Things That Speak
Things That Speak
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Chatter.
This article is cross-posted to the “Posts” section of my donation site, buymeacoffee.com, where even a minimum contribution of $5 USD will grant you full access to this and other kinds of weird, paywalled content going forward.
I’m dropping by the grocery store to fetch my morning joe. The coffee station is set up at the back of a long row of self-checkout kiosks. I take a wide berth around all but the last one, which stands less than a meter from the cup dispenser. I’ve played this game before, edging around its invisible detection field like Indiana Jones navigating the lip of a pitfall.
It must have caught a piece of my toe or something, because it begins to speak:
𝙒𝙚𝙡𝙡-𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙚.
𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙖 𝙛𝙧𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙧’𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙙, 𝙥𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙋𝙄𝙉 𝙣𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙣𝙤𝙬…
A single neuron explodes in my brain. I want a CTRL-Z, man, a do-over. But it’s too late. The pre-programmed speech it gives is horribly long and uninterruptible. It punishes me as I squirt out my coffee, and quickly bring it to the human checkout girl for payment. In my haste, I trip three more sensors along the way. The machines chirp over each other in slightly staggered rounds, like a kindergarten song gone haywire.
I gaze at the girl’s dour face and wonder:
Will all these voices drive her mad someday? Will they speak their filth into her dreams?
Or into mine?
We’re on the train platform. A female voice speaks to us from the ether. Its tone and cadence is that of an icy matron pretending kindness, Nurse Ratched smile-talking us through a death threat. The voice mispronounces a word, then weirdly elongates another.
At some point, it announces a delay that puts a train’s arrival four-hundred hours in the future. We blink at each other, double check the math. Maybe civilization has finally collapsed. Or maybe it’s just another bug.
Don’t care. Not our train.
I’m on a gig site, fussing with wires and console commands. Just another long monkey trying to make the Big Magic work. I dial a telecom’s customer service hotline. The rep who answers isn’t human. The timbre is masculine for a change, but still cheerfully dead. The bot’s staccato patter leads me deep into a menu maze, with no golden thread to guide me out.
I want to electrocute it somehow. Use my Big Magic to fry whichever server farm emits it. I dream of choking such voices out, MMA-style. But you can’t choke a voice with no throat, or body-slam a monster with no body.
I wait patiently instead, to speak to a person with some remnant of a soul.
I’m riding in the back of an Uber, a Nissan Altima. I don’t know how to pronounce the driver’s name. It looks like a misspelt version of one I can, but I don’t even try. The only word spoken during this entire trip would be my own first name, asked as a question when he pulled up. The only human word, that is.
The rest were spoken by the car itself. Or, to be more accurate, by a gadget mounted to its dash, a tool of a tool. It told the driver where to go, when to turn, how long before the next command would issue. This little glowing voicebox was his boss on this gig, but we were both at its mercy tonight.
It ran us in circles for nearly ten minutes, and kept interrupting itself halfway through an order. Three times it led us back into the same dark, dead parking lot, where it would start babbling psychotically:
𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙖 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙣 𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙤… 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙖 𝙡𝙚𝙛𝙩… 𝙄𝙣 𝙩𝙬𝙤-𝙝𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙩… 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚… 𝙄𝙣 𝙖 𝙦𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙢𝙞𝙡𝙚…
A feeling of surreal helplessness washed over me in the darkness. We suddenly found ourselves led into a very bad hood. Both human captives laughed: first him, then me. We were gonna get murdered. Wheeeeeeeee!
Then it was back to the parking lot again, to the stuttering and circles. None of us had any idea where we were, or where we were going, or how to get there. Not even the boss.