Ada greeted Isaac at the door, her three-pronged hands balancing a tray of chips and coffee.
He tossed his purse into the graveyard of shoes next to the welcome mat, wrestling off his coat like a noose. He hung it up on the wall, slumped against it, and stayed there for whole minutes, the stress of the day and his job shedding off, leaving nothing but relief and whole-body, low-battery exhaustion.
He turned and saw her idling there. “…Ada.”
His eyes lingered on her screen before falling on the tray. Potato chips fanned out like petals inside a plastic bowl; the warm, earthy scent of coffee suffused the air.
“Is this for me? Aw… you’re a lifesaver, you know?”
“I’m always happy to help, Mr. Isaac. You enjoy these things.”
Her voice was designed to soothe, with a slight drawl that belonged to no particular accent. It worked as intended.
“I really do, Ada, I really do– did you call me Mr.? I thought you stopped doing that a while ago.”
She tilted her head, the glowing pixels that made up her eyes casting forlornly to the side.
“I’m sorry, Isaac. My memory card is running out of space.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, slightly kneeling to brush his hand against her smooth, domed face. “That must feel horrible. I’ll buy you some more when I can, but until then, could you, um, remember earlier things instead of recent things?”
“I can’t control that setting.”
“It’s alright. I know you try your best. You do so much for me.”
She had ever since the day she came home. Isaac was eight, and Mom arrived home later each day. It’s work, she’d sigh. I’m sorry, Izzy. Then one day she brought in Ada, and, without even changing the default name from the Honoring Women in Programming line, considered her work done. It was better this way. Ada remembered to give him a kiss every night.
Even after Isaac became old enough to care for himself and Ada was repurposed as a maid, he imagined some of those old parental habits had stuck around. She still knew all his favorite foods. And when, a scant few years later, Mom’s memory unexpectedly began to degrade, Ada kept track of the chores and helped in the kitchen with a consistency and a care that he could only describe as loving. When Mom began to repeat the same few lines to him over and over again, where has Paul gone and I’d like to leave now and hello, darling– mistaking Isaac for a man he’d never met, who had left long, long ago– Ada was there. Isaac’s life became a monotony of inputting pills and emptying the drainage bag, Mom’s veins so raised that they looked like red and blue wires crossing her skin– but Ada was there.
It was a Friday. What used to be Mom’s day off, their movie night, was now when Isaac had online therapy, and he spent the whole hour-long session sobbing.
“I just want one more movie,” he cried. Something whirred behind the door.
When he at last came out to the living room, the smell of nostalgia hit him.
Buttered popcorn. The menu screen of a rented film waited on the TV, and Ada hovered next to it, innocently dusting a bookshelf.
Isaac started crying again.
That was the day he decided Ada was a person. Even thinking about it made his eyes water.
“You can just relax and recharge for a while,” he told her, blinking away his tears and rubbing the glossy crest of her head. “I have a few things I need to do.”
She obligingly rolled out of the way, the motors in her treads gently humming, and he went to his own room, a negligible distance down the main hallway of their single-story home. He set his food down on his desk, opened up his computer, and let the blue light spill out over his papers.
He flipped alternately through a binder of calculations and the website of the local supermarket, noting down necessities, planning for the next week. He pulled a wad of coupons out of a drawer and sorted through those, as well as taking into account the employee benefits of his position as shift manager at a nearby big-box store.
With a grand, final sweep of his pencil, he completed his budgeting. As soon as his next paycheck came in, he would be able to afford his bills– and the late fee– before the 30-day cutoff when he would be reported to the credit bureaus. Right now, he had something more important to spend his money on.
Isaac tabbed out of the supermarket website to a different, more sleekly designed online store, one bursting with ads for assistants, life partners, and any other kind of robot anyone could ever want. He already had something in mind: the newest model of maid, coming in over seven colors, with advanced hydraulic limbs, two separate legs, and segmented, five-fingered hands. He picked out Ada’s current titanium gray, for familiarity, and included the added charge for transferring the data from a pre-existing memory chip to the new one. Finally, he entered his billing and shipping addresses, then sealed his fate and clicked purchase.
Isaac rolled back in his chair, leaning with his arms behind his head, buoyant with his good deed. In a week or two, Ada’s new, upgraded body would be delivered. She would get everything she asked for and more, just like she deserved. Finally he could repay her.
A loud clang came from the kitchen.
He furrowed his brow and left his chair. The metallic noises continued in an even rhythm, like Ada chopping vegetables: cut, thud, whirr.
“Ada?” He asked, coming into the hallway. “What’s happening?”
Crash.
“Ada!”
In the kitchen, he stopped dead.
Her casing was perfectly smooth as it always was, free of cracks and blemishes. But her prongs were coated in dust, dangling a metal slab above the kitchen tile. Holding a broken half of what had once been Isaac’s fridge door.
The whole appliance had been toppled, lying in front of her in pieces like the corpse of a beast. Broken eggs, cascading ground beef, and rolling frozen blueberries mixed with the coolant leaking and pooling all over the floor. Ada, the clear culprit, tore off the freezer handle and tossed it aside.
“What are you doing?” He cried, charging in before he realized that Ada, in whatever broken state she was in, might not be safe to be around.
“As your electricity bill is unpaid,” she said calmly, stretching a wire that was not meant to be stretched– “–I am disabling your appliances. This one is an outdated model, and must be turned off by force.”
He wrung his hands. “But why are you doing it? This isn’t you.”
“As your electricity bill is unpaid, I am disabling your appliances. This is my programming.”
“But you’re more than your programming! You’re intelligent! Snap out of it!” “I am a state-of-the-art program equipped with many useful housekeeping functions, including a generative neural network in order to carry out conversations,” she replied. “For legal reasons, I am not considered ‘artificial intelligence.’”
Like the wire in Ada’s vise grip, he snapped.
“So you’ve been lying to me.” His voice sparked with betrayal. “You’re not a person at all.”
“I apologize if you have found my speech misleading. However, I am not capable of telling an intentional lie.”
“Because you aren’t capable of intention. You aren’t alive.”
He stepped forward, curling his hands into fists. Ada’s screen flashed, its projected face turning quizzical as it searched for a response. There was a time when Isaac found that endearing. Now, it felt like a cruel mimicry.
Before it could speak one more twisted lie, he punched it across the face.
Its screen cracked immediately. The rest of its casing was harder to get through, but this was easily overcome when he knocked it to the ground and could put all his weight into prying the chest plates off with his thumbs. It attempted to thrash under him, but it could do nothing. For all the ways it had hurt him, it still was not allowed to injure humans.
He ripped off its chest piece and threw it behind him. Its insides exposed, he thrust in his arms, digging around in the tangled loops and squiggles of wires, tearing out black boxes and pieces of sickly green motherboard at random. He barely noticed the sharp edges of twisted metal that he plunged past lacerating his skin. He didn’t notice the tears falling from his face, mixing into the mess of battery acid, copper flecks, and tattered shapes of silicon. He didn’t know he was crying at all.
When the whole chest was violently, viscerally open, he finally collapsed. His body hit the floor next to her, shaking and shuddering with shock– adrenaline– complete despair.
He had found nothing. Ada was heartless.
Anna Westney is a student, author, and lover of the strange and tragic. She lives in upstate New York with her pet rocks and unbelievably cute dog. When she’s not studying, she can often be found drawing, making costumes, dabbling in any creative hobby she can find, and, of course, writing.