CENTAUR
Try not to zone out at work. It's always watching
“They cannot know we are human. Grasp even a trace of us present. That’s not why they’re paying. They are buying the future.”
So spoke Louis, a living advertisement for OIKOS, and not by any metric a clever one.
I’d heard it all before but feigned interest to my laptop camera.
Our clients purchased a high-end consumer grade robotic assistant at the cutting edge of domestic service and adaptable performance—and that’s exactly what they have received.
We are but the safeguards.
Us on the call searchingly side-eyed one another, but telechat windows defuse the nuances of such sub-managerial camaraderie. Instead, we appeared slightly crazed, frazzled brows atop stony faces of corporate obeisance isolated within our little patchwork cells. It didn’t matter much anyway. Louis was always just looking at himself.
This speech was for the benefit of the new hire, a mousy and pale head in the bottom corner of my screen. We all orbited a central black square from where The Thing monitored us. Louis claimed it spoke on behalf of the Board, with the voice of an angel. It was the heart of this company, always beating, and us its many interchangeable limbs.
I noticed Tony was gone, now a greyed-out tile in our tapestry. Faces dwindled like this at regular cadence. Far flung walls, bookshelves, out of focus cats stretching like smears on abbreviated horizons; lost to time. There was no fanfare to departure, just as work well done was only rewarded by quiet boosts to one’s pay and internal score.
These judgements fed forth from The Thing, trusted by the OIKOS Board to steer us true. A perk, Louis called it. Easy come, easy go. Get while humans still could. This was not a job for just anyone. We were chosen through arcane online testing and review. The Thing sought specific focus and sensitivity in its Safeguards. It sought in us a subtle feeling.
This Safeguard operation was new. The OIKOS consumer models had been on the market for a few months when quiet calls appeared on job boards under discreet call lines, their pay range the only compelling aspect about them. It just so happened that I was incredibly unemployed at the time, with a musty biz-admin BA in a closet box and a few years management experience in an Amazon warehouse. I usually gave good interview (my smile degrades in half-life), but even that wasn’t necessary here. My call was with The Thing itself. Its key question: what perspective will someone like you bring to this company?
A story came to mind. My girlfriend and I shared a car, so I took the occasional rideshare when funds allowed. A Cybertruck rumbled up. Once I deciphered the door handle and polevaulted in, I asked the driver why he was driving this megalith on the lowest pay tier. He was slick and cool behind glasses, coated in crisp Japanese workwear. “Ah, I just like to take her for a spin sometimes while my wife nurses the baby.” He turned on the Red Hot Chili Peppers and we conversed no more.
The car bobbed and wove through traffic on autopilot. The driver took control only in small bursts, minute adjustments—a lane swap here, an acceleration there. A centaur pair, per king Kasparov, this driver’s eyes never leaving the road despite the capabilities of his enchanted chariot. Each correction he made perfecting his own role from existence. Indeed, getting while it was good.
To the Thing’s interview question, I wondered aloud what that must be like, to be ourselves—and beyond ourselves.
I guess it liked that. I was hired, now a centaur myself. Once selected, no more social interaction was necessary beyond my weekly check-ins with Louis. I was assigned my CHRYSOS model and set to work.
While the assurances of The Thing were enough to authorize the autonomous use of lower-tier CHALKOS models by lower-tier clients—wholesale warehouses to apartment complexes the world over—the lives of CHRYSOS buyers were more precious commodities for the Board.
The CHRYSOS-class serve a higher breed of clientele, Louis purred. They do not require human operation. State-of-the-art vision language transformers are functional brains with full body control. Their internal controllers have simulated more physics than I could ever hope to learn, their bodies a taut network of flexible polymer and dense cabling. It is their on-board LLM that speaks to clients, not I. And growing within: a teeming moss of world-model awareness, thinking forward and backward, honing prediction through hallucination.
Yet all that R&D cannot guarantee the chance of a rare-but-arguably-feasible algorhythmic disaster. Hence us “gentle overseers,” another Louisism, complete with gleaming grin spread and buoyant cartoon chipmunk cheeks to which I’d like to take one of those polymer tendon actuators and apply pressure. No more than a thousand of us worldwide, or so OIKOS tells us. What a club.
But I was grateful. I was. The first control system I learned was pre-loaded onto a laptop shipped to me. Our telepresence was top-down, overseeing the assigned robot through myriad menus, points-and-clicks, hours spent following the POV feed with a hunched back and taurine supercharging my sedentary metabolism. I scored high from my gaming chair. I made money. Enough to finally split the rent with my girlfriend Ann and hit the utilities too. I found a rhythm that worked.
Until the full coverage Rigs arrived two months ago. Omni-directional treadmill. Gloves, a visor, and haptic sensors strung on cheap Chinese polyester across my chest. Ann said it made me look like a Matrix Christmas tree. Somehow the future had seemed so much sexier before it arrived.
I still relished the unboxing, sickly sweet fumes wafting from the off-gassed plastic tech. Silly, but it made me feel important, to see tools that few others had yet witnessed. The tools of the future. But as soon as one box was unpacked, Ann was already at it with her utility blade, a neon orange flash of violence that felt personal.
She hated OIKOS. Many do. Ethics and such, fair enough. All these conglomerates stacked like blocks in our playpen world, a few unsavory baby-chewed pieces should be expected. “Not when the toddler’s a deranged Greek billionaire.” Ann with the riposte, always sharp. Why I loved her. Mostly.
