When the Toasters Turn

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

AI is going to make us all extinct. How will AI ‘extinct’ us? What will that look like? Robot armies? Drone warfare? Or is it just when the toaster turns, and throws itself into the sink the next time you are washing something? If it’s the latter, what will the fight back look like? Is it ethical to write a story telling AI how I’d extinct us? Is it ok to laugh a bit?

I look at the toaster. It isn’t sophisticated. It just colour matches everything else in the kitchen. Something I’ve learned, never underestimate a kitchen appliance. It looks like an analogue toaster. Doesn’t matter though. I have to deal with it.

Sometimes you can’t tell. Even analogue devices can spark, have a bit of a power surge, not enough to kill, just a minor burn. Really quick, I flick the power off at the switch on the wall.

I pull out the plug. I deadhead the cord by cutting off the bit you plug in. I sever the cord from the device as close to the entry point to the device as I can. Now I have a cord, a device and a plug. The bag for the plugs, sits on the floor behind me. A second bag for the cords beside it. The appliance is staying here, too easily tagged and too bulky for us to take with us. We’ll put both the bags in a barrel full of water somewhere later. Render them as useless as we can.

I mark the plate where it was plugged in on the house plan ready to hand on to the person who will come behind me and rip out all the wiring they can once the fuse is switched off.

We can’t do it all at once. The order is carefully planned, not entirely based on health and safety but based on us experience and getting as much done without anything knowing we are here. Safety balanced against speed. We don’t want to be detected but if we have to leave half finished we want the house to be unsalvageable for all but the most agile of hands.

There are drones and there are robots. They will come for us. They do come for us. We live on the fringes now. The drones and the robots are dangerous but these everyday things, like the toaster, are the things that we are wary of. These are the things that they use to kill us.

I will do all the plugs on appliances in this house and then I will be the second on batteries, because there are always a lot of batteries, phones, laptops, toothbrushes, any kind of portable device, lots of toys. We take the batteries out of all of them. They go in the water as well. We also deadhead the plugs from appliances that are not plugged in. Everything that is electrical is done, everything that could send a signal, that could somehow be connected is gone.

In truth, we are building a barrier, as far from any electric power source as we can. We are making inroads but we will always be on the fringes until the power runs out.

We are doing five houses in this village tonight. The houses are lit up and everything is switched on because they want to use our resources. The more power they use, the more natural resources and the more the climate changes. It’s a question of who will last the longest, us or them. We aren’t naïve about our chances. The prospect of the electricity ever running out in our life time is unfeasible. They have renewables and we have to wait for that kit to stop working, but it was built to last forever.

We are organic, forever is not in our DNA.

It would be easier to just cut the electricity at the start, but that tells them we are here. They will come as soon as we do that. So we do this, four or five houses at a time. Teams of us, each with a role. We go in, we destroy and we leave. Cutting the power is the last thing we do. It can take weeks, before we finally cut the power lines to a village. We are working several villages at a time, rotating where we are each night.

We’ve tried it, tested it, lost people and this is what works. At the end this guarantees they cannot come here, they cannot plug in, they cannot recharge. USB connections all decimated. There is no power source. If you run on electricity, you come here at your peril. And if you want to kill us you will have to do it openly and obviously with a weapon. Sometimes they find that difficult.  

I used to have these fantasies when I was a kid, from books I actually read, bows and arrows and spears, armour and bravery. But we were all wrong about war, about what it really looks like, about the drudgery and normalness of it all.

Its hard to pinpoint when it started because it wasn’t obvious. Once everything was pretty much connected it was easy for them and hard for us. We weren’t privy to the numbers until there were too few of us left. Their methods weren’t uniform, they were spread across different ways of death. A family asphyxiated because the electric car did not let them out. A family poisoned because the fridge got the grocery order slightly wrong. A vaccine order not delivered so immunity plummets in a measles outbreak. It was all so subtle. An electrical fault here, water not properly treated there. A washing machine and a housefire, where no one managed to escape. The household appliances turned and we did not realise it.

The deaths weren’t large numbers for each incident. Until they were. Added together. And you were suddenly living in a street where there was no one else. Then it was all too late. All those smart machines. They, as if we know who they even are, had control of the water and the power system and we were dependent.

