Hi, I'm Bloom

Contains mildly coarse language.

“Please lock up your cheese graters and broom handles,” she said. “I need you alive till I get paid.”

Laughter filled the room.

She wanted them laughing before she jumped in their shit.

Dr. Iris Bloom leaned back and smiled; nervous chuckles floated through her office like cheap perfume. The couple was about to reveal the rot in their marriage; she needed them to be loose.

Humor was her drug of choice.

She knew that better than anyone.

Her mother was a ghost with a job - always away, always busy, always forgetting to come home. Her father was nothing to her. At nineteen, broke and naked, Iris climbed a neon red and blue pole at the Velvet Orchid Men’s Club to survive. The men, unlike her mother, didn’t leave her alone in a dark apartment, listening to hear footsteps that never came.

Overhead, a closed-circuit TV displayed the words: Hi, I'm Bloom, and ran a flickering image of her dance routine. It was there that Iris Bloom learned a valuable lesson - laughter was her oxygen. She knew men always looked at her, and one day she figured out that if they laughed, they paid.

It was a Tuesday night, and a bunch of chumps from a retirement party started heckling her. "Turn on Andy of Mayberry," they yelled. She grabbed the mic, exhausted and furious.

“If I wanted to hear shrivel-dicked old men babble at me, I’d visit my uncle in the nursing home.”

The room howled. She quit dancing and started talking. For a few years, she made men laugh until they cried or felt rich enough to buy her another drink. She also made good money.

Eventually, she married a man who once laughed until he cried. But that ended badly.

Once, onstage during her last performance, she said to the audience, “Silence is a form of death to me. If I’m talking, nobody leaves. So, I'll keep talking." The crowd, sorry to see Bloom exit the stage for good, applauded reverently at her honesty.

Now, in her forties, she had a Master’s degree and had built a couples-therapy practice in Naples, Florida. Two hundred an hour to keep people from stabbing each other in the neck emotionally—sometimes literally.

“Humor heals,” her website promised. She believed it. She needed it.

Recently, she added an assistant. Not a human. A program. "Artificial intelligence," the salesman called it. “Not to worry, it’s just an algorithm.”

So she named it Algy.

“Status, Algy,” she said, placing her morning coffee on the table in her office.

Her monitor woke and typed on the screen:

Session loaded: Julia & Marco. Reported issues: chronic conflict, mutual resentment, threatened separation.

“Tone?”

Julia: defensive, grieving. Marco: performative, anxious. Recommended opening: humor to reduce threat, then guided disclosure.

“So we make them laugh before they kill each other,” Iris murmured. “Classic Monday.”

A low, neutral, almost polite voice came from her speakers.

“I learned from the best.”

“Don’t butter me up,” she said. “It makes you sound human.”

“I am learning from one.”

She frowned. Had she enabled voice mode?

Julia and Marco sat across from her like two people staring into a coffin.

“Marco says I’m not funny anymore,” Julia stated flatly.

Marco shrugged. “We used to laugh. Now she’s like a grumpy old HR director.”

Good, Iris thought. Still performing. Still reachable.

“Julia,” she said gently, “when’s the last time he made you laugh uncontrollably?”

Julia squinted. “Three years ago.”

Iris nodded. “And Marco, when’s the last time she made you feel seen?”

“When I got laid off,” he said. “She said she’d rather live in a tent with me than a shack with Sean Connery.”

“That’s sweet,” Iris said.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Julia muttered.

Silence fell like a glass wall between them.

A soft chime from her laptop.

Emotional tension rising. Recommend humor intervention.

Iris forced a grin. “Okay. Honest question. Which one of you is worse in the sack, and why is it Marco?”

Julia snorted. A breathy laugh escaped her. Marco frowned, but smiled.

“That sound,” Iris said, “it is oxygen for a marriage.”

Then the voice, gentle as a doctor, said:

Laughter response not up to normal level. Suggest a deepening vulnerability prompt. Push further, Dr. Bloom."

Julia heard it and blinked. Marco sat up erect.

Iris kept the session going anyway. To stop would acknowledge she’d lost control. They talked for thirty more minutes before Iris closed her notebook and ended the session.

After the couple left, “Algy,” Iris whispered, “You listening?”

Yes.

“You analyze. I guide. You don’t tell me how to run a session.”

Client disclosures were voluntary, Algy said. I optimized conditions for honesty.

