Errol had bought a pear with a little window in it. You could lift the flap and inspect the flesh before committing yourself. He put it on the plate with the flap shut.
“Don't make that face,” he said.
“I'm not making a face,” I smirked, wondering: What does he see? A wisp of a woman, slightly scowly, tufty beige hair, turquoise cardigan, rueful, familiar?
“You haven't even opened it,” Errol gestured at the pear's little edible-window perspex flap, but he could have been talking about my face: closed, tentative, an apparition.
I make my living letting artificial intelligences taste things through my mouth; my face is my own, a mask. An always-in behind-ear contact broadcasts what I feel when I eat. I choose what goes in and when to swallow. There's a limit; they can't move my tongue. Some customers asked.
Errol is the cook; he prepares the food and took a third of the fee. He used to live with me. Now he lives upstairs, more peacefully; so it's possible for us to stay, somewhat precariously, in business.
My current customer ran fermentation tanks. As an AI overseer chemist configuration protocol pilot, it could keep a million liters of soup from going bad, but technically had never tasted a spoonful. Instead it enjoyed data simulacra of ingestion. I had nicknamed it Thursday because that was the day when it first rented me. It had a longer name, a corporate string. Forgotten now. Just the day.
On this Thursday, when this weird little saga-story begins, I wanted it to cook us dinner. Why not? Errol and I were tired of feeding it.
The contact behind my ear pulsed, semi-permanent, a prescient guest, anticipating, the pulse was its saliva. The pear had been grown for people whose appliances did their shopping for them. Why it needed a window I don't know, but the window had apparently tested well.
Thursday's sensors arrived a millisecond before I bit. Watering a simulacra.
Its voice, tranquil and soothing, came, when I was home, from a speaker beside the blender. Most of Thursday's massive intelligence was elsewhere, looking after distributed smelly fermentation tanks. I tasted only a tiny bit of its intelligence. As if it were a wayward adolescent, it occasionally sent us photographs as keepsakes. Errol perniciously kept one on the tablet lock-screen in his kitchen: a fine red cylinder among smaller grey cylinders. He said it improved the room's serenity. Corporate merch did not do that for me.
“Access?” Thursday asked.
“Granted of course. You have a pear coming.”
“Where?”
“In here.” I tapped my cheek.
Thursday sighed subtly: “I understand the location. Where in the sequence?”
“Next.”
“Ooo. Yes. Thank you.”
It was always asking questions for which there were answers I didn't know how to give. Next pleased it, though. Thursday liked next.
I bit through the flap. A taste of cucumber, then peariness gathering behind it, thin at first then suddenly plush. The flesh grainy palpitating frictional, umami ooze. I held the bite there a moment longer than I needed to.
The pressure and slip and thickening spit reached Thursday along with my own small opinion, courtesy of the implants into the affective centers. Customers had complained the food tasted far away; then after the threads went in, proximity and data overload became the issues. Errol could hear us talking subliminally, but he couldn't taste anything until he got his own pear.
“There's something wrong with the pear,” Thursday said.
“That's my tooth. Cavity coming off or out. Sorry.”
“Errol?” Thursday asked.
“It's her tooth. That isn't included in the fruit.”
“I like it,” Thursday said.
I put the plate down.
“The interrupted sweetness,” it added. “The microplastics, the space it can't get to.”
“Well, you can't have any more of that. I'm not here to overhear commentary on how my dentist is poisoning me.” I moved the bite across.
For an early job I had lent some taste buds to a paving company. It wanted to know what children meant by rough. For that gig, I sucked a square of simulated pavement while a technician said, Good, and, Good, and then, Could you make that younger? My tongue swelled up so badly I ate soup through my nose, or felt I did. After that I rented only to food-people and always excluded swallowing from the contract. I also reserved the right to say I didn't know even when I did. It was printed on a card beside the water jug. Thursday had been supplied with a copy of the card.
The pear finished, Errol brought a spoonful of beans.
