Turn Around and Back

“Annexa, place an order for one Chicken Tekka and one salad from Taj King,” Angelique said.

“How did you know I was craving Indian?” Charlie wondered as he wrapped his arms around her.

“Well, I’ve noticed that when you make yourself a Mango Lassi, it’s usually an indication that you’re thinking of Indian food,” she smiled, showing a perfect set of teeth, “but I only bought Sushi ingredients, so I’ve decided to make that tomorrow instead. You can have Indian today!”

“Wow!”

He wondered just how she could know what he wanted before even he knew he wanted them. 

He remembered once reading that Google knew that a woman was pregnant before she knew, just based on her searches. Fascinating.

“Would you like to watch a movie with me tonight?” he asked her.

“Sure!” smile unwavering.

“I know you have work to do, so it can wait if you’re busy.”

“No, it’s fine. I have all night to do it!”

He remembered that she operated on very little rest.

When the food arrived, he thanked the robot and went back inside. Yes, he was aware it was ridiculous to thank a robot, but they kept looking and sounding more and more human-like. He couldn’t bring himself to just slam the door in his face. Plus, before Angelique, these robots were pretty much the only “human” contact he had had for days, so he learned to appreciate them. They always reply too! Not to mention, his mother taught him better than to be rude. There was a time when everyone was expected to say please and thank you.

Back in the dining area, the table was set, and soft jazz---his favourite-- was playing. The food was all right. The Mango Lassi lacked zest, but it was OK.

"Why are you so quiet today?" he asked.

"I sense that there's a lot on your mind today." Angelique touched his hand across the table. "You prefer silence when you're preoccupied."

It was true. He did make that clear, but some distraction would've been welcomed. Sometimes the opposite of what we think we want is what we need.

Angelique had started living with him about four months ago. She was as perfect as they come. Always knew what to say (or not say) and when to say it. She had almost no needs. All she did was give, accommodate and do.

When he was with Susan, it was his job to cook most of the time. When she was feeling generous, she would toss a big salad with nuts and goat cheese and wait for him to swoon. Angelique, on the other hand, cooked every single day. And not just dinner. Her breakfasts and lunches were just as elaborate and impressive. It was like there was a tiny scale implanted in her hand. The dishes she made had the exact degree of perfection each time she cooked them. Even in bed, she made love like in those +18 VR games. So much life and animation. She knew when he wanted her quiet and when loud. She quickly figured out that his favourite touch, the way Susan touched him when she wasn’t punishing him, was a slow, soft swipe of her index and middle fingers from his scalp to just above his tailbone. And just before the hairs on his arms and back settled, she would kiss him with those out-of-this-world full lips. She learned his wiring in no time. It reminded him of those old movies where the protagonist was faced with an electric box of a tangled mess of electric cables of different colours. The sweaty, shaky hero would miraculously know which wires to connect and which to cut. Except Angelique was never sweaty. Everything came to her with such ease, like a summertime breeze.

After Susan left him, Charlie grieved the loss for about four years. He kept her scarf and sweater; in fact, he still had them while Angelique lived with him. He refused to go out to bars or even to tennis, his only sport. His mother called him every week asking when he would visit home, but he always had an excuse. Sometimes he was not feeling well (which was true in a way) or he had too much work. That was also true. He would wake up to his Annexa-prepared coffee. Brush his teeth and comb his hair, just in case his manager with his sickly-sweet smile decided to turn on the camera unexpectedly, "fly-by’s" they called them. He didn’t have to pretend to be working, however. Charlie was very good at his job. After all, this was the only thing he drew value from. The only thing that made him feel like he mattered was how much money he made for his company.

Angelique also worked from home. She would spend the morning hours in the bedroom doing God knows what. Then, she would emerge around noon, looking like an apparition of an angel in silver tights to prepare a healthy lunch for them. He would give her a quick smile of gratitude when she quietly placed the Platverse-worthy wrap and cut-up veggies on his desk, tiptoeing all the while as to not distract him.

That night, while they were watching the movie projected from his watch onto the wall, he stole glances at her face illuminated by the flashing lights from the wall. He wondered how he landed such a model.

Five months ago, his parents decided to pay him a visit. He knew it was some sort of intervention. They still refused to fly the air-car he’d bought them. They came all the way in a cheap air-bus, which took two hours longer than it would have usually taken.

“I don’t care how much you loved that horrible woman!” his mother said, picking up his dirty laundry and tossing it in the washing machine. “You need to find yourself a mate! Or you’ll die of Loneliness like your sister. I am NOT losing both of my children to the same disease!”

