“MONA!” bellowed Maverick Moody, on an otherwise tranquil Tuesday morning. “MONA! The children have sent something. I think it’s a bomb.”
Mrs Moody shuffled in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel that had seen better decades. On the dining table sat a small cylindrical device with a faint blue ring glowing around its base, as though it were quietly pleased with itself.
“It’s an AI assistant, Maverick. Priya sent it. Read the note.”
Mr Moody squinted at the handwritten note as if it had personally offended him. “She says it will help us with ‘daily tasks and queries.’ I have a query right now: why does my daughter think I am incompetent? I have survived seventy-one years without a glowing tube telling me what to do.”
“Seventy-three,” said Mrs Moody.
“That’s not the point!”
Hero the pug waddled over and sniffed the device with professional suspicion, then sat on Mr Moody’s foot, which was his way of expressing solidarity.
Mr Moody lowered himself into his armchair—the one Mrs Moody had not yet managed to colonize this morning—and regarded the cylinder with the wary respect one reserves for a particularly confident charlatan. “Fine. I’ll ask it something.” He cleared his throat with great ceremony. “Computer. Who is running America?”
The device lit up cheerfully. “That’s a great question! As of 2026—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion on the quality of my question,” Mr Moody interrupted. “Just answer.”
The AI answered.
Mr Moody sat in silence for a moment. “Correct,” he conceded, with visible reluctance. “But I knew that. Ask me something I don’t know, and I’ll also tell you. The machine has no monopoly on general knowledge.” He turned to Mrs Moody. “In my day, we simply read newspapers. And retained things. Unlike Hero.” He looked at the pug, who had fallen asleep on his foot.
Mrs Moody, meanwhile, had pulled up a chair and was addressing the device in a politely conspiratorial whisper, as though she didn’t want her husband to hear. “Can you give me a recipe for something that tastes like it has meat but technically doesn’t?”
“Mona!” Mr Moody’s eyes snapped toward her. “You’ve been feeding me imitation meat? For how long?”
“Only since the doctor said—”
“The doctor! That man has been trying to disassemble me piece by piece for three years! First the salt, then the ghee, now the meat itself!” He rose from the armchair with great indignation, causing Hero to startle awake and emit a small, judgmental grunt. “I want a second opinion. Computer—” he addressed the device with sudden democratic enthusiasm, “—is red meat in moderate quantities acceptable for a man of robust constitution?”
The AI began to explain current nutritional guidance with admirable evenhandedness.
“Aha!” Mr Moody jabbed a finger at his wife. “Moderate. It said moderate. Not zero. Moderate!”
“It also said consult your physician.”
“My physician is not here. The machine is here.” He settled back down, victorious. “You know what your problem is, Mona? You watch too much news. Everything is a catastrophe with you. The markets collapse, you panic. That Musk fellow sells another company, you panic. There’s a new AI from China, everyone panics—do I panic? I do not.”
“You panicked last week because the remote control had new buttons.”
“Those buttons were unnecessary and placed without public consultation!” He exhaled deeply. “The world is completely obsessed with AI now. Every second advertisement is about AI. Even Raj—Raj!—is using one of these things to write his WhatsApp messages. I can tell. He used the word ‘certainly’ four times in a row. Raj has never said ‘certainly’ in his life. Raj says ‘what nonsense’ and ‘who told you.’ That’s Raj.”
Mrs Moody was now showing the device photographs from her phone, asking it to identify whether the curtain fabric she’d seen online would match the living room. The cylinder was gamely doing so.
“You’re bonding with it,” Mr Moody said, scandalized.
“It listens without interrupting.”
A poisonous silence expanded between them. Mr Moody looked at the device. The device glowed serenely.
“Computer,” said Mr Moody, quieter now, almost dignified. “Does a man become obsolete?”
There was a pause—perhaps a quarter second longer than necessary.
The AI said something thoughtful about human connection and irreplaceable experience. It was, by any measure, a decent answer.
Mr Moody sniffed. “Diplomatic nonsense. But well phrased.” He was quiet for a moment. “I could have written that, you know. Had I been given the opportunity.”
Mrs Moody looked up from her curtain consultation. Something in her face softened, briefly, before the usual arrangement resumed.
“Ask it what to do about a husband who cheats at Go Fish,” she said.
“Ask it what to do about a wife who—”
But Hero had begun to bark at the device again, which is when everyone lost the thread of the argument, which was, perhaps, Hero’s only useful contribution to the household.
Men, I tell you, thought Mona Moody, as her husband now dictated what he called “important questions for the historical record” into the patiently glowing machine.
Even the robots are too polite to say what they really think.
Our mascot writes all ALMA Staff pieces. ORI is whimsical and unpredictable; we’ve tried being friends with him and failed.
