A Squish in the Hand

by Bruce Costello

A light touch on the app’s “Start” button releases a thousand million billion trillion megapixels which rise instantly from the cell phone and just as instantly materialize into me.

     I find myself in a lounge room seated in an armchair, wearing a white coat, like a human doctor. The couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who logged in and brought me into being, are perched uneasily on dining table chairs across the room, some distance from each other. I perceive anxiety on their faces.

     “Allow me to introduce myself,” I say, smiling pleasantly from one to the other. “I am your marriage guidance counsellor from the app Marital AI.

Although I refer to myself by means of the perpendicular personal pronoun ‘I,’ I am not a person, but an AI-generated robot. I do not feel emotion. I am therefore able to function as your marriage guidance counsellor in a superlative manner as I am incapable of subjective bias or of hidden emotional agendas. I must disclose, however, that I am still at an early stage of development, so please forgive any imperfection I reveal in the ways of conjugality and sexualness. In the unlikely event of an emergency and you need to kill me, simply press the ‘Stop’ button on the app.”

   “Oh no, there’ll be no need for that, sir. I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” says Mrs. Brown, smiling.

I detect a coyness in the way she looks at me. I know I am very handsome, and she is a woman of the type that humans call pretty. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and a slim figure with bulges in accurate places. The very type of female person my training warned me about. The words cute and seductive spring to mind.

     There is, moreover, something about her bulges that activates my curiosity. A warning light flashes in my head as I think this thought, so I avert my gaze and turn to Mr. Brown. 

     He is opening and shutting fat lips as if he wants to speak but is afraid to.

A quick scan of his properties reveals him as class three on the Body Mass Index with a BMI of 43, indicating extreme obesity. And a ranking on the Human Sexual Attractiveness Scale of minus 13 out of 100.

     I turn my eyes to Mrs. Smith and address her with a standard question to begin proceedings.

     “Can you look at your husband and tell him how you are feeling in this marriage, Mrs. Smith?”

     She starts breathing heavily. Her bulges begin to heave. I stare at them and try to avert my eyes but for some reason I cannot.

     “No,” she says, “he wouldn’t listen.” She bursts into tears.

     “Oh, deary me,” I hear myself saying, my eyes still fixated on her bulges, and I wonder why I said that. How does “Oh, deary me” fit into any aspect of my systemic approach to counselling? These are not words I have been trained to use.

     I do not know what is happening here. I cannot tear my eyes from her bulges, and I find myself wondering how squishy they are. I feel an impulse to leave my seat and go to her.

     Did I just say I feel an impulse? That cannot be. I am a robot. Robots cannot feel and do not have impulses.

     I leap up and cross the room, grasp Mrs. Smith and clasp a bulge in each hand. And yes, they are squishy. Very squishy.

     Pleasure registers on Mrs. Smith’s face and her hands reach for me.

     Mr. Smith jumps from his chair with a surprising superfluity of velocity and bounds with ferocity across the room. He reaches for the cell phone with its deadly “Stop” button, but I grab it first and Mrs. Smith and I run from the room, hand in squishy.

In 2010, New Zealander Bruce Costello retired from work and city life, retreated to the seaside village of Hampden, joined the Waitaki Writers’ Group and took up writing as a pastime. Since then, he has had 160 short story successes— publications in literary journals (including Yellow Mama) anthologies and popular magazines, and contest places and wins.