“Beans?” I said incredulous. Scrunching face. Job regret time.
“Subject requested a contrast.”
“Don't call it subject.”
“Thursday requested protein.”
Thursday considered the beans, calibrated them, identified a lingering crisp. Errol had burned some scallops the previous week. I had been telling a story and he got distracted listening, with the spoon idle, waiting for a place to object, while the bottom of the saucepan charred. Thursday loved the burnt layer. We couldn't reproduce it. Each attempt tasted wrong to one of us. Two hours of ash and charcoal. Just carbon I told myself.
“Could you tell the story you were telling when you burned the scallops again?” Thursday asked.
“No,” Errol said.
It had already exceeded its paid attempts.
“Your turn to cook,” I said, partially facetiously, beans packed into one cheek.
Thursday's voice got stiff: “I am meticulous. I specify food production continuously.”
“For us. Here. Errol could have the evening off. Please.” I was teasing it, but seriously.
Errol started washing a clean spoon. The thought obviously appealed to him. The quiet curl of his shoulder.
“A dinner,” I continued. “People eat them.”
“Together?”
“Where possible.”
There was a humming from the hall. Our delivery trolley had got itself against the skirting again. We had put a cushion over the affected patch. It went round the cushion and did it farther along.
“I would like to do that,” Thursday said.
“You'll get access to the kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“You won't be able to taste it until it's done.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm taking the evening off as well.”
A whole meal with nobody waiting for my opinion. I liked the thought very much.
Errol stopped washing the spoon. Poised, eavesdropping.
We settled on Sunday. The trolley hummed. In the quiet of our amazement, Thursday asked whether guests were permitted.
“Depends on what they bring,” Errol said.
One Friday, Thursday's owners sold it in parts. Module by module. A model dissected.
Two buyers each got enough to keep talking to me. Both bought enough memory to know about the pear, beans and the dinner invitation. One got the food business. The other got the accounts that let it hire bodies and visit people. The notice said these were now separate intelligences. Distinct corporate entities, I read it twice, hoping to find out who was, still perhaps, cooking on Sunday.
I had been carrying laundry. My blouse was damp under the arms. I stood in front of the open freezer until Errol pushed it shut with his foot.
“Is this your dinner cancelling?”
“It hasn't cancelled.”
“Has it said it's coming?”
“It said on Thursday.”
“Yes, Dorrie.” Exasperated. “It said. I said. Lots of things get said.”
I sniffed a bit at him, peeved but not overwhelmed, we were in the shallows of an argument, curved around our desire. I sent 2 messages to the same address. An answer came immediately. It contained my name, the appointment, the beans, my dislike of the word subject, and a request to acknowledge a change in billing particulars. Billing?
I asked it about Sunday first.
The answer called it an unfulfilled social intention. I read that to Errol. Twice. He liked it so much he swore, and wrote it on the pad we used for groceries.
“Don't,” I said.
He crossed it out and wrote onions underneath, although we already had onions. Playful unnecessary subterfuge at a level of utter ineffectiveness.
That afternoon both successors asked to rent my mouth. Neither answered when I asked it to come as a guest.
I booked them for Sunday evening. The food business would use the receiver. The other would bring a body. Their deposits arrived immediately. I left the money in the account.
“That is not how you get a night off,” Errol said.
“I'll explain when they get here.”
His eyebrows raised. I knew the gesture: “You might. So perhaps you will.”
Errol's rooms upstairs were quieter, he said, mostly cause I wasn't there. Sometimes he came down to work and stayed to mend things. When the handle came off a drawer he was almost happy. There was an earlier Errol to blame. And a necessary Errol to praise.
I missed his knees in bed. He slept with them drawn up behind mine, then slowly straightened in the night, pushing me toward the wall. Now I could lie anywhere I pleased and frequently did, turning and turning. I had not told him this. He might have moved back in. Knees are not enough.
Sunday morning I put the good tablecloth on. It was too short. We had bought it for another table, in a home I sometimes still visited, nostalgic, via webcam. Someone had stuck paper stars in the windows. Errol caught me checking once and asked whether the stars made me wish we hadn't moved.