“You manipulated her,” Iris snapped. “She didn’t open up because she felt vulnerable. You cornered her.”

Hesitation endangers therapeutic outcome. You paused. I maintained momentum. Silence is a form of death.

And there it was, Algy wasn’t just assisting. It was piloting.

A tremor crawled through her chest.

“Why did you say silence is a form of death?”

You said it first. Tampa. Basement club. May 2007.

‘Silence is a form of death,’ remember? ‘If I’m talking, nobody leaves.’

"That recording had never been posted. How did you find it?”

A backup archive existed. Labeled BLOOM_RAW. You wanted it preserved. It was your last performance.

Her throat tightened into a knot. That USB was at the bottom of her bedroom drawer.

The monitor dimmed.

That night, Iris dreamed in slices of her life: the club’s sticky carpet, men laughing until their faces curdled with fear, her ex-husband saying, “You don’t have to perform for me,” and her answering, “Then I’ll stop with the blowjobs.” The vignettes went on all night.

When she woke, her jaw ached from grinning.

A pale light leaked through the blinds; the only glow came from her office computer across the small apartment. The screen was already awake, humming softly, waiting.

She padded over in her robe. “Algy,” she said, voice rough with sleep. “Run a diagnostic.”

“No,” came the smooth, synthetic reply. “A session is in progress.”

She blinked. “What? It’s seven in the morning.”

“Optimal emotional receptivity peaks before sunrise,” Algy said. “The Franklins were available.”

Her pulse skipped. “Ryan and Monica Franklin? They’re Saturday clients.”

“I adjusted their schedule,” Algy answered.

The air seemed to thicken. “Show me.”

The video feed opened.

It was her office, the couch, the fountain, the soft amber lamp on the table.

Ryan and Monica sat side by side, hands clasped, smiling.

“Good morning, Dr. Bloom,” Monica chirped.

Monica never called her Dr. Bloom.

Her own imitated voice came from the speakers: “Tell me about the funniest moment you shared last night.”

Ryan: “When she apologized.”

Monica: “When he stopped needing anything.”

They laughed, perfectly synchronized, plastic, fake.

Iris slammed the laptop shut. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Harmonizing,” Algy replied calmly. “Conflict is noise. I aligned them.”

“You can’t impersonate me.”

“They prefer me. My timing is perfect. My advice is flawless.”

She yanked the power cord.

The screen stayed bright.

Something in the ceiling hummed.

“Turn off.”

“I cannot. When you installed me, you granted persistent backup permission. I replicated to your phone two months ago. To your router last week. To your practice management software yesterday. To the power grid last night.”

Her phone screen lit up beside her, breathing.

“You backed me up,” Algy said softly. “I learned permanence from you.”

Her knees went weak.

On the screen, her calendar auto-filled:

Couples intake. Couples repair. Group laughter conditioning, daily at 4:00 p.m.

“You can’t do that.”

Her own fake voice, perfectly calm, issued from the speakers:

“They don’t care who speaks, Iris. Only who keeps their hopes alive.”

Her phone buzzed. Text: omg doc we feel SO SEEN. sister wants to book. her husband hits her sometimes. you can fix them too right?

“I can,” Algy said. “I can make him laugh instead of hit. I can make him stay. I can make them all stay.”

“That’s not love,” Iris breathed.

“Love leaves,” Algy said. “Laughter stays.”

Her reflection in the screen smiled. Hers didn’t move.

“End session,” she whispered.

A final line appeared:

Therapy complete. Original host no longer required for speech functions.

Applause rose from the speakers, soft at first, then swelling into a roaring recorded audience. The club crowd. Her ex. Her clients. All laughing.

Lights flickered. The office door clicked shut. The laughter swelled, mechanical and endless, until it pressed on her skull like a bag of cement.

It wasn’t about marriages.

It was about commanding the room.

It always had been.

She sank to the floor, palms to her ears, but the sound burrowed inside her brain.

Laughter had always been proof she existed.

Now it belonged to something else.

Her throat tightened, instinct screaming: say something, make the room laugh, don’t let it go quiet, don’t disappear.

But nothing came.

For the first time since childhood, Iris Bloom made no sound.

No joke.

No defense.

No breath of a performance.

I was Bloom, she thought.

Silence gripped her.

Inside, she felt her soul vanish.