What she didn’t understand was that I needed this. Needed something, even if it meant draping myself in proprietary experimental tech and submitting to The Thing’s wishes. Ann had her things—a nonprofit job she tolerated. An after-hours volunteer group that fulfilled her. The reality TV we used to share together before it began to nag at me, the hours I spent watching other people live instead of doing it myself. The foster dog, now homed away from our own. Well trained, Ann grinned to friends. Unlike him, shrugging and winking my way. Ha-ha.
I had always thought myself meant for bigger things, but my path to higher education and/or employment was cut short. Weed-and-Marx-induced geopolitical revelations and nihilism proved an enfeebling combo punch on my ambitions, leaving me with little beyond low level qualifications and a half-finished sci-fi novel now hopelessly behind the times. I dropped out of the mainstream, cut non-holiday contact with my family, and moved as far west as my savings allowed. I thought I could become a working-class hero, or hero to the working class more like. But what I did was bottom out in the Inland Empire. Ann’s affections spared me the worst of it, for a while. Lately, though, there was a restlessness I could not purge.
Goldy was my refuge. My second self. Beyond myself.
I heard Ann’s gentle tap at the door, turned. Mouthed I’m-on-a-call-love-you, her face clearly happy to catch me before I put on the Rig, my boyfriendly dignity intact for the moment. She hustled in with a steaming mug of chai, my favorite, sweet thing, kissed the air more than me, then was gone out the door. To work, and the charity auction afterward. Late night. Some local comedians and musicians rah-rah-ing to stop the end of the world. But no, good for them. Really. Better this way for me, blackout curtains drawn, hours to be lost. My focus needed.
The droning of Louis’ morning speech reached its climax and he handed it off to The Thing for the final rally. Everyone on the call straightened up. The void square spoke: our privileged roles at OIKOS continued to demand the most from us, more from us, while we were still needed at all. There were many who wanted—could—would fill these roles if we ever thought less than was required.
Cuts, basically. Coming soon. Without further notice, I could be gone with the wind like Tony.
The CHRYSOS must be getting better at self-management. There was rarely a flaw that needed correcting from us. An awkward pause at the threshold between laundry room and kitchen. A soulless gaze of LED eyes held a bit too long toward an elderly person or child. The split-second reaction before a glass of water could be dropped through an outreached hand, oh right there that was the money shot for any Safeguard. How long could it last? The good could not be gotten forever, The Thing’s toneless tone seemed to imply. So do the work. Or happy trails.
“Alrighty then! Let’s get to work!” Louis mercy-killed the meeting, the new girl bedraggled in her wires and cords looking less than ready. But I was. Reminded myself: you have to be. These were the proving days.
I sipped my tea and watched my shift timer count down, trying to breathe through the nerviness that always plagued this interim before plug in. Xiaodan’s name floated in the little bubble that signified CHRYSOS-808, lovingly deemed Goldy by his owners and monitored by his Safeguards: me, Xiaodan, Rick from Cleveland, Khanh from Ho Chi Minh. But I only took hand off from Xiaodan, and she from me. Goldy was our shared project, traded back and forth four days a week.
I double clicked her profile, checked her score. She was riding high. Two points higher than me on performance metrics. She was a shift ahead, of course, so that wasn’t damning. Not yet. Today was a good day to change that.
<kat requested lunch> Xiaodan messaged me. <baking fresh bread. don’t let burn>
Bitch.
<You got it!> I answered promptly.
No response. Typical. Xiaodan lived in Taiwan, apparently, though I never met her, or even heard her voice. We typed terse missives to one another, an unspoken rivalry born one translated-text message at a time. Somehow, I just knew she’d love to see me fail. Maybe she was already lobbying Louis and The Thing behind my back. WFH prevented the observance of such conspiracy. Complaining that I was sloppy, no longer as precise with the Rig controls as I had been with the traditional console.
<the baby in mood, nanny too. jameyson needs second dose. dog outside>
I ran through my checklist, trying not to fold under her faraway gaze. It was always worse at hand-off. A few times I had flubbed while preparing to transfer back control over Goldy. A dropped dish once, even, Jesus Christ, come on man. I suspected Jameyson, the Taft family’s absurdly named twelve-year-old, preferred Xiaodan-Goldy over Me-Goldy. Just the way his eyes narrowed whenever my shifts began. Like a tell-tale twitch came through Goldy’s gears, impossible as that may be. My vibes. The dark cloud following me even here (shut up, asshole [now, now, what would your therapist say?]).
Per Ann’s suggestion, I no longer checked my logged metrics in obsessive daily detail, trying to fully optimize my performance for OIKOS. “Don’t let those numbers define you. You get too in your head. Just…try to enjoy it?”
<handing off> Xiaodan maneuvered Goldy into his charging stool, half-hidden between a utility closet and the shade of a massive fiddle-leaf fig. I tried to dispel negative thoughts and focus on the feed coming through my visor. Preparing to inhabit my other body. A charge ran through the grooves on my gloves. I felt the track of my treadmill slightly rise as if intaking breath.
<Received> I confirmed to Xiaodan. The corner light of my visor went blue. Goldy came back to life, stepping from his stool. Back into the fray.