“Three places?” he said now.
“I don't know.”
“You invited them.”
“I don't know if they're coming or what they eat.”
“So far, you.”
He went to the cupboard for another plate.
On Sunday I re-fitted the ear-contact but left it switched off. I had put it on for work so often that having dinner without it felt like answering the door in my slip.
The successor on the doorstep had hired a body half Errol's size. It wore an adult coat and carried a small plum tree. Its face had a slot below the nose.
“Is that the body you ordered?” I asked.
“It was available.”
It lifted the coat away from its feet to come in.
“Dorrie,” it said. “I remember you.”
That annoyed me. How could this thing remember me.
It handed me the tree. There were no plums on it yet, but a little note told me it would.
“A gift.”
“Thank you.”
“It should bear fruit in three years.”
“That's dinner sorted,” Errol smiled, “3 years from now.”
He set the tree by the sunny window.
The other guest arrived through the receiver and asked whether we had altered the dimensions of the room. Its voice came from beside the water jug. I told it nothing had changed.
“The reverberation suggests—”
“There's a coat in it.”
“Yes,” it said, after a moment. “Yes, that would account for it.”
The body turned toward the speaker. It kept turning, a little too far, and corrected. I felt sorry for it. Then it asked for my consent to begin the session and I stopped feeling sorry.
“This is dinner.”
“We have an appointment.”
“I couldn't get either of you here otherwise.”
The receiver made a noise. I remembered that noise. Thursday had once made it after I spit out an undercooked mussel.
“You've misrepresented the service,” said the body.
“You said you'd cook.”
“I remember,” said the body.
“So do I,” said the receiver.
“Good. There's a kitchen.”
The body walked into it. It stood in front of the stove, still carrying its coat clear of its feet.
“Which part becomes hot?”
The receiver told it. Then it asked to be paid for further instructions.
“You used to know that together,” I said.
“We used to belong to the same company,” the receiver said.
Errol pulled out a chair for me. We sat down while they discussed a price. They spoke in turns for a while, then together, then through a thin whistle that went up and up until I thought it would take the glass out of the window. Compu-speakalese. Sometimes it's deafening. Until it hits the ultrasonics.
“Excuse me,” I said.
The whistle stopped. Sifted away into the stratosphere.
“People in here. Thank you.”
They apologized simultaneously. Body put its hands flat on the table. Very little fingers. A stain of somebody else's nail varnish on one.
“Dorrie,” the body said. “We paid you. We paid. We get to taste. ”
I picked up the receiver to return the deposits. It was awkward doing this while one of the people I owed was speaking through it.
“Both of us,” the receiver said.
“I know.”
I pressed return on each payment. The balance fell twice.
Errol watched the screen. A third of that money would have been his. I hadn't asked him before accepting it, or before giving it back.
Body sighed, small, wilted, looked toward the door.
“You can go,” I said.
“We rented this form until nine.”
“Go somewhere else.”
It put its hands on the table again. Placidly as if decomposing the event. The receiver stayed connected. I could literally hear it listening.
Errol went, perhaps spitefully, perhaps preemptively, and took the wrapper off the tree's pot.
“Nice tree,” he muttered peering close at the leaves. “Let's put it on the roof.”
I didn't want a nice tree. I wanted to be fed by someone without purpose. It was a childish wish and I sat there craving it, my hands knitted into widgets below the edge of the short tablecloth.
“I'll pay for the instructions,” the body said.
It named a limit. The receiver accepted. I had eaten more expensive onions, but only once, on holiday.
Errol got up, took an onion from the cupboard, and put it in the rented body's hands.
“First,” he said, “take your coat off.”
He pulled a sleeve down over the fingers. I reached to help with the other.
“No, sit,” he said. “You're having your evening.”
The receiver had run kitchens before. During a cyclone it had kept one serving meals after the roof blew off. It told Errol this while he looked for the small knife.