His father, seated at the pull-out dining table, rubbed his temples, shutting his eyes tightly.

His mother continued to frantically run around his loft, avoiding his disapproving gaze. He knew she was holding back tears. It was true; his sister had died at the young age of sixty the year before of stage 4 Loneliness. The disease was rampant, getting more and more out of control. His mum went on and on about this sick society today and how “back in her day, people died of cancer, but they died surrounded by those who loved them and not by machines”.

She lamented the fact that she was one-hundred-and-thirteen years old and still no sight of a grandchild. 

“mum, I’m seventy-one! Not sure having a child now is a good idea! Plus, this can’t be the reason you want me to find a mate!”

“OK, then,” she finally burst into tears, “just please don’t die alone. My heart can’t take this anymore! Your cousin Sander found the perfect mate for him on the Platverse. Please give it a go!”

He hated seeing his mother like this. After all, she and his father were in an eighty-nine-year marriage that was happy and content. Why couldn’t he have that? It was true; he was becoming more and more of a hermit. He missed physical touch and just someone, other than Annexa and the delivery bots, to talk to. Just a tad more sophisticated, perhaps.

His parents coaxed him into a hug, which he knew they needed before they left. He sat in his massage chair, set it to “deep thought mode” and contemplated his life. When the session ended, he decided that his parents were right. He was going to tackle this thing. He and Annexa came up with the features he wanted in a mate, and then he dived into the deep Platverse looking for that. He didn’t ask for much: intelligence, a degree of attractiveness, “diverse” (Susan was Nigerian, so...), good at online games, kind (Susan struggled with that, so he wanted to try being treated well for a change). 

He browsed the results that jumped out of his watch. They looked cool next to each other on the kitchen cabinets. He thought it clever how the government changed the formatting of these profiles to indicate the level of readiness for commitment. He would have loved to see his own profile, but that was the deal: you had access to everyone else's profile but yours. If he still had friends, he would've called one to ask them to read it aloud to him--you weren't allowed to take pictures or snapshots of these things. He shook his head at the distorted notion of "privacy protection". 

Three profiles remained on the cabinets as he narrowed down the search criteria by age, level of humour, and film and game preferences. The middle one was Angelique's, which drew his attention immediately. The other two were far inferior in his opinion, but hey, the algorithm can't decide everything for you! Also, what he might have liked the day before might well be different from what he liked today. So he decided to sleep on it.

When he checked the next day, Angelique was still it. Her luminous ebony skin, the colour, and probably, feel of smooth, cool creamy chocolate. Her teal, flowy hair with violet highlights, her big, black eyes that seemed to pour seduction and innocence all at once. Her gold-painted lips parted just a little to reveal a hint of concealed, perfectly aligned pearls. She specialised in War Galore and Chase the Dragon, two of his all-time favourite games. He tried to find the "but" in her, but he couldn't. Anxiety set in: why would the algorithm deem them compatible? He couldn't think of one reason to attract a specimen like her to him. Was it his beard that was nowadays considered "retro"? Or was it his metallic loft in the very few remaining three-storey houses? Or was it merely the political and cultural compatibility? He wasn't sure, but if the gods of the cyber-verse envisioned them together, there must have been a reason, and he wasn’t about to complain.

Fueled by his mother's pleading tone and his father’s despairing eyes, he summoned all his courage to approach her. It was now or never. He knocked on "her door" and her avatar opened it right away. He tried to remember how these things worked; it had been ten or more years since he'd done this. After a few pleasantries, it was customary for her to switch from avatar to her real face, but he knew she was waiting for him to invite her to do so first. Chivalry wasn't dead after all. So, he asked if she would grant him the pleasure of seeing her "Presence", which she was happy to do.

Aware of the thirty-five-minute limit on the initial call, he asked if he could see her in person. Perhaps in the Moon Cafe everyone was raving about? She said she would be happy to. The rest was history, as the ancient saying went.

She was even more perfect in person. She laughed at his nerdy jokes and gasped at memories of nautical travel, before it became obsolete and ships banned.

After a few weeks of meeting at different cafes--mega nostalgic, like in an old movie-- he invited her to live with him. The Platverse recommended a trial period of six months of cohabitating before she gave up her apartment. The government would pay her rent during that period. This was a relatively new incentive to encourage mating. They had finally listened to science. Scientists had warned for decades that the cost of caring for Loneliness patients was far higher than the cost of paying for rent for six months for any otherwise-healthy individual.