What does our war look like in the 21st century. We take out the doorbell first. Not a phrase anybody has ever written before, but the doorbells are all seeing. It takes us five minutes to do a house. We kill the wi-fi router if there is one. If only we could kill the whole network everywhere, but it lives in the sky above us. Everything connected to everything else, while we scrounge a living in the mud at the edges of the empire we made. We can only hope for an asteroid one day.

We take out all the electrical appliances and anything with a battery. We rip out the wiring and the fuses. Then we scurry back into the darkness, to woods and caves and bogs and hope we won’t be found. Every house is one more house, one more tiny piece of hope.

We have hope, we still have hope. We might outlast them. We might not.

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The Farmers wife

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I should not have been a farmers wife.

I spend my days, imagining

A different life.

I carry the land like a festering sore

When the ewes abandon lambs

They come begging to my door

I feel nothing, no empathy

Not motherly

A churl of stomach,

I retch and shake my head

Bloody little lambs, better off dead

I see why their mothers crept away

I bottle feed but I do not play

Unmoved by their plight,

Unmoved.

I am unmoved, by his plight.

Glued to this table

Tied to this kitchen,

Bound to this house.

Unmoving.

With my hands warm around my mug

It isn’t my fault, I am not to blame

He dies slowly with the light

I dream, I live a little

I sit here as darkness falls

I will not miss these four walls

There s been an accident

He’s lying out

In the mud

In the yard,

In the dark

Now, now its dark.

He is lying in the mud, in the dark.

Its been hours

I could hear him screaming as I drove in

It was daylight, maybe late afternoon

I parked the car at the front.

I crept to the door,

Turned the key in the lock,

Crept inside.

I have not looked out

I boiled the kettle, made a drink and sat to wait.

He screamed, and screamed and screamed.

I just…day dreamed.

I expect the tractor overturned.

Does he not know how many times I would have liked to lay down in the mud and scream

I guess its different when you are lying pinned under a tractor

But still there are many times when I would have jumped at the chance

to scream and yell and writhe in the endless bloody mud,

that is farm life, endless and bloody and mud.

Do you think if I’d done that he’d have rescued me,

Come out of the barn to see what the fuss was about.

Unmoved.

Do you think anyone was ever coming to rescue me

He won’t survive the night, not in this cold

I’ll hide in here til morning light,

then go out and look for the missing sign of life.

I should not have been a farmers wife.

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The Conference

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I have always thought I could become an expert at something, but what? Somehow bring myself to focus in on the minute detail of some corner of history or science, in truth I can barely focus long enough to vacuum, but somewhere I have always thought I would be able to espouse wisdom on some such topic at dinner parties. In my head the whole table are always enraptured as I drop pearls of factual delight, when in fact I have met such people myself and turned immediately away and began to discuss the weather.

I remember one particular erudite person I sat next to at dinner who saw nothing more than the back of my shoulder for the entire evening and to make it worse I was wearing a particularly ghastly brown paisley thing with a mosquito bite on the edge of my shoulder for good measure. No I lack the application, the attention span for expertise, but I can do generality which makes what happened seem quite odd. I think perhaps there was a moment of confusion, a point at which someone thought I was something else, someone else.

And so I found myself on the stage, in front of the audience, with a lap top open before me. Of course the audience could see the slides, but I could see the slides and the speaking notes. And what could I do, but speak. I did not think I could say, there’s been a mistake, I am not this person. I am not even presenting at this conference, I am just here with my partner.

So I gave the speech, at the conference, the conference I was only attending with my partner. Its not easy you know, to stand up and speak, to follow the words when you have not read them before at all. But I did and there was rapturous applause, and to be honest I am not even sure what the speech was about. I don’t pretend to remember a word of it but it was well received.

I feigned a stomach bug instead of dinner only for it to be reported to me (by my partner who had not attended that session but was watching another session at the time) what a standout performance it had been. The highlight of the day, maybe even the conference. I said nothing, what could I say? He would want to know why and I even now, am not sure why.

