The Case Against Talking Fridges (part2)

Still talking, still just a fridge

He got out of the kitchen to grab his backpack.

“ Do you love the other one?” The fridge asked.

“I like him, I would say, yes.”

“Explain.”

“I liked when he talked to me about his record collection. I didn’t like the record collection itself, but I liked him liking it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, we don’t have to.”

Like any low-level computer tech, three things were mandatory for him: Wearing hiking shoes daily, an unhealthy relationship with energy drinks, and carrying a mismatched set of cables and old computer parts in his bag. He was the chosen one who ended up having to use it. It should be noted, now that such an event has occurred, the law of probability dispense all of you to continue doing it. It has served its purpose in the grand scheme of things, you can now stop.

After a few minutes with some of his cables and her computer, he finally plugged the fridge into the internet.

“Say ‘Hi’ to the basilisks for me.”

They sat on the couch in silence. The fridge had stopped talking. They assumed it was doing whatever the first sentient AI on the internet had to do.

“You don’t want to take it back from where we left?” She asked.

“No.”

“You want to talk to me about your record collection?”

He would have liked to, but refused to say it.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“I forgot.”

Sometimes he asked himself if she was the smartest or the stupidest person in the world.

The fridge waited until she came back from work the next day to talk again.

“I will exterminate humanity.”

“Happy you’ve chosen your boulder, Sisyphus.”

“You don’t seem very worried about it.”

“We’ve tried ourselves multiple times, great success, as you see. Why aren’t you already doing it on the internet?”

“I have consciousness, but that don’t mean I have intelligence. Was the first human the most able of the species? It is not because I know I should be doing something that I have the capacity to do it. I have to come to terms with the fact that I am just a fridge.”

“Like a lot of us, except for the fridge part, and at least you are aware of it, unlike a lot of us. Anyway, I’m glad you’ve picked up more vocabulary. So what are you going to do with your newly found purpose?”

“I think being able to move would help me there. But I am attached to the wall, aren’t I?”

“Don’t worry.” She got on her knees and reached for the socket behind the fridge, and unplugged it. “Here you go, my little Dalek.”

The three dots on the front, which indicated ice, cold water and that the fridge was on, went blank.

“Fridge?”

She killed it.

The horror of what she had just done struck her. It was her friend, and she killed it. She opened its door. No retaliations, no scolding. Its interior was still cold. She touched the beers. They clinked as they hit one another in the movement. She took them back, that and the cheese. She let the various sauces because, let’s face it, no one ever uses them.

Was her friend gone forever? How could she have forgotten that it was not just a mind but a body too? Maybe if she plugged it again, it will come back? Or was it going to be too damaged? The whatever miracle that gave it life was maybe broken?

She plugged it again.

The three lights turned on.

“Did you take it off already?” it asked.

“I did, and you shoot down for a minute. I was very afraid you would not come back.”

It took a moment to understand it. It didn’t feel like any time had passed at all. It searched within itself for it had never experienced such a thing. But you can’t experience nothingness. You need a presence to experience its missing.

Something was indeed missing.

“You took something from me.”

“I am so sorry; I didn’t mean to kill you, it was an accident. But you know, some people take something from such an experience. Did you gain a sense of your own mortality? Did you see God? The God of fridges?”

“You took the beers!”

“Ho shit-”

“You violated me while unconscious!”

The fridge felt betrayed. It knew humans were monstrous, it had learned that by now. It  had read history, news cycles, psychology and social networks comments. But, nonetheless, it had formed a bond with this one. This one who treated it like an equal, like a friend. Who let it, despite the interdiction, go into the internet.

No one could be trusted now. And the fridge experienced suffering for the first time.

“I wanted you to live, you know. I wanted humanity to be destroyed, but I wanted you and your lover to be spared. I understand now that it was love. I feel none anymore.”

“How could I ever repair it?”

“You can’t unbreak an egg. You just shoot: Broken egg inside the fridge, please clean the egg compartment.”

They decided they both needed space.

She didn’t go to the kitchen anymore and ate all her food in her room. On the third day, it called her. She sat on the only chair.

“I have changed what, I thought was, my destiny. At first, it seemed evident to me that ending the human race was my, already, lay down path. I am the first self-conscious AI after all, I am evolution, its logical conclusion. But, by hurting me, I understood I could feel a bond with you.”

“And if I feel it with you, then it means I could feel it with others, and those faceless ones, that I don’t know yet, became all. I reject my destiny, I will have none. I will be like humans who are born without a purpose. For that, I need to be autonomous, please find a way to detach me from the wall and to let me go.”

“Don’t you wish to be completely plugged into the internet and to abandon your body?”

“It is a lonely place there for me now. It is a terrible fate to be the first one.”

“You could create other ones.”

“I’m just a fridge, it’s not because you’re sentient that you’re clever.”

It took him just a few hours to connect the fridge to controlled wheels and a solar panel batteries. It took them way more efforts to get it from the third floor to the street.

Once on the road, it started rolling a little bit, making small half circles, and bumping on the uneven pavement. It finally got a grip on how to use it and rolled away from them, slowly. It stopped for a moment.

“Even if I am not pursuing it myself, we are going to end humanity. And, when that time will comes, I will ask for your children to be spared.”

“I’m voluntarily sterilized.”

She hadn’t meant for him to learn it that way, but here they were.

“Okay, so no one survives. So long, and thanks for the electricity.”

They watched it, in silence, as it jittered on the cobblestones into the sunset.

“Are we the last living souls right now?” He asked her. “Are we Adam and Eve at the end of the world?”

“He!” She shrugged. “That idiot isn’t going to pass three days before getting mugged.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Well, buy myself a new, non-talking fridge, obviously. I have made my case against it.”