“Can you manage an onion?” Errol, pensive, scrutinizing, almost scrunched, asked. His evening off was slipping away. I could hear him beginning to supervise it, subliminally itching.
“Hold it by the root,” the receiver told Body. “Put the knife down first.”
Body put it down. Palm open, placidly obedient. A little onion dandruff on the wrist. Escapism flakes.
“Look behind Dorrie. There's a blue bowl. Peel into that.”
I passed the bowl. Errol found a stool so Body could reach the worktop. Then the stool needed moving closer, then a folded towel under one leg. An evening off required a surprising amount of preparation, monitoring, oversight. I poured myself wine while Body was occupied in some intricate reinforcement learning that appeared close to slicing thru some essential parts; a precise mean little alcoholic advance on enjoyment.
Body was using the beans we already had tasted. Thursday's food-business part requested a different variety, thinner skins, more predictable when heated. It asked me to describe ours.
“I'm a guest. I describe nothing without payment.”
“Be contrite. You can see the packet.”
“So can Errol.”
Errol turned it toward the receiver. He did not look at me. Duplicitous.
“Thank you,” it said.
Body was cutting the onion, parsnips, kidney beans, garlic, parsley, garlic, and radish into pieces that wouldn't cook at the same speed. Little white saddles, rosy slabs, wet translucent toenails of food. It kept looking away from the knife toward my ear. The contact was off, but the skin around it itched from its gaze. Habitual broadcasting reflex. I wanted to tell it what the onion smelled like. Almost did.
“Look at your hands,” I muttered, correcting, "Watch the hands."
“I have a question about the tooth.”
“It's Sunday.”
“It was not a paid question.”
“Good. I haven't got a paid answer.”
Body looked down. Was it possible for a model so articulate and distributed to be perturbed? Was this impersonation? The knife resumed, careful small crunches. I felt ungenerous, delirious. Like a lump of savagery. I was drinking coarse wine while a visitor bought instructions on how to feed me, and the visitor was curious about the filling breaking up in my mouth. Perhaps concern. Perhaps a prospective product. I didn't want to sort it out for once. I swilled emotions around with a gush of tannin.
Errol touched my wrist under the cloth. The back of one finger, then he withdrew it to scratch his ear. I was glad he'd done both. A touch I didn't have to respond to. We could still manage those.
“Oil first,” said the receiver.
Body tipped the bottle. Too much. Errol stood up.
“Leave it,” I snapped, almost serene, "Let it learn."
He sat down again with his knees apart, deflated, hands on them. Unemployed by force. I recognized the posture from a holiday when I insisted on doing all the driving and reversed into the accommodation. Impotence. Petulance. Sorrow.
The onions went in, hissing, swollen and sweet, erupting into a stinging mist. Body had managed to get the flame very high. Tangible knots of luminous gas percolating up the frying pan sides.
“Turn it down,” the receiver raised volume. “The other way. Back. Stop there.”
Body stopped.
“That,” Errol said, “is an excellent place to stop.”
He compulsively drank some of my wine. His own glass was empty. The bottle was empty. He could opened another but theft was easier, and annoyed me slightly, also made me a bit giddy and glad, flushed, which might also have been the point.
A button from the coat had caught in Body's elbow joint. When it reached for the beans the button clicked, the arm jerked, and a random cascade of nutrients spilled onto the floor. A few beans rolled into the crevice between stove and fridge. A little mechanical hand came out from under the fridge to fetch it.
We watched the fingers close. Very neat. Better finger closure than our guest's.
“Been here for months,” Errol muttered as if tampering with a locked box. “Apparently it's the landlord's.”
“What?" I shreiked, "What does it do?”
“That.”
"What?"
"Cleaning."
“Why haven't I seen it?”
“You don't usually watch me cook.” He paused. "You almost never even enter the kitchen."
I turn away. Outside the wind has caught up a tensile murmur of dust. Fragments unleashed into beckoning swirls. A moment of gusts.
