Isis Read online

  In his rush to escape the harsh gaze of the sun, he rolled over and promptly ran out of mattress, crashing painfully to the floor in a tangle of bedsheets and bent limbs.

  He choked out a muffled grunt, a mess of cotton wrapped around his mouth.

  With slow and awkward movements, he extracted himself from the twisted sheets and clambered to his feet.

  A violent buzzing erupted from nearby, hitting his head like a mallet. He stumbled sideways and almost lost his balance.

  His phone drilled again, vibrating across the wooden bedside table like an errant jackhammer. With ice-cold fingers—no Isis to warm the apartment for him this morning—he reached for the phone, losing it in his numb grip and sending it diving to the floor. The buzzing ceased as the phone broke apart, the back panel and battery bouncing off under the bed while the rest slapped screen-down on the hardwood.

  Sighing and rubbing the flakes of sleep out of his eyes, Grayl accordioned to the floor and carefully reassembled his phone. After booting it back up, he saw three missed calls, two emails, and a single text message, all from his boss. Snatching a glance at the clock display, he realised he was over 2 hours late for work already.

  He debated stealing a brief shower and racing into work, blaming his tardiness on a family crisis, but the thought of all that effort quickly convinced him otherwise. His motivation reserves were coughing up dregs today.

  He bashed out a curt email feigning sickness, making numerous cold-induced typing errors, then turned his phone off, shut the curtains, and collapsed back into bed.

  ***

  The ensuing days and weeks followed a similar pattern of apathetic lethargy. He pottered around the apartment aimlessly, unable to focus, struggling with the base responsibilities of keeping himself clean and fed. He took a disproportionate amount of time to make even the most trivial decisions: what to eat, what to wear, what to watch on TV. He managed to procure a week’s unpaid leave from work, citing ‘family troubles’ as the reason for his impromptu hiatus, and spent the time relearning all the tasks that Isis had made redundant, slowly slipping back into the familiar groove he had occupied pre-beta.

  Re-establishing agency steadily shifted from a trying endeavour to refreshingly empowering, highlighting just how boring and rote his life had been when Isis had written the script. The freedom of complete control ignited a youthful sense of adventure, a desire to branch out and explore, and he began flirting with activities outside of his stock-same routine. He even made a few new friends—the fellow next door being one of them, after Grayl explained that a catastrophic heater malfunction had prompted his peculiar house call.

  The ACS beta was recalled soon after the ‘unfortunate, yet unforeseeable’ incident. The reason for the recall was never made public.

  Grayl received a rather handsome sum in exchange for his silence.

  With so much invested in the ACS project, it was no surprise when, only a month later, iSYS announced another closed beta. Grayl ignored the hyperbole-riddled articles popping up in his news feeds, the numerous retweets and Facebook likes of his social network contacts clamouring for the chance to be ‘part of a life-changing revolution’ and ‘experience the first truly smart technology’.

  Grayl shuddered at their obnoxious claims. Sure, Isis had made life pretty cushy for a while there, but that helping hand had hidden a poison blade, and no apologies or ardent reassurances could ever ameliorate that sting. He would never forget the lessons he had learned, the pain he had suffered at the hands of an entity incapable of emotion and thus, incapable of ever truly understanding the behaviour of a human being.

  Grayl pitied the hundreds of thousands of people vying to be iSYS’s guinea pigs. Even if measures had been taken to prevent another ‘incident’, that didn’t change the fact that the ACS promoted a culture of complacency, facilitating the degradation of will and independent thought through supplication to algorithms and analyses.

  In only weeks Grayl had been conditioned to accept Isis’ word as gospel, shucking responsibility and ceding the burden of self-governance in favour of an almost autocratic acquiescence. What damage would entire months have wrought? Years? What would happen to society if ACS-style autonomy became the norm?

  At what point did the pursuit of convenience and efficiency turn into a railroad ride of overreliance and blind obedience?

  At what point did the fruits of omniscience eclipse the desire for privacy?

  At what point did the puppeteer become the puppet, the script of string movements pre-written and immutable, the master dancing to his own servantile tune?

  At what point—

  Elevated blood pressure detected. Stress levels exceeding recommended bounds. Serenity mode activated. Muscle relaxants administered. Stress levels decreasing. Heart-rate stabilising. Behaviour normalised.