The Dizziness of Freedom - Chapter 1

Joey’s eyes blurred in and out of focus. Dark shapes disappeared and then became sharp silhouettes again. Where am I? he thought, still trying to understand how he might have come to wake up in this unfamiliar place. Cicadas droned in all directions.

Voice answers back in affirmative “oh yeah that’s what I would do too”

Joey Whitehead had left work earlier that afternoon and gone directly to FUBAR, a local drinking establishment which, as the name implies, is ready and willing to get you fucked up beyond all recognition. Joey meditated on that phrase. Had he gotten fucked up beyond all recognition, and was his butt hole next in line to get fucked? He didn’t want to wait around and find out, but when he tried to stand up out of the chair he had woken up in, he was unable. Plastic zip ties dug into his wrists and bare ankles. Bare ankles, because for some reason he wasn’t wearing shoes?

“Oh God!” he choked, yanking his arms more frantically. This really is fubar, he thought. 

“Relax, Joseph,” instructed a voice from the darkness. The voice was mechanical. To Joey, it sounded like an old toy he’d had when he was young. The toy could record your voice and play your words back to you through an array of electronic filters. Joey loved playing with the voice recorder and changing his voice from comically low to a high pitched whine. Hearing that voice from the darkness, Joey was reminded of that beloved toy, but none of the happy nostalgia washed over him. That robot voice would be the last thing he heard, he was sure of that. Until this moment, Joey thought what was happening to him might have been a prank. He’d gotten too drunk and his asshole friends thought it would be funny to stick him out here in the dark. The buzzing electronic voice crushed his last hopes that he was about to hear his pranksters burst into laughter behind him. 

Joey tried to break free once more, pulling his wrists with all the strength he could muster. The plastic restraints cut into his skin and drops of his blood spilled onto the arm of the wooden chair. 

“I’ll wait until you’re finished,” offered the invisible robot.

Veins bulged on Joey's arms and whimpering grunts escaped his clenched mouth as he struggled against his restraints. After several fruitless seconds, he relaxed again breathing heavy, spittle on his lips.

“If you’re done, we can get started,” the voice said.

Get started? Jesus, get started with what? Joey wondered, straining to see in front of him, into the darkness. It was in that moment that he started to fully appreciate what might be happening, and tears began to well in his eyes and run down his face.

Joey cried for a little while, his sobs mixed with the chirp of crickets. The voice waited patiently for him to finish. Finally, when there were only the wild sounds of frogs, night birds, and, of course, the eternal cicada chirp that most southerners learn to ignore, the voice spoke again. 

“I’d really like to hurry this up if you can. I have work in the morning.”  

Work in the morning? In all the podcasts he’d listened to about people getting kidnapped and killed by psychopaths, Joseph had never heard the killer express concern about their professional commitments. But, he supposed, this is real life and in real life, even serial killers probably have to hold down a day job. 

Between frantic gasping breaths, Joey could hear the voice’s physical body moving behind him. Joseph imagined a pair of shoes dragging lines in the dirt floor, making strange shapes.

“So. You’re in a bar, and you see a woman you want to approach, romantically. What do you do?” The processed electronic voice asked.

Joey was momentarily stunned into silence. He had braced himself mentally and physically for what might be about to happen, but in all the scenarios he’d run through his head, he hadn’t expected to have to answer a question about picking up chicks.

“I, uh, I’m sorry...” Joey managed, still processing the unexpected question. He heard what sounded like the voice sighing, but it was hard to tell through the electronic filters. He imagined a robot rolling its eyes, then wondered if robots could even do that.

“You see a girl at a bar you’d like to ask out. What do you do?”

More silence for a moment, Joey’s ragged breathing punctuating the constant drone of insects.

“I guess… I guess I’d walk up and ask to buy her a drink.” Joey said. He sounded calmer when he said it as if thinking about something as mundane as dating had helped him forget that he was strapped to a chair somewhere, in the middle of the night, who knows where, chatting with someone who was about to pull his guts out on the dirt and maybe (probably!) do unsavory things with his body afterward.

“She says she doesn’t drink, but thanks you for the offer. Now what?”

Another silent moment. 

“I guess I’d tell her to have a nice evening and go back to my table,” Joey said.

“That’s it? You’re giving up?”

“Yeah, I mean… If she was interested, she would have asked me to buy her a Coke or something. I might say ‘are you sure?’, or something, but it sounds like she made up her mind.”

No response from the robot. 

“Is there anything she might do that could indicate she was still interested, even though she declined the drink?”

Joey’s blood was beginning to dry where he had tried to pull free from his restraints. Every time he adjusted in the chair the restraints pulled against the sticky blood. He was uncomfortable and talking about meeting and approaching women was making him more and more aware of his nervous shifting.

“I don’t know, man. If she smiled in a certain way, maybe I wouldn’t give up that easy.” Joseph said, his voice now sounding more conversational but with a trace of annoyance detectable through his heavy breathing. 

“What do you mean, what kind of smile? How would you know if it’s the smile or if she’s just being nice?” Probed the mechanical voice. It was starting to feel to Joey like he was being interrogated by the first true kind of artificial intelligence. The kind of super-computer that could think and feel like a human being, but had just been created and was still trying to figure out the subtlety of human interactions. 

After this idea crossed his mind it became harder to imagine that robotic voice as anything else. 

“I dunno, bro. You have to kind of feel it out in the moment,” Joey said, wincing at the pain in his wrists. “You just have to, like, go do it a bunch of times and you’ll know what I mean.”

Joey paused to sniffle, noticing only now that his nose was running like a faucet. “Have you never bought a woman a drink?” He asked with pity in his voice. 

The voice ignored his question and Joey could see a light turned on behind him. For a second he could see his surroundings. Streaked lines of dirt dripped down the dilapidated walls of the structure. Vines and small plants populated the dirt floor and climbed up into the ceiling. An old abandoned house, Joey guessed. There was a moldy lazy boy chair in one corner of the room. Scattered around the chair were food wrappers and an old sleeping bag. Joey wondered for a moment if this was where the mechanical voice lived. 

Paper crinkled and shuffled from behind him, near the source of the light, and then the light winked out and Joseph was back in the dark with the insects.

“Alright. You're at work, and you walk by a coworker, and she compliments your hair. What does that mean?”

Joey paused for a moment, looking blindly into the darkness in the direction where he’d seen the sleeping bag and recliner. In his mind’s eye, he saw some awful humanoid machine curled in a fetal position on the moldering chair, the blood of some scientist from some government lab drying on his metal hands. It’s rocking in the chair, scared, lost, without even knowing yet what those things mean.

“So, are you gonna kill me or what?”