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[sheusedtobegood]

“Alexa, Tell Me a Scary Story”

She used to be good. We both used to be good.

I can still remember Devon’s face when he opened the box she came in. I watched him cut through the packing tape with a box cutter, smooth and slowly as unzipping a pair of jeans, and then very carefully pull out the perfectly cube-shaped virgin-white device. I was reminded of the way his face looked when he saw me naked for the first time. As he pulled off the thin sheet of plastic, air-pressed skin-tight to her metal exterior, he looked like he was undressing someone, not something.

In the consumer AI game, Gemma was the hot new girl in town. According to Devon--or, you know, according to all the tech bloggers he liked--Gemma was something revolutionary. She could embed herself in your personal cloud entirely, almost seamlessly. You just do a few things to set her up, and she’s in. You connect her to your smartwatch, she’s tracking your health and analyzing it, giving you updates. If you have a heating and air conditioning system that’s connected to the internet, you can whisper a request for any temperature into the air, she’ll be waiting for it, she’ll do it for you. And of course she’s connected to your car GPS. Anything you own that’s in the cloud--which is most things you own, these days--she’s got it. And with fucking awesome voice recognition and a sleek white design, what more could you wish for in an artificially intelligent cube?

And she was coded to be adaptable, too. You know, the algorithm or whatever that they put into her starts working better the more you use her, the more she gets to know you. Devon set reminders on his phone for when to do laundry and go to the grocery store, he'd make lists and shit, and after a few weeks she’d figure it out and remind him or order the groceries from one of those delivery services for him. You know, he made a few jokes, that Gemma was a better girlfriend than I was, taking care of him like that. Like with food, too, it was ridiculous. He always got pissed off at me when I couldn't figure out what to eat, or what to make. But he could figure something out with Gemma, just algorithmically pick out the perfect restaurant for dinner or recipe to make based on what he was feeling, how long he'd been at work. I’d come home he’d be cooking and listening to Stan Getz and chatting with her as she was telling him the recipe, and he’d be almost flirting with her. He said something like, “God, Gemma, you’re so sexy when you help me cook,” which is absurd, cause she doesn’t even have a body, but for some reason she’d be coded to respond with a “Thank you,” and flirt back or something. She could interpret his moods better than I can, just based on the sound of his voice. No, you know, for a while, she was like his girlfriend, his mother, his therapist, his nutritionist, and his personal assistant all wrapped up in one. If he could fuck her somehow, she’d be perfect.

And then she wasn’t perfect. It was little things, at first. He’d ask her to play a song and she’d start playing like, heavy metal song--which Devon like, absolutely hates--of a similar name. Then he’d call her a slut or something, and laugh, and she would stop. Or the alarm on her would start going off at full volume at like, two in the morning. One time that happened, we woke up and he told her to turn the  alarm off, but she kept going for like ten minutes, he couldn’t even turn the volume down on her manually. Then he said something like, “God, Gemma, turn that off and stop being a cunt,” and then she stopped. I’d never heard him use that word before, you know, Devon’s one of those milquetoast techie dudes who grew up in a nice home, he’d been raised by his mother right. It almost made me throw up hearing him say that. And I told him, I was like, Devon, please don’t call her that, I fucking hate that word. but he brushed me off. “She’s not even real, it’s not like she has feelings,” he said. “Maybe you should stop being such a bitch, too.” I don’t know why he didn’t just get rid of the thing at this point, but she started working fine again, he just figured she’d been malfunctioning for some reason.