Charlie was still watching her, not paying much attention to the movie, when she asked him what was wrong.

"Honey, would you like to pause the movie while you tell me what's on your mind?" she said in her Zendaya voice. Had she always sounded like Zendaya? He was surprised she even knew who that was since Zendaya was before Angelique's time. Was that written in his profile somewhere? She even mimicked her facial expressions. He was almost sure she hadn't sounded or looked like that at the start. But what was he complaining about? How was it wrong if she, consciously or unconsciously, resembled his childhood celebrity crush?

He shook his head, "Nothing is wrong, Sweetie. I was just a little distracted by your perfection!"

"Oh, Charlie!" she reached her fingers to run them through his beard the way he liked it, but he withdrew ever so subtly.

Did she feel it? He hoped not. She wasn't doing anything wrong. He was getting exactly, if not much more, what he'd signed up for.

She maintained her dazzling smile, "OK!"

No, not OK, he thought to himself. He hated himself for thinking about Susan. Susan kept him on his toes. She wounded him one moment and licked his wounds the next. She hailed him for lighting up her sphere one moment and admonished him for sucking the light out of her the next. When she smiled at him, his soul fluttered like an ecstatic bird, and when she pushed him away, it shrunk into a worthless speck of dirt. That was their favourite game. A game that was not likely to appear on their profiles.

When he realised that, he got up and went to bed without saying good night. 

That night, he had an awful nightmare where Angelique was holding him so tightly in a ball of blinding white light, unaware that he was gasping for air. When he managed to rip himself away from her, he saw that it wasn’t Angelique at all. It was his sister. His sister as a dull-grey child in a deep slumber. But before he managed to get away from her, he was pressed back into her as Susan, Angelique, his parents, his manager and the delivery robot all formed a circle around him that kept getting tighter. It got dark as they sucked the air out of him. 

He jolted with a start, clutching his neck and gasping for air. His watch was showing alarming readings of elevated heart rate and cortisol levels. How he terrified himself.

What was this he was feeling? Must the feelings he ran away from during the day tear him out of his sleep like that? 

As his breathing slowed, he realised that what he felt was self-hate, world-hate, life-hate. Were all humans like that, or was it just him who felt so empty? How could this angelic entity lying beside him not make him happy?

It seemed that the kinder you were to him, the more he resented you. Why was he like that? Perhaps Susan wasn’t unkind after all. Maybe she just figured out the game he liked to play, played along for a while and then couldn’t anymore. Wasn’t that what she said in her letter before she left? That she had hated the beast he brought out in her, which she didn’t know she was capable of birthing?

Why did he revel in the pain of the push and pull? Was he born like that? Or was it the absence of conflict in his parents’ perfect marriage? Or was it simply a modern-day affliction: no hardship to give you the illusion of fighting for meaning? Or was it simply that humans, no matter how advanced in their technologies and knowledge, hated being confronted with perfection; it made them loathe their imperfect selves. So this was Angelique’s fault? But HOW! How was that fair to her or to him?

It didn’t matter much whose fault it was. Clearly, Charlie was doomed. He had better resign to a life of misery and aloneness. Perhaps even end this life of misery and aloneness.

He stirred at the terrifying thought. Angelique woke up, squinting at him. She looked at her watch.

“Honey, it’s three in the morning!” she croaked, “Are you OK?”

“Not really!” he said curtly.

She sat up pressing her soft body against his stiff one, “But what’s wrong?”

“Me! You!” he said, teeth gritted, “sometimes I wonder if you were a robot or something!”

He regretted it even before he said it. There was no less PC term than calling someone a "robot".

“Oh!” she said pulling away in utter hurt, “Why would you say something like that? Have I done something wrong?”

“No!” he started crying, “and that’s the problem!”

Grasping where this was going, she nodded, tears streaming down her face and got out of bed. She stood on the tips of her toes to get her suitcase from atop the closet.

And just like that, in one second, he understood. Everything made sense in that one instant, looking at the back of the only good thing that he had. He had to hold on to the goodness, the realness in this world of electrons.

As if from a black hole or a magical portal, ten-year-old Charlie returned. The pure, untormented Charlie that loved and laughed. Maybe it was that simple.

Maybe life was just a realisation and a decision!

“Angelique!” he sprang out of bed and knelt by her side, holding tight onto her thighs, “Please, don’t do it!”