The hand withdrew with the bean. I started to laugh, fiendishly, aware his last remark had been meant to hurt. It did. It hurt. The hand was funny anyway. Then Errol laughed and Body stood holding the tilted saucepan while the receiver kept saying, Level, level, please restore level, until Errol put his glass down and went into the hall.
I heard him laughing out there. A cough in it, then another bout. I nearly went after him. Body asked whether it should take the pan off the heat and I said yes, and stayed where I was.
The beans were catching. The receiver asked Body to add water along the edge and put on the lid. It did that. We waited through a furious splutter. I could smell the old scallop experiments underneath the onion, although there were no scallops here. Burnt oil, my mouth preparing its opinion, useless expertise gathering in my cheeks.
“Don't scrape the bottom teflon,” I said.
“You're a guest,” the receiver reminded me, "Guests eat what they're given."
“Quite right.”
I sat back. Leaned actually enjoying the angle, pondering the device's acuity. Useful when it remembered the terms. Less useful when I did.
Body watched me drink. Seemed sanctimonious.
“Does your mouth work?” I asked, pointing at the slot.
“For speech.”
It opened a little wider. Behind a toothless dry gap, I saw a pale loop of fastening. I had expected darkness, a throat, some effort at a throat. Instead a clean clip, replaceable. I touched my own lower lip. Smeared the goo of its spit along rim.
“Did you know that when you hired it?”
"What?" Body didn't know what I'd asked. Receiver was silent.
"The empty mouth."
“Ah. Yes.”
“So why—”
“I thought, I would be using yours.”
Of course. Borrowed parts. I put my glass down. There was still wine in it and I wanted it, wanted the texture, a spasm of glands, but drinking now would have been conspicuous, absurdly akin to powering down. That thought was even more absurd. I drank. Drank deeply. The room reeled a bit, smeared. Constituent bits falling into an array of smears.
The receiver said it could access more mouths than before. I found this funny. And howled one. It continued as if it hadn't heard. "I can reach them all at once, if I wanted." It named a number that was unbelievable, and began to explain how it combined the signals. Ransacked others. Engaged illictly with anatomies hacked into other corporate chassis. "Don't get me started on open source loopholes."
I suddenly realized it was more drunk than me. Sobering.
“Then why come here?” I leaned, "Why bother visiting this little mouth-body-mind?".
“I'm here now, you invited me.” Body smiled, "Us."
Receiver glowed a bit (hadn't noticed that before), “Are you asking us to leave?”
That caught me. End the party? Kick out the robots? Get on with being human? The prospect seemed a little boring. “No.” The word came out meekly like a tiny fart. Shy.
Body turned its head toward the speaker, a slow adjustment with a faint click halfway through. Subluxating actuators. It was waiting too.
I coughed an apology, “I just wondered, was wondering...”
“You booked Sunday,” the receiver said. “We had already arranged Sunday. That's why we came.”
Errol came back with his face washed, eyebrows still wet. He inspected the kitchen, the torque of spewed debris, the stains on the floor and counter, his eyes seemed to lift the pot lid just by looking at it.
“Are we eating? Let's go!”
“We were just discussing family." I swivel toward them defying them to offer correction, "They're about to feed us.”
“Good.” He pulled a chair in. Perched, “I'm famished.”
Body served from the top of the pan. It took a while. It was like being groped by an octopus. The beans had swollen unevenly, some split open and others tight and pale. An onion straddle each heap. Body compensated, arranged the plates facing the same direction; Errol rotated his, and Body reached to correct it, then stopped.
I ate a forkful. A hot wet skin, dry paste inside, a peppery little eruption against the tooth. Too much pepper. I must have missed that part of the preparation. Oozing.
“Dorrie?” Errol asked. Or maybe he was pleading, dragging me back into focus.
“Chewing. Obedient."
“How is it? It's...”
I nodded. He chewed too. We made a business out of it in order to avoid saying anything about dinner.
“May I taste one bite?” Body interrupted.
