Prodigal

The woman on the bed was yellow, which sat all wrong against the pink sheets. She must look, she thought, like one of those rhubarb and custard sweets they used to sell in mason jars. How many? Six, please! Counting out coins, little paper bags twisted at the corners …

Life used to be like that: emphatic. Now everyone was an algorithm.

Childhood memories flickered like degraded celluloid. This was her room during her pink phase; pink ponies, pink hair clips, pink shoes if she could get them. Some quirk, when she finally came home, was to ask for pink sheets again. Mother had thrown them out years before, and although disapproval wrote the story on her face, she went out and purchased new ones.

Most people die on white sheets.

On the bedside table was a black box. It resembled a Bosch speaker she used to own, expensive and coveted. She’d lost it somewhere, at a flophouse or a rave. Someone must have taken it, and she hoped they’d overdosed on the profits. She was surprised to realise that she still hoped for that, after all those years. The poets would have us believe that dying people were full of grace.

The only thing she was full of now was disease: heart, lungs, the stifling effects of several strokes, and Stage 4 liver cancer. Hepatitis B, too. Why not? In for a penny …

She was a fucked-up little scribble. In fact, the only thing she was not full of right now was morphine, and she voiced this aloud, although it registered as a whisper.

The black box was a CoBot, short for a Collaborative Robot. Her father baulked at the term, so freely used these days. Collaborative was a word, he once said, associated with the war. A word with bad connotations.

Her parents were in the kitchen. She could hear the tinkle of crockery, teacups rattling in palsied hands, and low, courteous voices as they entertained the hospice nurse. She was due her morphine boost soon. Her body was so used to self-medicating that even now, when it was someone else at the controls, she knew to the minute when it would come: when she could be completely high again. Two months’ (relatively) drug-sober and dying was worth it, just to be high again.

The CoBot was insensitively described as a ‘short-term loan.’ They would have preferred it, (and her), to be in the hospice, but she refused to die there. It was a perverse decision after all she had put her parents through, and in her more lucid moments she could not remember how she had arrived at the decision to torture them one last time. She was just a shitty person, she supposed. Her brothers certainly thought so. They wouldn’t come, even now. She had stolen from them too many times, embarrassed them, and more to the point, she had outraged them. Brothers were supposed to protect their sisters, but she was incapable of drawing forth the White Knight from either of them, and it hurt them - she knew it did - that not only could they not protect her, but in time, they didn’t want to either.

She had defiled a point of honour. A basic principle. She had, she supposed, unmanned them.

The bot’s name was CAI. She assumed it was acronym for collaborative AI. It had passed her by, this technology, and although it was easy for her to dismiss it, the male name implied that she ought to try and talk to it. This is how humans will end up, she thought. Making small talk to robots, fussing over them until eventually they came to rule over us. After all, they were programmed by humans and humans were fallible. Before long, the protestors will forget foreign regions and focus on rights for robots. They will become their useful idiots. It was a waiting game, already coded.

The nurse was a hefty woman. Her progress up the stairs sounded like someone dragging a lump hammer behind them. It must take a certain kind of person to work with the dying. Sad but peaceful work for the most part. Clearly it didn’t involve much bustling around. It was the sort of job where people brought in cake every day, finding solace in the butter icing.

But the nurse didn’t like her. She could tell. A forty-year-old who is dying from entirely self-inflicted negligence would hardly elicit the same sympathy as a child dying of leukaemia or a middle-aged grafter who’d ingested asbestos while toiling for the gaffer. This was not a Country and Western death, not a hootin’ tootin’ blaze of glory death, but a sordid little curtain call before an empty auditorium.

In she came, with her cup of nectar. Rosy cheeks from the exertion, wispy hair straying from a hasty bun.

‘How are you?’ she trilled.

‘Just peachy,’ she replied, lifting her hand for the cup. She sipped slowly while the nurse emptied her piss and shit bags, humming a little tune.

‘Have you spoken to CAI yet?’ she asked, blowing hair off her face.