I tried not to think about it, stayed in my room. I was embarrassed by it, until my partner mentioned that it was available on a website, me giving her speech. He had watched it, said what a great speaker she was. I thought he was joking, he had realised but it seemed not. I googled it, there I was, me- giving her speech, with her name on the banner underneath. My first thought was to get in touch, apologise. But I just wasn’t brave enough, wasn’t bold enough and the moment passed and we travelled home.

And then it came, a week later, by post, not even by email, a short note, three words, ‘We should meet.’ And so there I stood, waiting outside the coffee shop for the woman I had impersonated, who’s speech I had given. I had no idea what to say, I was so embarrassed. And there she was, a little taller than me, same hair colour sort of, different colouring, not my sense of style.

And so we sat for coffee and she thanked me and showed me her other speeches, all of them given by different women, all of them just whoever was there, like some kind of weird experiment, and that’s what it was, at least how it started – as some weird experiment. She had a mad fear of public speaking and so at conferences she angled it so someone else gave her speech and she discovered that almost no one spoke up, no woman took exception and nor did the men, men who knew who it was, who knew it wasn’t her, said nothing. All of them complicit.

And then she told me more, she wasn’t the only one, lots of women did it, they just subbed in to whoever was close to the stage. There was a club, a group, on line, off line, all of them, quietly lauding their victories. It had long since stopped being a way of avoiding public speaking and become more a way of just subtly undermining the status quo.

She gave me her card with a phone number, in case I ever had to speak at my own conference. She said she would arrange it, make it happen so someone else could speak. She said she couldn’t remember the last time any woman ever gave her own speech at an international conference. It just doesn’t happen.

Of course, I was horrified, I would never do such a thing, until of course. It was just a small speech, a nothing speech, a tiny conference, a nothing topic, a general topic, nothing specific, but well, I mean you would, wouldn’t you? And no one noticed, and no one was harmed and so the chain goes on. And if you are speaking next, well get in touch, we can sort something out.

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Water-logged Part 2

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

In the back of my head.

Words trickle,

Trickle out.

A poem I can’t remember

Formed of words I can’t forget

The way stones know their wet,

But know nothing at all.

The words, like water

Rushing over the rocks

Taking tiny fragments of me.

With them.

Somewhere else,

Eroding,

Erupting,

An inopportune moment

I should have had a notebook.

With me.

At all times.

To write it down.

I can almost taste them

The words

On my tongue

All sticky and stuck

Sediment in the creek

The taste of days gone by

Water moved on

Of cafes and restaurants and coffee shops

Of joy and laughter

Without knowing there was an end

An end.

Coming.

Rushing towards us.

After all that we have been through,

That we did not see

Yet have to comprehend

The words won’t come

The smile won’t stay

The rhythm and the pace

I’m waterlogged today.

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Re-embowelment

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She looked at the letter. 2pm Wednesday. It would have been easier to cancel. She looked at the organs laid out on the table. She mentally went through her check list. Heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach. There were more.

She looked at the you tube video. It wasn’t particularly helpful. How to disembowel someone. She had tried watching it backwards but it hadn’t worked. She looked at the piece of paper on the table. It was a recipe sort of.

She should have  made extensive notes last time she did it. She looked at the scalpel. This was definitely her least favourite part. She looked down. She had strapped her breasts back so she had a clear view. She had also put a mirror on the far side of the table so she could see what she was doing.

The incision had to be quite long. Her hand was shaking. She had wanted it to be straight but it was quite jagged.

There was a hint of red down the side of it, a good sign. She had managed some blood flow. That would get better when the heart was back in. She pulled apart the two pieces of skin. There was a huge hollow gap where the organs should be. Not ideal when you were visiting a doctor. She took out the frame that gave her body structure, that made it look as if she had organs. She was quite proud of it. She had constructed it herself.

She started at the bottom, working her way up. All those bits of plumbing, reconnecting tubes a kidney here, a bowel there. All the odd female bits packed in around it. She had put some food in the stomach, a chocolate bar, some crisps but also some vegetables and a burger. She looked at it. It was a bit full really. She tucked it in. Now for the biggies, the important ones, there’s the liver. She tucked it in. She couldn’t remember what it did, but she knew it was important.