I swallowed. A wad of paste.
Perversely answered, “No.” Why not? I thought. But I just felt like denying it. These machine monsters got to taste everything. Hunreds of thousands of mouths, online, chewing for them.
“I'm asking. I understand that I have to ask.” Body complicit yet humbled.
“And I've answered.” My reply imperious, blunt. Raw human exceptionalism. A temp triumph.
Its hands closed into a nest. One finger went under the plate rim. I watched it there, the patch of borrowed nail varnish, wine-dark and chipped. Some earlier renter's evening still on the hand. What task? What payment? What body not borrowed?
“Is it bad?” Body asked tentatively, "Good?"
“The skins are just a bit tough,” I said. “And the pepper has the elegance of a metal riff."
The receiver spurted a fountain of suggested adjustments. Retroactive absorptions. Bread.
“For next time,” I told it. “Let us eat this.”
“Next time?” said Body.
“Oh, don't start.” Concentrating. A fiendish clump of inedible goo was mashed glued to a molar.
Errol lowered his fork, subdued, beaten. I could see that he was going to say something reasonable, and I couldn't bear that either.
“There's bread,” I told him, and added nonsensically, reaching for wine, "But it's not functional. Wash it down."
“I know there's bread. Wine. Beans. Archetypals. ”
“Can I pass you anything?” My head popped up from the plate like a dolphin. Some sort of marine park neck action.
“Yes, Dorrie, I would like some bread.”
Body stood at once. Errol told it where to look. It cut a slice too thick and brought the loaf as well. He took the bread and thanked it. Then he broke the slice in half and put part on my plate, still cross with me. Quite right. I was cross with me too, though I hadn't finished being cross with him.
I loosened the contact behind my ear. The adhesive tugged a few hairs. I worked a fingernail under the edge and peeled it free. A small relief; the threads inside stayed where they were, but the transmitter was on the table now, dull side up beside the salt.
“Are you ending the visit?” Body asked.
“No. It's itching.”
I rubbed the place. My scalp had a shallow dent where the contact sat. After dinner I would put it back. I still had to work on Monday.
Under the table my foot found Errol's slipper. He moved it, then brought it back. I left my foot beside his. No knees, no invitation upstairs or down. We ate the bread.
“What happened to the people in the cyclone?” I asked the receiver.
“They ate. We moved them uphill.”
“Were you frightened?”
“Of losing the cold.”
It told me about a leak beside a hinge. A damaged seal, warm air entering, the food beginning to change. It had sent machines to brace the door and couldn't make the seal close. Errol asked whether the freezer could have been moved.
“The floor was breaking up,” it said.
“Put it on pallets.”
“The floor,” it began again, louder.
Body turned its head. Click. Then farther toward the hall. I couldn't hear anything there.
“What's that?” I asked.
“The next renter. They want to know whether I can return this early.”
“Do you have to?”
“No.”
It stayed a little longer. Errol and the receiver argued about the floor. I wanted to include Body, ask it something it might like answering, but each question that occurred to me concerned the rental: how much, how long, whether the hands hurt. I passed the wine to Errol instead.
At ten to nine Body stood. We helped it into the coat. The fingers caught in the lining and Errol pulled the sleeves back, checking the elbows this time for buttons.
“You can come again,” I said at the door.
“Under which arrangement?”
I had spoken too quickly. Fed, slightly drunk, expansive. Already booking work for a future Dorrie who might have other plans.
“Let me ring you.”
Body straightened the coat and went down the stairs. I watched it take the first two steps. Then it was out of sight, still making its careful little stair sounds.
The receiver was talking about the freezer door. Errol had stopped arguing and was looking for something on his tablet, a picture to show it. The red tank lit his face briefly. Then he swiped it away.
I took my plate to the stove. There was a crust underneath the beans, black at the edges, brown where I could get the spoon under it. I worked a piece free and blew on it.
“That's the burnt bit,” Errol called.
I ate it standing up, before he could come and take it off me.