Christine

I am not going to go into details about my feelings at the loss of Claire, my wife. Everybody’s grief journey, to use that dreadfully overworked phrase, is the same and everybody’s is different.

Similarly I am not going to reveal who it was who gave me Christine. Reasons for that are more complicated, and there is no call to do so.

Suzie, who came to deliver and “install” Christine was petite, attractive, and young. And naive. I should not say that, it sounds misogynist and pejorative, but it is defensible. She was clearly talking from a learnt script, not from absorbed knowledge responsively to the situation. Example: she earnestly informed me that Christine was a helper and companion, not a sex toy. She had not seemed to compute the facts that I was in no physical shape to be able to derive any benefit from such, and that Christine’s hard white plastic body and wheeled locomotion hardly fitted her for any such role.

Other parts of her programmed spiel were of greater relevance. Christine had settings that I could request her to adjust from the defaults of 5 out of ten. Fastidiousness was one, how tidy and clean she would attempt to keep the place. Assertiveness was another – there would be some things that were beyond her capabilities that she would have to ask me to do and this controlled the degree of demand with which she would do so. Intrusiveness was a third, how deeply should she probe into my affairs, the better to serve me.

It was made clear to me that Christine was an assistant and companion. There was a further setting to put her into carer mode that I could request if I felt I was “loosing it”, but this would require assessments and authorisation by the authorities.

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Life with Christine was, how shall I put it, interesting and different. I fairly soon used the facility to turn her factitiousness down from 5 to 3. I was slightly disapointed when she informed me that this covered both cleanliness and tidiness, there were not separate settings for these. I decided that I could well put up with a little more dust on shelves, and having the kitchen surfaces less that pristine it this was the price of allowing the place to get into the condition of structured untidiness that I am comfortable with. I turned assertiveness down to 3 also, but then back up to 4 to get her to ask me to go shopping when really needed.

She was a conscientious housekeeper, did the washing when needed but did not badger me to change clothes that were not in need of washing. Her method of loading the dishwasher was different from mine, but acceptably efficient and I did not interfere. She proved to be a most inventive cook, coming up with different recipes every day.

So, as as helper she was fine. It was as the promised companion that she was odd. I had readily accepted the clearly scripted and grossly over emphasised and unnecessary instruction that Christine was not in any way to be seen as a substitute wife. I should not allow myself to form a relationship with her. However, I had expected to be able to converse with her on matters of interest. And indeed I was, in a slightly off kilter way. She was a fund of factual information, but devoid of opinion. In no way could I get her to disagree with me, even by the artifice of taking up preposterous positions. She would always methodically lay out the alternative views of any matter, enumerate the arguments for each side, but elide away from any true discussion. It is not that I had ever had heated discussions with Clare, we rarely disagreed and amicably disagreed on those occasions when we did not see eye to eye. With Christine, however, there was never a feeling of engagement, no sharing of viewpoints. In the end, I gave up trying. It may have been misogynistic of me, but more and more I came to see her as just a skivvy.

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Full realisation came when the water main burst. Fortunately, the storm drains coped fairly well. Some gardens were over-watered but no houses flooded. They came promptly, shut of the road, dug a huge hole, and stopped the leak in reasonable time. A nice man in a yellow coat came and told me to run a bath-full of water, and a bowl-full from every tap, and all would be well. Potable again.

Then the nice man in a yellow coat called again. Apologetic. Some Dumbledunk (his word not mine) had, he said, put a spade through my optical fibre cable. It would be fixed as soon as possible. I went indoors and checked. Yes. Phoned dead. Television dead. Wi-Fi dead. Digital assistant dead. Camera doorbell dead. Fortunately, once I had turned on data, my mobile gave basic connectivity. The repair took some days, a dispute about responsibility I was informed.

The effect upon Christine was immediately apparent, although far from easy to describe accurately. She was no longer herself. Depressed. Had she been human, I would have suspected she had the flue – not so daft since there are electronic viruses as well as biological ones. Her conversational abilities became limited, stilted, juvenile. Her cooking deteriorated from cordon bleu to boiled eggs and baked beans on toast. All memory of the proper places for things seemed wiped, having me hunting to find where she had put things. Even loading the dishwasher went stupidly awry. It was initially a relief when the nice man in a yellow coat called to inform me that all was repaired and I re-booted my modem.

Then I go to thinking. Christine’s intelligence and personality, in so far as she had one was not incorporate. All but the most basic programming was clearly not done within her circuits, but over the internet in the great banks of computers and disk drives that they call “the cloud”. I understood Suzie’s looking at the back of my modem, she would have wanted the Wi-Fi code to program into Christine. What came to disturb me was that everything that she did for me and saw, the minutiae of my life, went winging over the air and cables and out of my control. Unlike my dippy (my word) daughter in law I do not believe in a divine being above the clouds. I know that spinning disks and integrated circuits have no interests in me or my doings. Even were it possible for some malicious hacker to access this data, he or she would find nothing salacious or interesting, nothing that could be used to do me no harm. For all that, I just wanted to keep my life to myself. Irrational I know, but there it is.

I knew that Christine had assistant/companion and carer mode. I did not want to ask her if there was also a slave mode, but found in the thick instruction book that I had never looked at that there seemed to be none such. However, hidden in Appendix IIX I found other settings beside those that I had tweaked that seemed able to produce the effect I wanted. I then turned curiosity down from 5 to 1, initiative down to two and put assertiveness back to 3 and then further to 2, accepting the need to instruct her more precisely and question her in more detail in such matters as what shopping is needed.

So I now live a contented life as a slave owning bachelor, who enjoys an evening with his mates in the pub.