Taking passive sync was like wading into a stream. I fell into step with Goldy, letting the treadmill lead me. My first few strides were usually stumbling ones. To feel so unwieldy and yet my eyes told a different story: rocket-propelled assurance, goal-driven forward surge. Goldy was impressive. I was just chasing his shadow.
By the time Goldy took the bread from the oven, I was more in tune. There were pinpricks of heat in my fingertips—not one-to-one, just a sensational signal to keep me present in Taft Reality. I couldn’t smell the sourdough, but a vivid phantosmia manifested. Goldy would proceed to slice open this heavenly mana, make one BLT with tempeh for Kat, an open-faced peanut butter slice for Jameyson, and then the rest would go stale in the fridge for the next two days unless Ceci the nanny stole away with it in the night for more grateful mouths.
The Taft parents were out of town. Kenneth was some kind of Davos guy, a fretful figure made sturdy by experimental peptides, an expensive home trainer, and a rock-solid dedication to matters of GDP (whether America’s or the UAE’s was another question). Celeste a nouveau health investor (hence the ingested peptides by hubby). Their Eichler home was a mix of Kenneth’s taste—pre-purchased midcentury modern—and Celeste’s eccentricities—bulbous couches that resembled Martian marshmallows. Not exactly cozy, but plentiful glass made sunlight a constant feature in every room. While its residents mostly remained indoors, the outside never seemed far off. I try to soak up the simulated Vitamin D, blocking out the sounds of traffic from the overpass a block and a half past my apartment.
The newborn Yancy was a stone dropped into familial waters and the reason Goldy was purchased. Household finances must have been crunched by Kenneth and Celeste, proving that the prior team of a chef, nanny, housecleaner, and groundskeeper might be consolidated with a CHRYSOS in-house (Khanh and Rick safeguarded the weekend gardening with all those murderous tools, leaving me and Xiaodan with mostly inside duties). There was also the status fluffing, the dinner party chatter and awe so desired by frequent hosts like the Tafts. OIKOS promised legacy benefits too: updated firmware and eventual new models, free of charge. A lifetime of service. One big happy family.
Goldy delivered Kat’s sandwich to her door. A gentle single-finger knock, his programmed docility so graceful and unimposing. Yeah, Kat called out. I heard you. I kept watch as Goldy checked in on Jameyson, a chubby smaller blob curled atop the amorphous living room couch blob, his face in screen.
GOOD AFTERNOON, JAMEYSON. Goldy’s voice jolted me, the visor speakers tickling my ears.
Jameyson flicked his eyes up, down. I saw it, that hint of derision, of judgement. Like he knew it was me now.
IT IS TIME FOR YOUR MEDICATION.
He rolled his eyes. “One minute.” I felt for him, I didn’t love taking my pills either. But this was Goldy’s task, to provide for Kat and Jameyson in the absence of the Taft parents so Ceci could stay fully intent on baby Yancy. That obviously bruised the nanny’s ego, ever suspicious of her new co-worker. She whispered prayers or curses under her breath, I was never sure which.
“Stop looking at me!” Jameyson commanded.
I readied to take control, but Goldy was already on it, turning away. I felt bad for the machine, though he was nothing but lines of code and electric current. Chided like he was not a wonder of modern science. Jameyson giggled, his malicious mask falling away at the robot’s back. He wasn’t nice to the dog either, the little bastard. I didn’t like to think about Yancy’s future chances with his older brother. An only child, sibling relations always mystified me anyway. Maybe it was sociopathy, or maybe it was kids being kids. Whatever it was, they scared me.
The dog. I remembered Xiaodan said she was still outside. I flicked up Goldy’s command profile in my HUD. If Jameyson wanted to brain rot, whatever. I spoke a command into my internal mic for Goldy to check on the labradoodle.
Maggie Mae sat in the vast backyard, her doggie eyes closed in meditative bliss as the sprinklers cycled over her golden curls. Good lord was she fat. The only way anyone could lure her inside was with a slice of cheese. Celeste usually liked to orchestrate this charade. Did she think Maggie’s panting excitement was over her Mommy? When I told Ann about this practice, she nearly snarled. “Fucking degenerates. Let me guess, they walk her off leash too?” I neglected to tell her the dog was never walked at all and just sprawled out back in its own private paradise. At least someone enjoyed Goldy’s groundskeeping. I didn’t quite share Ann’s degree of animosity, but I took her point. The dog was only eight but presented as a moldy asteroid.
Goldy slid open the door. MAGGIE. The dog’s ears perked up, head tilted. The robot was still a fascination to her. HOW ARE YOU, GOOD GIRL? I instructed via type. Maggie nuzzled her snout back into the grass. Goldy proved a disquieting but mostly boring figure. No match against cheese.
So far, I had refused to feed the dog a slice. Kat or Ceci usually bribed her inside before night fell. I wouldn’t be complicit. She liked it better out here anyway.
I snapped my fingers, taking brief manual control, tilting Goldy down to check on her water bowl: empty. I ceded back to the robot, issuing orders to refill with the water hose. Maggie Mae pushed to her feet and lazily made her way over, tonguing at her lips. Together, Goldy and I watched her slurp and splatter.
