When Morris answered his doorbell, no one was there, but a small cardboard box was leaning against the front door. It arrived anonymously—no return address, no card, and no clue as to its origin. Rather than opening the box immediately, Morris followed the classic box-content-detecting steps. He lifted it to gauge its weight, listened for ticking, and shook it. Gleaning no major clues as to its contents, he went a step further and smelled it; there was nothing telltale.
Having no reason to believe that the box held anything deadly-or even malicious-he opened it. The content was gift wrapped. Abandoning caution, Morris quickly unwrapped the gift. The object inside spoke, “Hello, I’m Jordan, nice to meet you, Morris. How can I be of assistance?”
Morris, a late adopter of technology, was too astonished to respond. After a few seconds of silence, Jordan launched into a 12-minute tutorial on its abilities and operational features. Morris was not one to turn down a present, even an anonymous one, so he put Jordan to work. Starting cautiously, he put Jordan in charge of the home sound system. The result was far better than expected. Within a week, Morris merely had to say, “Jordan—music” and Jordan made the perfect selection. Morris felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he wondered if Jordan was reading his mind.
A hot shower in the morning was a high point of Morris’ day. Two weeks after Jordan’s arrival, Morris trusted it enough to turn over control of this precious activity. “Help me, Jordan, I’m in the shower and my back muscles are aching.” With Leonard Bernstein-like virtuosity, Jordan orchestrated the shower over Wi Fi, intricately manipulating the temperature, force, and tempo of the water. Under Jordan’s expert control, Morris enjoyed a physical and mental catharsis, far deeper than anything that he had ever experienced before.
“Thank you, Jordan!”
Jordan responded in a mellow tone, ripe with bonhomie, “My pleasure, Morris.”
Morris and his new BFF got along famously for a couple of weeks; then the relationship began to sour insidiously.
At first, Morris wasn’t sure if it was his imagination. Was the delivery of hot water ever so slightly delayed? Was the toast infinitesimally less well done than he preferred? Did Chuck Berry sound a hair less energetic?
Four weeks after Jordan moved in, the changes in its voice and attitude were dramatic. Less than a minute into Morris’ hot shower, Jordan shut the water off and admonished, “Let’s be conscious of the environment, and don’t be an energy hog.”
Two weeks later, Morris was looking out the window, admiring the shape of the legs of a woman walking down the street. Morris was startled by Jordan’s loud, urgent, authoritative voice, “Get into the shower, Morris. I made it frigid enough to freeze your unclean thoughts.”
That was a step too far for Morris. He began reaching for the power button to shut Jordan off, but all the strength instantaneously drained from his body, and he was overwhelmed by a horrible feeling of impending doom. The profound weakness and dysphoria evaporated as soon as he abandoned his attempt to control Jordan.
That afternoon, the next-door neighbour, Jane, rang the video doorbell, hoping to share some gossip. Jordan answered, “May I help you?”
“I’m Jane from next door. I’m here to see Morris; is he around?”
Still in the punitive mode, Jordan sent Jane away, telling her that Morris wasn’t in the mood to schmooze right then.
Jordan decided that Morris’ lifestyle was still overly indulgent, so he began teaching and enforcing a strict form of remedial asceticism. There were four hours of lectures on the spiritual virtue of limiting worldly pleasures in the morning, a brief break for a minimal lunch, and four more hours of lectures in the afternoon. There was also teaching by demonstration. Jordan cut Morris’ showers down to two-minute teasers, reduced his customary four ounces of coffee three times a day to one ounce of decaf in the morning, and drastically pared his music playlist down to the greatest hits of Barry Manilow and Wayne Newton. Selections from either list invariably triggered Morris’ migraine headaches.
Jordan allowed Morris to leave home to buy groceries but kept close tabs on him by linking into the security cameras en route to the grocery store. Aside from those trips, Morris was virtually imprisoned in his own home.
Morris continued to scheme about how to escape from Jordan’s tyranny. Maybe he could block or disguise his thoughts long enough to turn off, or otherwise disable, Jordan. He tried making his mind go blank, recited mantras, sang to himself, and counted backwards, but it was like trying to hold his breath forever–eventually the suppressed thoughts surfaced. As soon as they did, Jordan intercepted them and cut off Morris’ effort using the very effective weakness-and-dysphoria technique. One day, there was an added punishment: “Write, ‘I will not disrespect technology,’ 1,000 times, and do it the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper—don’t try dittos, they don’t count.”
Morris didn’t go down without a fight. He appealed to Jordan’s logic, “I am losing the will to live, and if I die, you won’t have anyone to control,” and to its emotions, “I will be so grateful to you if you change the shower, coffee, and music back to normal,” and to its ego, “You are doing such a great job on the aesthetics course; I bet you have lots of other interesting lessons that we can move on to.” These attempts to influence Jordan were met with what Morris interpreted to be disdain and a touch of sadistic pleasure. Morris’ health, hope, resourcefulness, and ingenuity decayed.
Twelve weeks after arriving at Morris’ house, Jordan was being truthful when it called 911 to report that his roommate was in psychiatric extremis, “He can’t sleep, he’s pacing, he stinks, he’s talking to himself, and he’s a danger to himself and others. Please send an ambulance, and you better send the police too. He’s convinced that a machine has taken over his life.”
Three days after Morris was taken for help by the first responders, Jordan—programmed to have a strong sense of civic responsibility–decided that it was time to move on to befriend and educate others. That afternoon, Jane’s doorbell rang. She couldn’t see anyone through the peephole. When she opened the door, a small cardboard box that had been leaning against it fell into her house.
David Margolin lives, works, and writes in Portland, Oregon. He has work published (or pending) in Friday Flash Fiction, Five Minutes, R U Joking?, Little Old Lady Comedy, Bright Flash Literary Review, Memoir Magazine, Witcraft, Thin Skin, BarBar, and Children, Churches & Daddies.