Dog Food

The front lawn of the Florida home on the golf course had become a 21st century dumpster fire. Tablets, 8K OLED monitors, game consoles, Alexa speakers, Google Home hubs, smart phones, smart watches, smart TVs, smart washer/dryer combos, and even a smart refrigerator. Every piece of evidence that the house was ever connected to the AI-generated streaming and social media age, was now going up in smoke.

On the sidewalk, a woman in shades sat in a lawn chair and watched everything burn while she sipped the neck of a non-alcoholic Corona bottle with a slice of lime. The look on her face was unmistakable. I’m done with the bullshit. It was almost written on her forehead.

Around the cul-de-sac, neighbors were coming outside to see why they smelled the odor of silicon chips burning, and then whipping out their phones to record what was sure to become the next trending video on X and Truth Social. But there was no gossiping, no one whispering questions, and certainly no one bothering to call the fire department. They all knew what was happening, and the only shock was that it hadn’t happened sooner.

“You have GOT to be shitting me Karen!” screamed a man as he stumbled to get out of a self-driving Uber in front of the house while carrying a single can of dog food. The woman in the lawn chair, presumably Karen, didn’t move a muscle, and just continued sipping her cerveza as the reflection of the flames flickered in her shades. “Bro, are you even listening to me??” shouted the man as he placed himself between her and the fire, blocking her view.

“I heard you Leonardo Da Vinci Hernandez, if that is your real name. Or if, for that matter, you are in fact a real person.” she said with enough ice to make the sweaty day feel chilly all of a sudden.

“Pero like, what does that even mean?” Leo wondered why his wife had chosen, of all places, to have her manic episode outside his natural habitat of morgue intensity central A/C. “Am I real? Tuh. I should turn it around on you! Are YOU real? Like, is this a REAL fire on our lawn? And, how do I know I’m not on REAL Housewives or the REAL Adventures of Jonny Quest right now?” Leo then noticed their SUV idling in the driveway, packed to the brim with luggage and Karen’s entire VHS collection of trashy 90s romcoms, along with a toddler in the child seat.

“And the biggest question: Why is Zaida in the car with half our shit?” Leo continued. He noticed the fire contained ashy silhouettes of the house’s appliances and he was even more confused. But then he remembered, he didn’t have to figure it out on his own. He had a pocket therapist on tap at all times. He messaged ChatGPT his favorite question, “Why is my wife angry, again?”

“Put yourself in her shoes.” it replied. “Treat her the way you would want to be treated.” Solid therapy, Leo thought. He would now attempt to put it into practice.

“Oh ya. I see.” Leo began as he stroked his beard. “This is our Matrix moment, right? The AI is self-aware, the machines are rising and they’re always listening? Blah blah blah. You’re right, I’m totally with you bb. This fire is all on me for not getting us a VPN.”

Karen smiled. It never ceased to amaze her how many times she could point out her husband’s narcissism, believe that this time he truly understood, and then see him once again miss the point by a country mile. It couldn’t be that she had a legitimate reason to be upset. That would be too logical. Instead, it must be that she finally believed every tin-foil hat theory Leo had ever read on 4chan, and that she realized the error of her scientific ways.

She got up, revealing a very pregnant abdomen, and calmly waddled over to him. “Do you remember when Comcast came by yesterday to fix the wi-fi?” she asked as the fire raged behind her.

Leo then had the worst kind of epiphany. The kind when you realize that you left the stove on half-way to Disney World. Suddenly, he knew exactly why all their devices were on fire, that his wife was leaving him, and why not one of their neighbors was helping.

“Somehow…”, Karen feigned ignorance, “...you developed the ability to text in your sleep.” Leo was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the weather. He went back to the phone to see the last message he sent her. To his horror, it was a Shakespearean love poem, sent 30 seconds prior, somehow. Leo wished he didn’t know why the phone had gone rogue and was now able to send messages without him. But he knew.

“Don’t even bother. I have it right here.” Karen continued as she displayed the poem on her phone. “I suppose I should have known what was going on. It’s not like friends, family and neighbors couldn’t see it. But I didn’t want to. Texts from you were like texts from my favorite films. You always knew the perfect words to say, and you made me feel like I had found my own Richard, Tom, Hugh or yes, even a Leo. Then, outside of the phone, I might as well have been married to a dog. But not a cute dog, or a fun dog. A miserable, spoiled dog of a man who only ever knew how to do laundry by asking one of the women in the house to do it for him. A dog who spent all his time scrolling Instagram, watching Netflix, and handing our life savings to an AI trader, that oh so wisely put it all in MiamiCoin. Never working, never doing a chore, never changing a diaper.”

Leo was in his phone frantically trying to figure out what happened to his perfect system. BroApp was set to text Karen on a schedule, with messages generated by ChatGPT. But BroApp was supposed to pause when they were connected to the same wi-fi. And that’s when Leo realized. He wasn’t on the house’s wi-fi. Comcast must have changed the password when they came to fix it. Karen saw that he wasn’t listening to her and she angrily snatched the phone out of Leo’s hands. “They said the router was hacked, because someone set the login to ‘password123’. I wonder who that was?”

Leo was shocked. How could anyone have figured out his bulletproof password?

“I just want to know why.” Karen sighed, as she got into the SUV.

Leo knew at this point that it was over, and there was no point in lying anymore. There was also no point in being angry, as ChatGPT had told him many times before. Karen was only ever going to notice his flaws, and never his positives, like when he gave her a copy of Wreck-it-Ralph in 4K HDR for Mother’s Day. What mother doesn’t enjoy a good children’s movie about sentient computers? But to indulge anger would be to miss the bigger picture. Leo saw that he was the villain she needed in that moment. She had for so long been so unhappy in her social purgatory, trying to please people who would never be pleased. But now, he almost felt pride because she knew what she was willing to fight for, even if it meant fighting him. What could be more human? He’d only ever wanted a similar reason to exist. He wondered for a second who he would be without an algorithm to tell him. He had no idea. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe he wasn’t real after all.

So why did he intellectually catfish her with an AI all the way to a marriage, kids and a house on the 18th hole? For the first time in his life, he told her, and himself, the truth. “Because relationships take work. And I don’t like work.”

Karen nodded in surprise. “Wow, Leonardo Da Vinci. I guess you are an artist after all. I’ve never seen anyone be so creative to be so lazy. If our marriage is your canvas, and lies are your paintbrush, then this my love, is your magnum opus.”

It wasn’t the first Da Vinci joke Leo had heard in his lifetime, so it didn’t phase him. But he did feel concerned about how he was going to explain this to his parents, whom he would now have to live with after they had already kicked him out three other times, for similar reasons. The reincarnation of the original Da Vinci he was not.

“Can I ask one last question?” Leo inquired. Karen just stared at him. “I’ll take that as a yes”, he quipped while having a self-deprecating chuckle, but Karen was not amused in the slightest. He read the room and swallowed. “Why did you have me go buy dog food? We don’t even have a dog.”

Karen laughed in a way Leo hadn’t seen since the day they met. Maybe she was reconsidering, Leo thought. But no. She tossed Leo’s phone in the fire. “Because I didn’t want you to starve”, she sang with the delight of a free bird.

And she drove away, just as the fire department arrived.