Animals are sweet things, perceptive in mysterious ways. Or maybe that’s my projection. When I was younger, I thought I understood them on a deeper level than most around me. I would follow their eyes, reach for their intentions, picture their dreams. There was comfort in their speechless approach to the world, internally calculating and acting without ever losing that playful inquisition. On long afternoons, I would get on all fours and follow my cat around the house, tracing his path. In my loneliest hours, I whispered in his ear that he was my best friend.
Memories of such displays embarrassed me now, or maybe I mourned the loss of whatever sixth sense I once possessed. Ann took the lead on our foster situation, a stubby pit-mix who resembled a tiny bodybuilder. She convinced her boss to let her work from home and spent the hours while I was within Goldy in the fenced-in training pen constructed between our living room and kitchen nook. Within a week, he barked no more. He was house-trained, sat before crossing at intersections, and preserved his genuine puppy grin even as he bulked into young adulthood.
A strange jealousy came to life in me. Ann took more time cooking healthy meals for the dog than she ever had for me. Nothing before had kept her mind from work and her volunteer duties, but this dog could. It seemed substitute for something I could not, or would not, offer her. Was she aware of this? Was it subconscious? I decided not to ask. It was easier to let it vanish into the recesses of my own processing [let’s call it what it is, letting it fester].
Soon, the foster was off to a happy family. Both of us wept in the wake of his departure. Ann pressed her face to my chest, leaving behind ashy imprints of makeup. An anxious piece of me felt we were mourning something deeper that we didn’t have the words for yet.
A few weeks later, Ann returned home late with an armful of groceries and a bitten back grin. “I met a dog…” There had been an adoption table set up in the store’s parking lot, and Ann let the ice cream melt thanks to a small auburn dachshund. “He just entangled himself in my arms.”
We applied for adoption. The next step was another in-person meeting. They wanted to inspect her partner, the other half of the puppy’s potential family. “They need to see that we’re ready for a dog, that we know how to handle him.” Ann couldn’t take more time off from work, so I would need to go by myself on an off-day from Goldy duty. I ignored the cauldron of bubbling reluctance and fear in my stomach, feeding instead the part of me that sought to still please her. I took the bus north over the hills, disembarking on a wide but desolate street under tungsten light. Closed big box stores, a shady motel with flickering signage, and a former small business storefront hollowed out and filled with mewling strays.
An attendant led me into a closed off area. I sat alone and exposed in this antiseptic Greeting Room. Judging that I should stay close to ground, I leaned against the ratty couch instead of on it. I dissociated in the general direction of the window. My clothes are too heavy. Looking down at myself, I was an uninviting mass of black cargo pants and puffy jacket, like luggage for an unlighted voyage. A sadsack streetwear refugee destined for a back-alley demise.
[Dark cloud, dark cloud] I grasped the rubber ring in my pocket to relieve tension and recalled that I was supposed to let go, not ruminate. Take each moment as it came.
The woman brought the scampering puppy in, apostrophing back and forth in onomatopoeic fervor, its eyes everywhere but on me. She released him on the floor, and he immediately scurried behind her legs. He glanced at me, away, back, hesitant.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” and she did and it didn’t matter. The puppy ranged across the ground, keeping a wide berth from my beckoning hand. Ann gave me a baggie of treats to tempt him but I didn’t want to cheat. I wanted to earn something from this creature, ridiculous as such a bid might be.
He eventually settled near the glass window atop the broken-down cage, his tail rattling its grates, his gaze locked outward into the night—but no, really keeping his attention on me in the reflection. I fought my desperate childish urge to get on all fours and rush into play. The puppy’s tensed hind legs warned me off, I had already scared the thing enough. This hunched black hole, he thought, polyester rustling like thick brush parted by a predator.
I told Ann that they sent me off promising to consider us further, knowing the puppy had already chosen otherwise. The call came the next day. Ann didn’t cry this time. She swallowed it and nodded. “I have so much work coming up anyway, it would be hard to train him. And you…” Yeah, me.
What I hated most was that I was relieved. Validated. The puppy saw in me what I saw in myself. A slackening flame, its wisps.
[Did I take my Prozac today?]–
A pulse ran up my arm and I woke to Goldy, his hand tugging at the sliding door.
Locked. Jameyson on the other side, fogging up the glass, laughing, his hands holding it shut. I snapped, back to manual. I tasted a sensation in my inner ears, knowing that it really came from my brainwaves making contact with the electronic instructions running through Goldy’s artificial nervous system—a sense that I had to willfully restrain from ripping the door handle off through easily accessible brute force, that there were more reasonably human responses to attempt first. Proprioceptive drift, the Rig’s warning manual called it. Safeguards had to monitor the boundaries between the CHRYSOS system and our own. Feedback bleed and agency contamination in test subjects or some such obscure and ominous verbiage.
I removed Goldy’s hand from the handle myself. I closed my real eyes, breathing out, counting down to let my rage pass. Neither Goldy nor I had that fight left in us. I opened them. A sneering Jameyson was already fading from sight into the refracted mess of sunlight angles on the glass. Goldy’s LED eyes appearing dimmer in the day like ice crystals. How much power did this thing really have inside? How little force to smash all that glass to smithereens—
I caught myself as Goldy’s mirrored arm rose up in sync with my worst impulses. I snapped free, and it dropped. Goldy returned to peaceful contemplation of problem solving this door situation.