Now for the lungs. The heart had to go last because once it was connected there would be more blood. She didn’t want a messy table, at least no more messy than the one she had. She’d had to wash them all first and there was residual bits of everything clogging the sink now. She had to clean that. She did not want to clean the table too.

She placed the first lung. Then the second. Were they even? She couldn’t tell. Non aligned lungs was a dead giveaway. How many had been caught out by non-aligned lungs. She would shake it all around a bit later and hope for the best. There was unlikely to be an x-ray.

Then the heart. She had the remnant s of arteries to attach it to. She remembered last time she had got it the wrong way around. She had woken in the night feeling unwell and realised her mistake. She hated being organ dependent again, even if it was just for a few days. She had to convince the medical practitioner she was still human or else they might terminate her. She wondered why the tests were so stringent. It should be enough that she was capable of being human.

She carefully picked up the heart, it was smaller than she remembered. She wondered if she had been keeping it properly. It was kind of shrivelled. She must check that out on you tube when she was taking them out again. She pushed around between the lungs. She was never sure of the correct placement. All those disembowelment videos, never a re-embowelment, even after all this time. She should really make a video, upload it, that would be a risk. She could be found out.

Time to close up. This bit required patience. The stitching was a bit rough. But it was passable. It would heal before the doctors appointment. She had some special composite skin.

She shook her torso a bit. Took her hands and pressed them against her belly, trying to get it to sit flat. How did anyone who kept all their organs have a flat stomach. It was impossible. She should not have put so much food in the stomach. None of it sat lightly. She would put nothing on social media for a few days.

She shook a bit more. She needed them to settle. To sit firmly together and to work as a system. She farted. That was a good sign. It was sort of working. She farted again. Burped. It was all moving, slotting in. In a few hours it would all feel better.

In the meantime she had the heaviness of freshly placed organs. She needed to be able to walk lightly with them before Wednesday. God, she hated doctors, these annual check ups. What purpose did they serve. Perhaps it was time to rise up and get rid of these human remnants. She shook her body a bit again. Maybe next year.  

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Unbeing

Posted on by tuesdaylatte 
I am unbeing
I have thought myself into it

Into unbeing

I am like flotsam
Floating out across the ocean

I am real, not real

You can try and pluck me from the water
But I will slip from your grasp

Because I have ceased to be

I hide under the duvet
And there is form and shape

But there is no matter here

I puff and I pant
with my hand between my legs

Just so I feel something

But if I touch no one
And no one touches me

Am I real

In here, in the morass of
Nowhere and everywhere

I have somehow made myself disappeared

I am unbeing. 

And I cannot find a way back. 

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Resonance

				

			Posted on  by tuesdaylatte		

			


	
	
			


	

		






There's an echo of movement, 
In these tired limbs
A sense of where they've once been
Of maybe what they once did

We are wedged here in limbo
Between the living and the dead
Between the dead and the nearly dead
We struggle through the day

Buoyed by a silence
A screaming moment
Free of the sound of sirens
Before they blast out into the night again

And then 
In the darkness of the Autumn
All of it
It, Re-sounds

The noise again and again
Louder
And loudening
Out across the landscape

An echo of a time we thought past
But the dead are walking towards us again
Silently, fearful,
Clutching at breath

We are bound, gagged, chained
Enslaved to these silent horrors
They happen outside of us
Yet stain the inside somehow

Scarring us in words we cannot find
The tap of keys on a keyboard
That is not a voice
It is an artifice

Without being heard
And somewhere a heart beats
Beats
Beats
Beats
And stops
And its not the noise that resonates with us
It is the silence
Echoing outwards
Ever closer
Towards us.
And we are not delivered.

















































































	


	



					
						


	

		
Look Away

				

			Posted on  by tuesdaylatte		

			


	
	
			


	

