2.0
He was so happy,
that day. Came home with a big box,
“Its name is Dorian! How clever is that?” he said.
I remember feeling
amused, and warm that he knew the story,
—should have wondered how much
he remembered
it would take
instead, I laughed—set it up!
This will be good for him, I prayed,
not that he wasn’t okay—but we are all
striving for
a better tomorrow starts today flashed on the display.
Dorian, silver sphere, sat expectantly
while my husband read careful directions
when to recharge
how to connect,
Wi-Fi integration, voice recognition—
gave it his name
and life:
allow access, allow access, allow access
always listening, plotting
data points to
“A better you in 30 seconds,”
that’s the promise.
“Touch Dorian here, and let it swallow your anxieties whole!”
All the
is this email too direct / is my hair thinning / everybody hates me / my pants are too tight / my skin is so dull / am i too old for this / do i belong here / will they know i’m a fraud / i am such a burden / why am i this way / will my children’s children be indentured to FedLoan too / is the sun going to explode / is this job going to last / will i have enough / what is enough / i am not enough / i’m almost thirty what have i done / can we afford a house--
Gone.
And to every “I am failing, I am
failing—” Dorian says:
you are only tricking yourself into failing.
At first, things were great: my husband
out of bed at six am to make me coffee was
delightful and
Dorian glowing in the corner,
a minor dread,
was easily swept under the rush of our days.
He was faster and lovelier and
out of his own way, he is out of his own way!
I really did start to think that.
I watched my love loop himself into a bow
and a lasso and a tightrope
across which deals inched forward.
He, a lifeline to (me)
drowning in an ocean of
—you should try it, he said.
No,
I’ll leave my body to the rot and the chemists.
The broken cupboard of my neurology holds
its chipped mugs well enough,
synapses rattling and hormones coursing as they do;
but dammit if a little part of me didn’t love
the newly balanced, agile and relentlessly focused man
in bed with me,
at the store with me,
present with me,
so with me that I didn’t even notice the first
shots fired.
Who would notice anything
with an empty laundry hamper and
an oven full of warm bread?
his canceled dentist’s appointment
a fluke.
because I don’t review my credit card statements
or listen to my voicemails,
I missed the early signs of
system overload:
business dinner vanished from his calendar,
odd.
Once I had said to him,
“Honey, what does Dorian do
with all the bad things he takes away from you?”
And we tumbled into a discussion
of what constitutes badness and relativity and
whether or not fairness should enter the argument
where artificial intelligence is involved.
This isn’t terminator, he’d grinned as we fell
into bed and Dorian glowed in the corner, ominous.
But the kissing was so good I forgot to say
all those bad things have to go somewhere.
I forgot to tell him about Octavia Butler’s organism ship and how
what we bury has consequences.
our private pictures texted to his mother,
alarming.
Where do all the bad things go?
Into the cloud, into the cloud.
A month later when my happy, soaring
Icarus crashed home from work
with a box full of all his things, we were too late.
Every draft email in his draft folder:
SENT.
He snapped.
A gladiator in cargos, wielding my meat tenderizer.
“This isn’t terminator!” I shouted as
pieces of Dorian splintered and ricocheted
off our freshly painted walls.
I watched my husband swing and smash
until my protestations crumbled and
were swept into the dustpan.
He packed up all the shards of it,
every scrap of steel, and shipped them back to Boston
with a note:
This may not be terminator, but this machine has to be stopped. My wife always says we can’t will our emotions away, we have to deal with them, they have to go somewhere. Perhaps I should thank Dorian for putting me through hell because I see now, she’s right. If you have any sense, you’ll scrap this project.
-I.
It was over.
Like taking your shoes off after a long, long flight:
little by little the dents disappeared and we
eased back into our inferior selves,
pettiness and procrastination spread like
salve over our mechanical gouges.
And just when the laundry bin was piled
high enough to feel normal again,
another box arrived.
The note read,
Dear I.—Thank you for your feedback. Other Beta testers experienced similar interface malfunctions with Dorian 1.0—we’ve worked all that out now. Instead of uploading to the cloud, Dorian 2.0 captures all that toxicity in a 3D printed cube. Care to give it a whirl?
Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. Her work has appeared in Obsidian, Tinderbox, Glass Poetry, Rattle and others. Jeni edits poetry for Kissing Dynamite Poetry and organizes Poems in the Park, an acoustic reading series based in Detroit.