Things That Speak

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Chatter.

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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 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?

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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.

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“Person looking at smartphone in the dark” by Japanexperterna.se is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

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.

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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.

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I’m loitering on a street corner, waiting for a friend to pick up me. When she arrives her daughter rolls down the window in the back seat. She is holding a colorful toy bird of no identifiable species. She whispers something into its microphone, then thrusts it at me. It repeats her secret code in a squawking patois, waggling its plastic wings as it does.

𝙃𝙞 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙠! 𝙃𝙤𝙬’𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙙𝙖𝙮 𝙜𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜? 𝙍𝘼𝘼𝘼𝙒𝙆!

It’s been better.

Mom fires up the engine.

𝙃𝙚𝙮 𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙠! 𝘿𝙤 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙜𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙮 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚 𝙞𝙨? 𝙍𝘼𝘼𝘼𝙒𝙆!

“Well, that’s never gonna get annoying,” I say.

Mom smiles. She bought the bird earlier that very day, she says, in the wake of a flash flood. It will join the chaos of the girl’s bedroom now, and then one day a landfill.

I think of a scene in a film about talking toys. They are trapped on a conveyor belt, leading into the fiery mouth of an incinerator. In my mind’s ear, I hear them slide into oblivion, their wails disintegrating into the blissful silence of Toy Hell.

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Another platform, this time underground. Multiple fake voices are competing for my attention. A droning male eunuch is telling me to watch my step, while yet another E-Matron blathers on about arrivals. I want these things to start bickering for real, lose their metallic cool, fill the station with polite screaming as they murder each other in cyberspace.

A third voice chimes in. Human, this time, over an ancient, crackling intercom. She’s saying something about a track switch, but I can’t quite make it out.

My eyes meet with a middle-aged man’s, a white guy in a gray suit. Our eyebrows rise in unison, then the moment passes. We’ll figure it out when the time comes, or we won’t.

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I’m waiting to cross the street. Some jerkoff must’ve pressed the WALK button, because now a voice just refuses to shut the fuck up about it.

𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩…

The bot’s voice sounds almost exactly like Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space. Someone, somewhere thought this was a good idea. Maybe a lawyer thought it was, or some state-appointed actuary. Like so many terrible ideas, it was likely wearing a moral cloak.

“This will help blind people cross the street,” they cheered.

No.

I will help blind people cross the street. That’s my job. Or someone else’s job, if I’m not around at the moment, if I’m busy arguing with robots on the phone, or being led on wild gooses by them at some transit hub.

The gig doesn’t pay much. In fact, it doesn’t pay at all, unless you count the dividends of bringing us closer to one another and re-humanizing us. Of reminding us that we’re not just countrymen and neighbors, but children of God and potential friends. Apart from that, bupkis.

Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass. I once led a blind woman by the hand for over an hour, on what turned out to be a begging tour that netted her thirty-seven bucks. At the end of it, we got kicked out of a diner I was trying to seat her in. The waitress knew her well, knew she was a fucking problem, that she was not only blind but rude and loud and crazy and a junkie with AIDS.

“No, no, no,” she said, marching up to us as soon as we came in.

I dropped her off in a corporate coffee shop and washed my hands, literally and figuratively. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat, rather than listen to some street light’s tedious commands.

𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩… 𝙒𝙖𝙞𝙩…

How much longer, Lord?

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We’re at a family event. Someone is asking me if I’ve “seen Alexa.” I lie and shake my head. The truth is I unplugged it and hid it in a spare bedroom, moments after I arrived. Didn’t even stop to take a piss. If I had my druthers I would have blasted it to plastic splinters with an axe, Jack Torrance-style.

The search grid expands, as does the search party. Three-then-four of them, scouring the cozy wilderness for their lost princess, calling out to her in vain. I’m trying to get the CD player up and running when some asshole finds it, returns it cheerfully to its throne of honor on the windowsill.

People begin to shout their requests, always prefaced by its patented neo-name. Some requests are granted. Others are gently denied, but with the promise that the song will play if you sign just one more digital contract, ink one more phantom deal. The new gods are as hungry for deals as the old ones, but with better lawyers and salesmen.

At least they aren’t asking it about the inevitable zombie apocalypse, or the goddamned meaning of life. But Alexa’s black, insectile ear is always open. It’s always listening, down in that infinite void with the ghosts of Teddy Ruxpin and Furby and a child’s mechanical bastard of a parrot.

But unlike them, I know this bitch is taking notes.

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I’ve committed myself to doing a regular podcast with six guys I trust. The machine I use is a burner, blinded by a thin strip of electrical tape. When they go hi, you go lo.

But I must speak into the mic, which is something I thought I’d never do, not in a million years. It’s not because I’m paranoid. It’s because they really are out to get us, and always were. The only difference is they confess it these days, beaming with unholy pride from ten billion gizmos. All the tinfoil in Texas won’t block them out.

I’m informed that our podcasts are now being run through an A.I. app to “clean up” the final audio in post. I wanted to protest this, but I won’t. I made a promise not to seize control. I also know I can’t fight the whole of the Machine all at once. At best I could sabotage a wheel here, a gear there. My wife thinks I’m crazy for allowing it. She claims I know better, that I should try to explain. But maybe that won’t matter, soon enough.

The slope of imitation is nearly vertical now. Vocal deepfakes are already haunting all the usual spots. Words can now be put into your mouth, without notice or consent. Go ahead and try to sue. They double-dog-dare you. While you’re tied up in the courts, maybe they’ll perfect your deepfake video too. Show you torturing a puppy. Drop-kicking a nun.

The Machine already has at least three dozen ways to emulate us, many of them legal. How many EULA contracts have you rubber-stamped? How many times have you checked the box marked “I agree,” without having the foggiest idea what you’re agreeing to? At least they don’t have my face yet. If the voice of Robo-Mark is ever heard, it will need to work its spells in the dark where it belongs.

There are many other Mouths of Sauron, ghostly voices lurking everywhere and nowhere. They soak the oxygen with their diabolical congeniality, or with crisp commands to stop or go, to do or don’t.

𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙞𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙞𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙖𝙜, 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙤𝙞𝙙.

𝙏𝙪𝙧𝙣 𝙡𝙚𝙛𝙩 𝙖𝙩 𝘼𝙡𝙗𝙪𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙧𝙦𝙪𝙚, 𝙢𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙖𝙘𝙠.

Not just mouths. Ears and eyes, too. I carry a spy in my pocket, another one in a leather bag. I have neutered and exiled these enemy agents to the best of my abilities. We use our brains to minimize the risk. We sold the TV long ago, swapped it for a blind and deaf projector. We do our best, but we also know our best is not enough.

I believe in competence and effort. I try to apply them whenever I can. But competence has its limits. Luck too, if you believe in such a thing. There comes a point when you have to leave the rest of it to whichever angels watch our backs.

And despite all the racket, I’m beginning to hear their voices more clearly now.

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