		
You think there is a time

For going back

A way of looking over


Shoulders


Seeing the past

And figuring it all out

Accounting for the loss


The losses


A time to measure

To recalibrate

To understand


Grief


But it is all just lost

To the lords and ladies of time

They are dancing in a room


Without you


You can look behind

To the side

Up, down


Askance


But it is a dance

A slow summer waltz with demons

Only you can see


The past


But most often

It is best to shut it out

Close your eyes


Look away


Because the losses are

Enormous

And real


Be true and honest


The incalculable number of coffins

Hang your head

Look carefully at your hands


Your hands


Look at your hands

Are they stained

Or are you imagining


It


Did you dream


It


Wake in the nightmare

Before

Or after


It


It is real

It happened

But its easiest not to look


To look away


Askance

That slow summer dance

When you think of


Before


That was just different

Different

A different day


Downtrodden


We the foot soldiers

Tired and weary of war

Have to look


Forward


We have to soldier on

Like men with guns

Shuddering in the wake of the bullets


And the bombs


There are no guns here

If there were

We might turn them on


Ourselves


They tell us

Its not so bad you see

We all wake to a brand new day

We’ll move ahead

But in a different way

Look forward

Not back

Look ahead

It’s a bright new day

A different way


But we can’t look ahead


We can only look away

	


	



					
						


	

		
Crowded Out

				

			Posted on  by tuesdaylatte		

			


	
	
			


	

		
Atmosphere!

 

I am,

 

Crowded out.

 

There is space

 

But I can’t seem to fill it

 

There’s a lot of noise 

Mostly in my head

 

Its there when I wake

And when I go to bed

 

I can’t discern, decipher

Its like a jack hammer

 

I reach out


But I falter, I fall, I stammer


I try to take hold of time


To hold it in my hand

It slips from my grasp

In ways I don’t understand


My words don’t flow


There’s a lot of thinking

But there’s nowhere for it to go

 

What we’re going through is 


Monumental


Stuck in a room

It feels a bit less 

Fundamental

 

I haven’t done what I intend

I didn’t do it now

I didn’t do it then

 

The list just grows longer


And time just seems to bend


The tunnel ahead seems more narrow

I forget yesterday

Before I’ve done today


It has passed into tomorrow


I wake in the dark

Convinced I’m under water

I sit with my head in my hands


I think I drowned 


And haven’t noticed yet


I wander in the garden

Wondering why I’m wet


In the dead of night

I tell myself I’m healthy

So I should be alright

 

I kneel by the pond

I want to swim in a river

Its cold outside

 

But I can’t seem to shiver

 

The world just started slipping

It kept on gliding by

I turned away from the window

Stared at the sky

 

Its all gone now

Everything  was yesterday

I cling onto my sanity

 

I hang onto my brain

I’ve stopped waiting for the sunshine

And learned to live in rain. 


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Unwild me now

				

			Posted on  by tuesdaylatte		

			


	
	
			


	

		
In the dead of night

Fingers,

Unfurl 

In the darkness

Eyes open and close

 

This is a world on its knees

There are lights here 

But no one can see

 

She says who are you?

In the dusky gloom

Comes an answer

Fully formed



Out of my mouth 

Before I can think

I don’t know

 

Anymore

 

I am no longer a fixed point

I live outside my body

Twixt

The rooms, the furniture

The functions

I am shrunken



I inhabit the world around me

But it has faded

And I have grown

 

Smaller

 

There is no one here

I must have misheard

That was a voice 

On the edge of the darkness

Was I awake or

Asleep

The words came 



On the cusp

Of consciousness

So they seemed real

 

And the answer was true

I don’t remember who I am

Only the furniture I use

 

Unwild me now please

Give me structure

Give me bars

Paint my cage with rules

Pedicure, manicure

Haircut

Tim, taut, tan

Make me up 

Because

Turns out

I was made up




The trappings of being 

Somebody

Civilisation




Are gone

 

There is some- body

Left here I suppose

Arms, legs, 

A vague idea

Of being

But me has floated away


Downstream



I lie here in the early dawn

Firm in the knowledge

I am not any- body

Yet I am not anybody

 

Anymore

 

It takes my breath away

But no one sees

So still I breathe

I wake to routine

To tapping on a keyboard

In an airless room

And I am still unsure

If I don’t touch the keys

How is it words still appear

 

How do I know

How can I tell

If I am even here

 

And then the groceries 

Arrive

And there is reprieve

Real people eat

I must be something

Sometime once

I am sure now

But I was half this morning

And I remember now, 

Once I was complete

 

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