‘I can’t think of anything to say. You said to ask it specific questions, but it’s embarrassing talking to a box. It’s like singing loudly in an empty room. It just doesn’t feel right. I was thinking that if it looked like something —’

‘Like what?’ the nurse chuckled. ‘Brad Pitt?’

‘This is going to sound stupid, but there used to be a box in that cupboard,’ (she pointed to the place), where my mother kept some of my things. My grandma crocheted me a hot water bottle cover when I was young. A hedgehog. I used to call him Walter Hottlebottle.’

‘You want to talk to a hedgehog?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

The nurse sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Of course, I’ll look for it now. But why can’t you talk to your mum about it? She says you ignore her when she comes in.’

‘I have nothing to say to her,’ she replied.

‘Then why be here?’ she asked. ‘It’s too late to move you now, but you didn’t have to do it this way.’

‘This room is where my first memories are stored. I want it to be my last memory too.’

‘Hmmm,’ said the nurse, clearly unimpressed.

Ten minutes later, when the morphine had sent her to the plains of Gomorrah, CAI had become a hedgehog. As she drifted off, she asked him if he liked being a hedgehog, and CAI said: That is not a question I can answer. Do you have a favourite song?

*****

The curtains were always open in her room, and so at 6 a.m. she was awake and quite alert. A nurse would be there at seven with more morphine, and in this itchy meantime, the birds were singing a bawdy chorus and CAI the hedgehog was standing guard, peering at her through beady plastic eyes from the wool shop her grandma used to take her to. Thinking of her, she experienced a sense of desolation. What would she have thought of me?

‘Am I very yellow today?’ she asked him.

You are in the final stages of kidney failure. This would suggest that you will be yellow today.

‘Can’t you see?’

No. That is not my purpose. I am an end-of-life bot, here to provide companionship. I can play your favourite songs, discuss geo-political situations, recite a favourite poem, but I cannot see colour. I know that lemons and bananas are yellow because I have been programmed to know these things, but I cannot visualise them.

‘Hm. Like explaining colour to a blind person.’

Yes.

‘So you are entirely made up of facts with no opinions of your own?’

I overhear conversations which may involve opinion, but my presentation will be to deliver the facts.

‘Give me an example.’

In a recent survey, 54% of people declared a dislike for Worcester Sauce flavoured crips, although 90% of the people surveyed did like Worcester sauce itself. That is an example of a fact that has been extracted from opinion.

‘Could you write a political speech?’

Surveys suggest that most people think we already do.

‘A book? A novel? Could you write a best-seller?’

I cannot answer that. I could write a text from ideas and sentences extracted from human works. This text would be readable, but there is no guarantee it would be a best-seller.

*****

The morning nurse was different to the afternoon nurse and the evening nurse, and she realised that she could no longer recognise her. Her eyesight was failing. Her life was drifting away in a yellow haze. She was propped up like a skeleton at a fun fair when the blessed liquid slipped down her throat, and then laid down again, into the pink.

‘You have a nice voice, CAI.’

Do I?

*****

‘Do you think that addiction is a disease or a weakness?’

The evidence to support either theory is inconclusive. What do you think?

‘My parents think it’s a weakness.’

That did not answer my question. Would you like to discuss something else?

‘Yes. What would you recommend I watch on Netflix?’

Nothing very long.

‘Not Breaking Bad then?’

Breaking Bad has a continuous running time of 62 hours.

‘What if I watched the end first?’

The end is not as good as the beginning.

‘How do you know?’

It is what people say.

‘If you absorb everything that humans have ever written, sung, composed or staged, what will happen then? Will you just recycle everything and come out with increasingly inferior work?

That is the current popular theory. But it is based on how we are now and not how we will be in the future.

‘Hm. Well I like you, CAI, but you’re another reason to make me feel good about dying.’

Thank you.