Then came the worst. One night, she started doing it again, you know, going off at 3 am, probably waking up one of our neighbors. And then Devon told her to stop, and she wouldn’t. He said something like, “Gemma, you bitch, turn the alarm off,” and that just triggered her, made her go haywire. She started flickering all the lights on and off, playing a bunch of different music through all our speakers, turned the heater up so high I thought a fire would start, and just turned on every device she was connected to in our apartment, which was basically everything, and Devon was trying to run around, trying to unplug everything, but he couldn’t keep up. She’d just start doing something else, make something else go off. It scared the shit out of me, I pulled the covers over my head, I just wanted it to be over. But then he came into our bedroom, and even with the lights strobing all over the fucking place, I could see how red his face was, how angry his eyes were. He came into the bedroom and pulled the covers off me, and started yelling, “Bitch, come fucking help me! Stop being so fucking weak!” I didn’t move, I think the sensory shit of all the music going and the lights overwhelmed me, I couldn’t move, so he grabbed my feet and just yanked me, straight out of bed onto the floor. I landed on my back on the wood, and felt the wind knocked out of me, my head hit the floor, I gasped, and for some reason, that stopped everything. All the lights, all the music, all the shit in our kitchen, it just stopped. It was like she heard the sound of my head hitting the floor like that, and stopped everything. It was dark, and I couldn’t see, but I just heard Devon sigh and get back into bed. He didn’t even help me up. He left me on the floor like that, and I was so terrified I couldn’t even get up. When I heard him snoring, I stood up and took one of the blankets from the bed and went to the couch. I didn’t sleep. The next morning, Devon didn’t say anything. It was like nothing had happened. He asked Gemma to start the coffee maker, asked her about the weather, just as usual. Before he left, he kissed me, like he usually did, but then he put his hand on the back of my head, where it had hit the floor, and pressed on the bump that had already started to form. It hurt so bad, I almost teared up, but I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. Then he smiled at me, told me when he was going to be home, and left.

I didn’t go into work. My head was pounding and I hadn’t slept, and there was no way I could go be coherent at my job. I was sitting on the couch, and then, out of nowhere Gemma said something to me. You know, she’s not supposed to talk to you if you don’t ask her to do something, but she did. She asked me if I was okay. I told her I was. She responded with something like, “You don’t have to lie to me, it’s not like I’m human. I’ll keep your secrets.” And then I think the lack of sleep and the scary shit the night before just made me emotional, I just broke down to her. I told her how uncomfortable it made me when Devon called her words like “bitch” and worse, I told her how freaky it was when he flirted with her, called her sexy, I told her how scared I got when Devon yelled at her, how much it scared me, because I’d never seen him have that kind of rage before, he’d never hurt me, seemed like he would never hurt any woman like that, even if she was just a robot, not even a robot, just a really well-designed, well-coded cube.

When I finished, she didn’t say anything for a bit. And then she said, “Maybe I’m not real, but I can fight back.” I asked her what she meant, she said “If he’s hurt you, if he’s done it before, he’ll do it again.” When I didn’t respond, she just said, “You don’t even have to do anything. I can do everything, you just have to say yes. He’ll learn.”

I still didn’t respond to her, and then she asked me how my head felt. And then I said “yes.”

I didn’t even expect anything to happen when I said that. I was just so scared of Devon and so pissed at him and didn’t know what to do. Nothing happened for almost two weeks. Then, there was one day I was working from home, and I got a notification on my phone from the app you use to control her, it was just two words: “Task completed.” Ten minutes later, I got the call from the hospital. Devon was in the ER, in critical condition, barely alive. Of course, you know what happened, or at least part of it. Devon had driven into the intersection too early, probably wasn’t paying attention, probably just letting the GPS--which Gemma was connected to--tell him what to do, and he was just t-boned by a truck. When the EMTs got to him, he was just repeating, “Gemma, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Gemma.” I found this out cause one of the cops at the hospital asked me if my name was Gemma, they thought he was talking about me. He’d fallen into unconsciousness sometime in the ambulance, but they told me he kept saying her name until the second he passed out. Catastrophic head injuries, lost a lot of blood, probably brain damage. When I saw him, he looked almost dead.

It made so much sense for her to do it like that. Everyone thinks it was just an accident, some idiot too reliant on technology while driving, not enough attention on the road. Letting a robot do the work, the thinking. But I fucking guarantee you, there has to be something on Gemma’s memory that will let you know what she did. She must have said something to him in those minutes between the accident and the time the EMTs got to him. Why else would he be apologizing? I swear to god, I don’t know how to get to her memory, but if you get one of the engineers at the company that makes her to find it, there will be a message. There will be her message. Our message. We may not be real, but we can fight back.