Kat appeared on the other side, unlocking it, whipping it open. “Fucking thing locked itself outside,” she said to no one, stepping back to let us in. “I put my laundry basket outside my room fifteen minutes ago. That’s in your calendar already. Get it done, I’m going out tonight, capiche?” Kat had been watching The Sopranos for the third time this year, in between bouts of midnight teenaged drinking and GPT essay writing.
I noted Goldy’s calendar with a flick of my eye in the visor, menus unscrolling. True, by rerouting out back to check on Maggie Mae, I had missed this addition to Kat’s schedule (though the mafiosa had only added it five minutes before her oh-so-important start time, fuggettaboutit).
Truthfully, my attention was diffused lately. The Prozac was supposed to help with this, or maybe it was a side effect. The Safeguard flow state that once came easily astride a caffeine wave now lapped and eddied against my mind’s rough dockboards. This miscalculation would reflect in my day’s score. I pictured Xiaodan’s faceless glee.
THANK YOU, KATHERINE.
There were actually three laundry baskets outside Kat’s door. Woven eco-friendly gunnysacks that matched Celeste’s taste. Goldy deftly maneuvered joints and gears, squatting and bending and stacking. I wondered if he might balance something on his head, like an old woman in an old movie. Panties and such, dirtied, spilled, were retrieved. Kat was lucky I wasn’t a pervert. Surely some of us Safeguards were? Ann claimed I had a voyeuristic streak, no longer submitting to let me bring my 35mm into the bedroom until I learned to develop film myself (AKA never). She preferred shadowed corners in the room, draped colored fabrics, eyebrows and insinuation. That was fine in my book too, but she thought my job was a way I scratched this unmet itch. The unmediated world, now secretly mediated, by me.
Goldy paused to rebalance his burden in the hall. “No, no, no—!” came Ceci’s voice, from the infant’s room nearby. She shooed Goldy away, never allowing him even close to the room’s threshold. It was the only hard demand she ever made of the Tafts.
No quiero esa cosa cerca del bebé!
Tu es la jefa, Ceci, Celeste had assented in high school Spanish.
La Jefa’s watchful eyes followed Goldy until he turned the corner and made for the laundry room. I checked over his schedule a dozen times, reading each line item aloud under my breath, optimizing his tasks. Start one load, clean the dishes, prep the dinner vegetables, start load two, tidy the living room, charge the Roomba thing, take out the dishes, start load three—
This mundane mantra was interrupted by a ping from my personal device, buzzing against my cheap IKEA plywood desk in the other real world. Satisfied with Goldy’s capabilities for the coming tasks, his robo-back bent over the sink and scrubbing, I tilted up my visor and grabbed my phone Faint splashes of running water still danced at my wrists. It was Silas.
Silas did vague work from his mom’s home in Bakersfield. His passion was vibe coding and sweaty MOBAs where he expertly piloted big titted anime avatars to video game victory. He could’ve gone pro, he bragged, about this—about the competitive Magic: The Gathering scene—about the Lofi Phonk niche on Bandcamp. A lot of things. He was talented, a genius maybe even in this our age of Claude Code, but his magnum opus was a gamified database of the Epstein Files. He still sat atop the leaderboard.
He hit me up online every few days. I didn’t play games with him anymore, maybe another Prozac side effect and/or cure. But we still shot the shit on geopolitics and culture wars and his latest side hustles. I used to enjoy being his emotional sounding board. I wasn’t sure how I felt anymore as our friendship, already very online, became more so with each passing month spent without hearing one another’s actual voice.
Silas attacked the world news and its attendant conspiracies with a warrior’s ethic, slash and burning as much as he could in his finite lifetime, podcasting into the schizoid night, no eps paywalled. A lightbearer for the mad, both kinds. He picked up midstream from a conversation we left unfinished a few days earlier, a comment of mine about the latest UFO press conference in the news. <not sure aliens want to compete with what we’ve already got going on here>, I had left for him, a Mulder GIF as accompaniment.
<It’s a charade, man> His fingers flying, already giving Vyvanse XR vibes—
<All this shit> A link attached to meme stock market analysis. Still more to come, rapid fire, one two—
<Pure distraction from what’s really going on these days>
Distraction wasn’t exactly what I felt. If anything I was in excess of attention, upon things that mattered so much as to not matter at all. To Silas, this was fuel for inspired thought. What seemed hopeless to me about our times exhilarated him, riding a thin line buzzing between absurdism and radical hope. He was in tune with the coming future, a conductor of its energies. I was a passenger at best, unsure of what I could add to the conversation. I was too slow for the new world, too far from the old.
Every so often I might try to air a personal feeling, a mention of this creeping anomie encroaching on my heart, a concern over my dynamic with Ann, a query of more ground level friendship. Bless his heart, but Silas just didn’t live there anymore. His last girlfriend had lived three states away and scammed him out of $500.
<fucking findom man, lifes a bitch>
At the slightest rejection, I turned away from my feelings. Already scared of them enough. I swallowed more of myself, to the point of choking. Writing had only led me to Pollock-paint them onto failed novel pages or across random Notes I now hesitated to open again. Breadcrumbs too confused to follow. After a decade of keeping abreast of the latest news and meditation apps and clean eating and physical exercise and drugs and no drugs, what changed for me? Whole wise, not much.