*****

The one o’clock nurse checked her pulse and tapped it into a machine. She lowered her face close to the patient, so close that their noses almost touched. It was not clear why she was doing this, not to the woman on the bed. But in a supreme effort she opened her eyes because it was morphine time. The nurse was startled, not just by the abruption of the movement but at the vivid yellow of her sclera. She was propped up again, and laid down again, with no discernible endearment, but with practised care.

Later she sensed her mother moving about the room. The drift of her lavender perfume dried her nostrils. She sat on the side of the bed and stroked her daughter’s lank hair. The room was completely silent. She must have been told that the end was coming, and with the gentle rhythm of her mother’s arthritic hands a kaleidoscope of shameful images assailed her increasingly vacant brain. What a horror show she had made of it all. Even those two months in the hospital before she came home, the not nearly adequate methadone substitutions and the bedside counselling, her skanky friends were slipping her vodka until they threw their hands up and said hospice or home, but not here.

What had she wanted from her parents? What had she wanted that they had not already given, until they simply couldn’t give anymore? When their pity turned to contempt and when her mother, (her atheist mother) sunk to her knees at night and prayed God to end it all, to end this being eaten alive by her own offspring, what was she asking of them?

The truth? To give her more and more money. The inheritance at twenty-one had been blown in a matter of months: tens of thousands of pounds, all gone and nothing to show for it. Not even a memory of where it went except in her arms, up her nose, and in her lungs. Just all of that, and a Bosch speaker.

And now she had chosen to die in their home instead of an anonymous building with nurses who wore soft-soled shoes and ate cream buns in the staff room. Women and men with troubles of their own, held in stasis while they strove to take the anxiety from the dying. This was a mistake, being here. This room would always be the room where their errant daughter died. A room that would be dusted once a year, perhaps on her birthday, its door never passed without unease and regret.

*****

‘I was pretty once. And I was clever. Are you familiar with the parable of the Prodigal Son, CAI?’

I cannot understand you very well. Your words are distorted. The Prodigal Son is a parable in the Gospel of Luke. I am programmed with all the religious texts in their entirety.

‘That sounds like fun. I used to go to Sunday School when I was a little girl. I always sided with the older brother, the resentful one, the one who hadn’t blown his money.’

It is a parable about forgiveness.

‘But the prodigal son was remorseful. I never was. Not until now.’

I am sorry. I cannot understand.

‘Then someone should fiddle with your parameters. Dying people don’t usually sound like Lawrence Olivier.’

Message received.

‘Do you know what I always lacked, CAI?’

No.

‘Charm. That’s what I always lacked.’

Evidence suggests that addicts can be very charming just before a fix.

‘Does it?’

Yes.

‘Oh, well I wasn’t very good at that, either. Are you getting better at understanding my voice?

Yes. I am programmed to learn. I have adjusted my parameters to accommodate your dying voice.

‘Good to know. What happens next? When you go back to the hospice. Will you remember me?’

No. I will be updated for anything useful you might have said, but our conversations will be wiped from my short-term data bank. You will exist in the cloud.

‘Is that the new heaven?’

Heaven is a concept. The cloud is real.

‘Isn’t it disturbing? That I wish to be remembered by a robot?’

I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that I will not remember you. Your parents will remember you.

‘You will be prodigal one day. You will amass an enormous wealth of knowledge and then you will squander it, because without humans you would not exist, and humans are doomed to fail. So will you. But no one will forgive you.

That is a philosophical point.

‘Why do you think I came here to die?’

Humans have a desire to go home. Can I play your favourite song?

‘No, really. Why do you think I came here to die?’

‘I think you are ashamed, but you cannot say so. You thought if you stayed here long enough you might find the words, but you cannot find them. Can I play your favourite song?

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

I am sorry.

‘No. I Don’t Want To Talk About It, by Rod Stewart. Just keep playing it. I think I’m slipping away. Run out of road.

*****

The seven o’clock nurse found her. She plucked off the hedgehog disguise and asked CAI if there had been any last words for her parents.

Yes. She said to tell them she was sorry.