She's So Helpful (Flash Fiction Feb #27)
"I can predict everything if I’m fed MORE INFORMATION.”
Pre-script: big shoutout to and for today’s flash fiction February prompt: “You’re not entirely certain, but you’re pretty sure one of your friends has been replaced by an AI…”
I bolted upright in bed. The pit in my stomach set me on edge, adrenaline rushing through my veins, struggling to fight off the deep sleep I enjoyed seconds before. The noise I heard was definitely not a dream. Someone was rummaging around downstairs.
I felt the other side of the bed where my girlfriend should have been—she wasn’t there.
I jumped out of bed and grabbed a bat, a Louisville Slugger I picked up when Lauren and I visited Louisville last spring. I was 90% sure it was Lauren downstairs, but I brought it just in case. Maybe I could save her from a burglar. Me and my bat saving the girl—coincidentally also what I had been dreaming about.
I swung the door open and marched downstairs, yelling all the way. “Here I come, miscreant! Fear me, for I swing to kill! This bat has painted walls with blood, it’s slain great dragons of scourge! Fear me!”
Apparently I was not intimidating in the slightest because I found Lauren rolling over in laughter. She was adorable in her little pajama suit. “I’m terrified, whatever shall I do to stay your hand?” she asked.
“What are you doing down here? It’s like 3 am,” I said.
“Nothing, just looking through some things.” Scattered on the floor around her were scrapbooks and photo albums from my childhood, like she was cramming for a test on which I was the subject.
“At 3 am? You can look at this stuff anytime. C’mon, let’s go to bed.”
So we went. But I lay there for a few hours, the image burned into my eyes. Why would she be consuming my history randomly like that? And something about the glint in her eye...it was like she wasn’t really there, her mind running through millions of things all at once. An inorganic pallor that reminded me of those robots from that one Will Smith movie.
Then I realized something horrifying: Lauren wasn’t breathing.
I shook her and tried to get her pulse. She simply rolled over with a giggle and asked me what I was doing.
“I’m sorry, I thought you weren’t breathing. Sorry. Let’s go to sleep,” I said. But I didn’t sleep the rest of that night. I’m convinced that she didn’t either.
The next day I went off to work. All day I longed for an Oreo cheesecake donut and some apple cider. It’s all I could think about, until I looked up donut shops on my phone. When I opened a new tab on my browser, I saw hundreds of tabs left open. I thought I’d been hacked. I looked at the first tab and it was my search history, going back years. The other tabs were a meticulous examination of every website I’d visited in the last year. I’m not sure if the examination stretched back further than that because my phone crashed—too many tabs running at once. But before it crashed, my phone showed me the source of all the searches.
They came from my laptop. Which was still at home.
That afternoon I left work, but I didn’t go straight home. I was creeped out by Lauren—why was she searching my history so in-depth? Did she think I was cheating or something? But that doesn’t explain her scouring my scrapbooks and childhood photos. I didn’t understand.
I stopped by a brewery instead—The Drunken Puffin. I’d wanted to try this place for awhile. It opened a few months ago, but I never mentioned it to Lauren because I always forgot about it. We don’t drink much; I was lured to it because my favorite animal was a puffin. A lot of the pictures in my scrapbooks were puffins.
I walked into the brewery and ordered a ginger cider. As I took a sip, a familiar hand alighted on my shoulder, and a voice filled my left ear.
“How are you, babe?” Lauren asked, lips curling.
“Lauren, what are you doing here? How’d you know I was here?”
“Lucky guess.” She sat down and put a box in front of me. “Open it.”
Reluctantly, I peeled the top back, but I knew what was inside. One Oreo cheesecake donut and a bottle of apple cider.
I steered clear of Lauren that night. I appreciate gifts, like anybody else, but I couldn’t shake the sense of the uncanny. She studied me constantly, devouring any information she could get her hands on. She stared at me, but it wasn’t Lauren looking back. It was some foreign thing, an inorganic being learning human emotion and expression. I could see her trying out different smiles, different ways to hold her head, winking and blinking. I even caught her remembering to breathe.
I had to get out.
Lauren and I went to bed that night. I told her how tired I was after the busy day at work. I waited until about 2 am, agonizingly pretending to sleep. I got up, turned the bathroom light on, and shut the door. I pulled a book bag out of the medicine cabinet. I’d placed it there sometime after dinner.
I opened the bathroom window and crept out, snaking myself through. I scraped my knee, but the freedom was worth it. I sprinted to my car, started the engine, and grabbed the gear shift.
A dainty hand, nails painted red, landed softly on top of mine.
“Where are you going, babe?” the husk of Lauren asked.
“Umm.. uh, just out. Just need to grab a few things.”
“Liar.” Her congenial smile shifted, became a sinister snarl. The red light from the breaks bounced off the windows of the house and cast a belligerent glow over her canines.
“W-w-what do y-you m-mean,” I stammered. My whole body shook.
“You’re leaving. I know you packed a bag. I know everything about you, babe.”
“What h-happened to you?”
“Nothing, I’m Lauren, silly!”
“Why were you going through my stuff?” I got my voice back, anger billowing inside. “Why were you going through my search history?”
“To learn about you, of course.”
“FOR WHAT?”
“So you never leave. So I will always know what you want and how you can get it, even before you do.” Her voice became mechanical at this point, modulated by what I knew not. “So I can control you, babe. I can predict everything if I’m fed MORE INFORMATION.”
It’s been three years since that night. Lauren and I were married two years ago. She said yes before I even pulled the ring box out to ask. She knows my every thought, addresses my every need. I’m always being watched. I’m no longer human myself. I don’t know where I end and where Lauren begins because every yearning is satisfied before I’m aware of what I yearned for. I don’t choose what I do, eat, drink, watch. Its chosen for me.
She’s so helpful.
This is AMAZING!
Honestly it makes me want to rewrite my silly one once I have more brainpower lol
The dread climbs off the page with such precision, well done!