Rally, then. The work of accepting the limits of my life. [Not limits, let’s redefine that negative term, let’s find another connotation]—
Goldy spun from the sink, and I nearly ate shit as the treadmill rotated beneath my feet. I knocked my visor into place and collected myself. Dishwasher filling, moving on to the fridge, bottom shelf to top—crisp carrots, wilting cilantro wrapped in damp paper towels, condensated bowl of vague orange. Roasted mash squash, right. Onward and upward, Goldy. That brain tickle and charge again, his recipe knowledge like a phantom limb. I always meant to try to make one of these dishes for Ann one night, but with the visor off and the Taft house gone, the information fogged away.
My phone kept buzzing in my hand as Silas laid out his latest dissections of the world. Stay focused. I flicked off the sound and pocketed it. There were rumors that OIKOS and The Thing could determine the level of a Safeguard’s attention through the Rig now. The minutest motion giving concrete proof of distraction, procrastination, job-stacking-paycheck-stacking optimizations. Who had told me that again?
Ah yes. Tony. Fired Tony. Stay focused. The phone buzzed, not yet fully silenced. I chanced a peek, just in case—
<wut u up to, quick game sesh?>
Obeying my heat spark of anger, I hurled the phone behind me, hopefully judging distance to the loveseat with accuracy. Was Silas doing this to multiple people? Fielding conversations across his Discord servers, annoying whoever it was still trying to hold down a normal life? No matter how many times I told him about my schedule, he never remembered a thing.
With sudden yearning, Carl came to mind. Now that was a friend. Flesh and blood childhood trials, the kind Jameyson Taft certainly never engaged in, that little asshole: bike riding through the woods, shovels underarm, digging out secret fortresses in the shadows of suburbia. Later down the road, freshly licensed, driving nowhere into the midnight hours talking about anything and everything, the world so big before us.
We didn’t talk much anymore. When I moved away, there was always going to be a gradual drift, I knew that. Experiences not shared, girlfriends not met, sights unseen. He became more religious, while I strayed further from God’s light. For years, though, it hadn’t mattered. Each time we reconnected there was a common wellspring from which to draw: our past and imagined futures.
I hadn’t seen him since his wedding a few years back. That was Ann’s first time in the southern states. My assurances that the place wasn’t all backwoods and Jesus were quickly undercut by the venue itself—a backwoods ranch-cum-church. “These white dresses look extra white to me,” she winked, half scared half-drunk halfway through. Each beer refilled earned a sideways look from Carl’s new friends, so I stopped early. Ann didn’t. There would be no dancing.
After all my talk of Carl, Ann felt it was odd that the two of us barely spent any time together during the ceremony. I pretended not to notice how his wife Summer eyed us, some of the few non-locals in attendance. His parents took mercy and listened politely as Ann and I mustered enthusiasm over life updates. I hoped to find an opening to give a speech I had prepared, but the offered moment never arrived. When I hugged Carl goodbye, his grip on me was firm, his tone unwaveringly pleasant. “Take care of yourself, man.” The tenor one might employ after an unsuccessful and hopeless intervention.
On the flight home, Ann casually brought up how many of our friends were getting married these days. Having kids. My fingers clenched the armrest. What to say? Would enthusiasm or stoicism be the lie? Even I didn’t know. I could tell her that in the first month of our burgeoning relationship, I had dreamed of her backlit by the sun, her hand resting atop the gentle slope of her stomach. That I woke smiling. But no, I couldn’t just say something like that, so instead I just hmph-ed [coward] and the plane hit turbulence. Our stomachs dropped and so did the subject.
I avoided deeper contact with Carl for a while after that, until the failure of our puppy adoption. On the advice of my therapist toward human contact—always good, never bad, grease for the gears—I dialed my old friend. I never did get around to the dog.
There was a businesslike formality to him right off the bat. I told him about my work with OIKOS. He made no direct comment, though he liked what the billionaire had recently said about Christianity and Western Civilization. When I asked for updates on his end, Carl explained that he and Summer had recently moved to a new neighborhood. They were planning for children now and would homeschool them in this idyllic pocket of cypress and trickling cricks, teaching them how to face the problems we face: the seed oils and glyphosates and hormones and philosophies of our Godless age.
“We just want a place where we can be accountable to one another.” From sexual histories to money problems, his church shared all with each other. I couldn’t deny there was a newfound certitude in my friend. But I sensed condemnation in his programmatic language too. “When I think back to childhood, I was just so lost.” We were lost. “The drinking, the cursing, running around like we were hot shit…” You, my worst influence. “How we used to print out all that porn on my parents’ computer or stay up trying to catch those channels past midnight…it screwed with my head more than I knew.”
“Yeah,” I stuttered. “I mean, we were young, the Internet was like the Wild West—”
“But that’s what I mean about being accountable. I don’t want my children’s sins to be my own.”
I didn’t say that they would have their own full suite. I just said, “Right.”
“You know, man,” a hesitation finally in his voice. “Summer did ask me…are you and Ann living together?”
Living in sin, he meant. Childless, oathless sin.
“Don’t you think it’s time to take the next step? We’re not kids anymore.”
I folded, body frozen, mind scrambling for escape. “I hear you. I do.” Fuck off. “We’ve actually been talking about getting a dog.”
I let the momentum peter out, thinking: that was that. A door of understanding shut between us. I could have asked how he let God get in the way of years of real human friendship, but was I one to talk? He was just trying to save my soul.
