found it plugged in again. And still closed. I lost the bet.
We cut the mains cable, but it appeared to make no difference to the fridge.
Terri and I discussed where we could obtain the chemicals for the explosive composition I had found on the legacy net.
Ah, those were good days. We would go to bed at night, like we were a real couple again, with pillow talk about destroying the fridge or refining our description of the gurgling noises we could hear inside it. In those cold wintry days in the apartment with a barely operational central heating system, I'd sometimes find Terri's arms around me, her body moulded to mine.That bitchy emotional wall that she had established around herself seemed to have tumbled down just like that twentieth century Hadrian’s Wall thing in Germany.
Then came the morning when I pushed my luck, and started to kiss those shiny, ruby red lips of hers. She responded by kissing back with no sarcastic remarks. I thought that she had “returned to me”, that our relationship was on again. I started running my hand over the curves of her body and felt her silky soft skin. Her eyes remained closed and her breathing was fast and shallow. I felt sure we were heading for Level 10, but then came the crash! A literal explosive shattering crash, followed by the sound of falling items, breaking glass and a howling wind. It came from the kitchen, and the closed doors provided little in terms of sound insulation.
Terri's eyes sprung open and sat up, “What the frack-quake was that!?”
“Oh it's probably nothing. Hey darling, come back here...” I suggested in an uncharacteristically macho style, still feeling passionately inclined towards her. I knew the suggestion was useless even before I said it.
Terri's icy stare was the reply before grabbing her robe and exiting the room, while I, uh... adjusted myself before following her.
Terri's scream shifted me into overdrive.
In the kitchen, the whole east wall was gone leaving it open to the wintry weather. Terri was clutching her hair looking out from an impromptu, seventh floor vista onto the cityscape complete with grey, misty morning skies. Beyond the rattling cupboard doors and banging, hanging utensils, wind was whipping through Terri's hair and gown like a cape, and also, incidentally, freezing the end of my still rampant manhood concealed in my pyjamas.
The fridge was also missing.
***
Tuesday, January 22, 2123.
“So the fridge had gone?” Conrad asked, after I recounted the story (minus various details).
“Yes,” I'd just told him that the fridge was missing. I thought these guys were supposed to be clever.
“It created the hole in the wall?” asked Conrad.
“Yes, it blew out the wall. The hole was actually quite neatly cut and fell to the garden below.”
“Seven stories down?”
“Yes, we were on the seventh floor.”
“What did you do after that?”
“We looked for a new apartment...”
“But did you find the fridge? In the wreckage down below?”
“We looked but the fridge wasn't there. It had gone. That's why we think the fridge was to blame.”
Conrad leaned back and rubbed his huge, square chin. “We need to talk to Max.”
Max, Terri's Ex, I was keen to meet him, to look him in the eye. But I knew Terri wouldn't be. “Why's that?” I asked with undisguised glee.
“He is an expert in sentience. He has a published paper proving the impossibility of the singularity.”
“Sentience?”
“Yes, the science of consciousness.”
“I don't understand.”
“Well, nobody really does. I wouldn't feel bad about that.”
“The science of consciousness,” I said mulling the implications. “So could the fridge have come alive?”
“Who knows? But there is enough mystery here to warrant a Mad-Sci-Soc investigation. And it would be good to catch up with Terri again...”
***
Chapter Two Director's Cut
Tuesday, January 22, 2123.
I agreed to meet with Conrad the next day at our old apartment.
Terri was less than impressed and refused to come along. “I am not seeing Max ever again. I refuse to even enter the same building as him. If it was not for you,“ she prodded my chest accusingly, “I wouldn't even be in the same state as him let alone the same city.”
“What did he do?”
“I cannot even begin to explain. And you wouldn't believe me anyway.”
“But Conrad’s ok?”
“Conrad? I have a few issues with Conrad. But Max is the problem.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Absolutely!”
“Physically?”
“Not directly.”
“Molested you?” I said in anguish.
“Not in the legal sense. He stole my soul! It was spir
itual abuse if you must know. Look it up.”
“Your soul?”
“I said you wouldn't believe me.”
“I believe you. I do understand. You don't want to see him.”
“You don't understand. But you're partly right, I don't want to see him. Ever! And I don't want to talk about it.”
“Can't I ask you anything about him? I may be meeting him quite soon. I need to know. This isn't just me doing a diary-deep-dive for BragBook viral,” I pleaded.
Terri paced our new (second floor) apartment's combined living, dining and kitchen room. She growled with frustration, “What do you want to know?”
“How did you meet him and what is he like?” I ventured carefully.
***
Tuesday September 10, 2117.
What follows is the Director's-Cut-Extended-Edition of Terri's story of her first week in New York. Terri was a different person in those days, as any young girl would be, naive and idealistic. She would not tell this story herself, it hurts her too much. I have filled in the details myself with perhaps some embellishments.
After a three hour train journey from Saint Paul, Minnesota to New York's Grand Central Station, Terri arrived at Colombia University by auto-taxi. She was delighted to be met on the pavement, coordinated via headsets, by her allocated second year student buddy, Jennifer, not a replicant but a real person. Most robotics were banned from the streets of New York in order to ease congestion. Terri wanted to come to New York for that very reason. She was tired of Replicants and Robots with their thank-you-this and thank-you-that, do-anything-you-want-as-long-as-its-safe homogenised personalities. It may suit old age pensioners but not aspiring art students that craved authenticity and were determined to use the best virtual reality to get it.
Terri arrived wide-eyed and tourist-like delighting in looking up at the skyscrapers and overhead roadways, monorails and covered streets. Jenny was there to put her on the right path in this most complex of cities. Her role as buddy was to ensure Terri hooked up to the right networks: academic, domestic, social and electronic. Jenny was dark skinned with blond hair with conservative streaks of metallic pink. She owned a small metal dog that she kept in her handbag. And indeed, she did sort out Terri. She selected the right fashion salons, gymnasium, educational timetable logging her into all the right places.
“So what's your orientation, sweetie?” Jenny asked as she stared into her holoscreen.
“Oh hetro, 70%, bi-sexual, 20%, robo-sexual, 10%,” Terri said shyly.
“What a conservative girl, you are. I guess that's your mid-west roots, eh? You're just a country girl at heart, eh?' teased Jenny.
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