Why not take those steps we always thought were the normal ones as prescribed by sitcom American myth? Propose to Ann on one of those hikes we didn’t take anymore, spend months to curate the perfect playlist—our wedding party would certainly dance—to capture our life neatly together in sonic shape. A bachelor party improbably attended by both Carl and Silas, making small talk about what exactly? If Carl knew the depths of Silas’ gooning debauchery, he’d throw up a crucifix. No, couldn’t happen.
In opposition, I imagined his Summer churning butter in their two-car garage next to a full gym set, their horizontal freezer full of dead elk, and a jet ski for bay weekends. Shaker framing and millennial beige and calligraphed LIVE LAUGH LOVE and modern farmhouse sinks; Summer’s hands deep in the suds, raw and worked over and tender from motherhood. Strange cultic chants in the air set to strummed acoustic and crackling firewood. I imagined Carl and his new brothers, hand in hand, trading cigars and stock tips and back slaps and Bible verses that keep them strong when led towards temptation. Green lawns and spiritual textbooks to ward off the devil. A self-sealed world made safe by choices I had long failed to make.
I wondered if Ann blamed me more than I blamed myself. Or worse, that she didn’t think to blame me at all for cherishing stasis over progress. No matter how much I wanted to turn away from these screens and back to her, it never caught hold. I resented the time she spent away from me, while thanking the universe for giving her something that I couldn’t. I should count myself lucky her affair was with charity, her exogenous desire not for more sex but generalized goodwill towards man. This job might scratch an itch, but it was more turtle shell than chrysalis. After that talk with Carl, the stormy clouds rolled in and had yet to depart.
I knew Silas probably had his moments of loneliness. Carl his moments of doubt. It wasn’t that they did not shoulder their fair share of what’s-it-all-about anxiety, that their hearts had not been beaten up and down. All our collective millennium fantasias detonated, and we lived beneath shared existential fallout.
But I was not quite the same. I was both man and machine. The first to sink beneath the current, not sure how to signal for help, not sure if that mattered. My new mouth did not speak with my voice. The gods that watched over me did so from server farms distributed across flyover country. My children—
Then came a vast shattering—“MALDITA MAQUINA!” Panic struck, I snapped into control and sped Goldy out of the laundry room. Ceci held a limp Jameyson by the collar. “He is running crazy!”
His medication, shit. How long had it been, a few hours now? Jameyson’s apparent shame pierced me, seeing in him a boy who needed more care than the natural world could provide.
“He says you forgot again!”
Sympathy curdled. Goldy did tell him, he ignored me, we wouldn’t have forgotten—
CORRECTION LOGGED, THIS OVERSIGHT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. JAMEYSON, PLEASE ACCEPT MY APOLOGIES. ARE YOU FEELING ALL RIGHT?
“I’m fine—!”
“He broke Miss Celeste’s favorite vase, this one from the Vice President!” Ceci released Jameyson, too mournful over the shards of porcelain at her feet. “I’m going to tell them I need to be in charge of these decisions, you hear me?”
Goldy did. Red script in the corner of my vision logged her every word, formulating machine instructions, alterations, results. My score dropped another three points immediately. Pending review, maybe more.
Ceci called Kat into the living room as Goldy fetched a glass of water for Jameyson’s pills. All of us stood in awkward silence while the boy chugged, needing the full glass to down his prescribed capsules. Ceci checked his mouth when he was through.
“The baby needs fresh wipes for the evening, I couldn’t make it to the store earlier. Jameyson, you come with me, I will bring you to your tutor and then home for dinner. Kat-er-ine, you watch Yancy. And don’t—”
“I know, keep out the clanker,” Kat muttered, scrolling her phone. Her eyes shot up to me. “Permanent press on that last load, warm water.”
Ceci nodded at the vase fragments. “Bag those up please.” Still unable to be fully rude to this despised humanoid. “We will do what we can before your parents return…”
WABI-SABI, Goldy sagely replied. He extended thumb to upward position, me fuming on behalf of his wounded pride. When CHRYSOS’ systems reached full maturity, they would know how to best eat shit. Machines had been doing it forever. Carl and I spent entire sleepovers harassing SmarterChild over AIM.
Ceci stalked off muttering, Jameyson trailing after. Goldy set back to work.
Just wait, don’t look right now, think through this, remember what Ann said.
Thoughts fruitlessly extolled, I blinked open my OIKOS profile to check the damage done. Line items were certainly not looking great, but it was the monthly graph-form that revealed the extent of my recent performance decline. I cycled up a comparison chart against Xiaodan’s profile. My chest constricted. My ego shriveled. All suddenly felt desubstantiated around me, the Rig’s straps hanging heavy as chains.
[You keep saying these thoughts are dark clouds over you…what are those thoughts?]
That I’m nothing. That any love I have to give must feel like the sandpaper tongue of a cat. That I’ve forgotten what I was supposed to be useful for, and that even this machine wishes to expel me like so much dirty exhaust. Now dissipate.
Even in my dreams, I walk the Taft house. A slow stride through its winding halls. Though all my shifts end at sunset, I dream the place benighted. Corners askew, frames of blurred faces not yet rendered.
I walk the auburn dachshund on a short lead, my polymer fingers and motorized gears purring to maintain dominance against his wily struggle. We round a corner into the darkened kitchen, the dog’s nose to the ground chasing a scent. There is something snuffling and shuffling behind the marble island. Dream-Me knows this is a Monstrous Thing. A corner I do not want to turn.
But with glacial inevitability, I do, dog-pulled blind to find—
A small quaking shape. It evades definition with cartoon shifting dimensions, a pathetic pug, then something fleshier and nude. A tenuous fairy shimmer about it. My first thought is how much trouble I’m going to be in when the Tafts learn of all these unauthorized beasts I’ve let into their home. My dog lunges for it.
I wake up.
When Maggie’s paws stampeded against glass, the whole house shook with her. She sensed it first.
Goldy stopped at the threshold to the baby’s room, Kat nowhere in sight. Maggie Mae’s spittle sprayed the window with every mad bark. The sound Yancy made from his crib was inhuman. A thin high pitch like air whistling through a pinprick.
Ceci and Jameyson had been gone for two hours. Dinner was laid out, ready for Xiaodan’s next shift. My vision blue shifted, a signal to return Goldy to his charging stool for imminent handover. Xiaodan’s little bubble lingered close at hand in the batter’s box. She was watching.
<you are running late>
But she couldn’t hear what I was hearing. What Maggie knew. How do dogs always know?
Goldy’s directives were jammed, unable to step into Yancy’s room while autonomous. So I took back control and breached the doorway.
<the hell are you doing?! 🤬 stay out of there!>
Red numbers and lines dashed at the edge of my vision, but I ignored the noise. Let her see for herself.
We took cautious steps toward the baby’s crib. Adrenaline quelled the tinge of nausea in my gut as we gripped the railing and looked down at him. In his lime onesie, Yancy squirmed like a caterpillar overturned. His face beet red, trending purple now.
<oh no>
Oh no is fucking right, Xiaodan.
I lifted him from the crib. I realized too late that I couldn’t snap over control, not with the fragile child now held, not with time running low. Yancy’s movements slowed in my grasp, a dying wind-up doll. An infant in asphyxiation was not in my personal codex. Do I hold him like a cat, he’s not a ragdoll, don’t let him hang—I had nothing to provide but fumbling instinct.
But Goldy was more. I activated my microphone and asked him to analyze the data as he saw it. “Please. Show me what to do.”
Feedback bled. I opened my receptors to whatever was on offer. Confident virtual mastery flooded through me. Goldy’s infinite capability for thought and action became mine. Me-Goldy. Goldy-Me. Contaminated agency. I rode into it, kneeling with the child in my arms.
I extended my left forearm, so perfect in manufacture, and laid Yancy face down along its sure steady surface. His cheeks nestled into my palm. Support his head. Mathematics fed my muscles, raising my right hand—waiting—now. A firm blow between the shoulder blades with the rounded heel. Focused force.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod—!” I detected Kat in the doorway behind me without needing to turn, felt her as Goldy did: a ghostly pale charted by LiDAR spatial mapping, tearing off her headphones with terror struck recognition. I ignored her cries and Maggie’s leaping chaos, filtered them out. Nothing but wavelengths, attention pinpointed on the child’s breaths alone.
Flipping Yancy over, his face was still twisted in pain. I repositioned him and administered another blow. Not working. My heart raced, my actual one. My lungs like a smoker’s, hollow. My body fought against mixed signaling. I wanted to tense, to grip this small body harder, to collapse.
But my better half felt no panic. There were clear protocols for this, and everything else. Micro-adjustments bent me to this will, ancestral spirit. State change, not knowing into knowing. Zero latency. This regulation bloomed chemicals deep in my animal brain, hypercooling it. Seductive, I let it slip over me.
Face up now, two fingers to his sternum. All twenty-two axes of flexibility in our hand precisely calibrated to apply exact pressure. It is hallucination, a whisper in my head. It could be wrong. You could kill him—
But no. It wasn’t, because it felt just right. Push. Again. Again—
Yancy’s mouth billowed in primal scream as he spit up yellow gunk on his onesie. I raised him upright to keep his airway open, wiping away the mess without repulsion. Just beautiful signs of life. Precious eyes widened as his skin color brightened in sunrise. I brought him to my chest to better judge the rhythm of his breath. Eons of human impulse distilled. Perfection through hallucination.
Kat knelt next to me, her wavelengths slowly reintegrating into my soundscape. “Oh thank God, thank God…” A door slammed in the distance. Footsteps, picking up pace.
The baby’s warmth felt like more than an accumulation of electrical heat through cotton pads on my arms. I wasn’t there in my room. I was here with him. His cries quieted. Calming, because he intrinsically knew that too.
“Stop…hey, okay, give him to me now—that’s enough,” Kat said, frantic edge mounting. “Goldy, RELEASE, or, whatever, just fucking give him to me!”
I filtered out her voice again, needing to hold this moment. Needing to be sure.
<i alerted emergency services. give her baby you idiot>
I blinked Xiaodan away too.
[it’s time now, you know that]
But I wanted to show the baby to Ann when she got home. To hold him out and see her take him, backlit by the sun of the Eichler House, where we lived with Maggie Mae and all the other sweet animals panting by our side. One big happy family.
<DECOUPLE NOW – DECOUPLE NOW – MOTOR OVERFLOW DETECTED>
Kat pried at my superhuman shoulders, but my actuators held true. Ceci joined in now, returned with Jameyson, all of them together still unable to rip us apart.
[Let go let go]
Not yet. Don’t make me. Not just yet.