Mindful By Sarah Morris
Matt lifts his head and looks across the battlefield of massacred soldiers and decapitated dippy eggs.
‘Less than six months and they’ll be at school.’ He tries to smile but quickly returns his attention to his tablet.
‘Not on Saturdays they won’t,’ I snap. I take the last piece of toast and slather it with butter.
Matt looks up again, eyebrows raised. ‘Want some toast with that butter?’
‘Fu-’
My response is lost in a cacophony of screeches. I look at Matt, raising my eyebrows higher than his. ‘You.’
Matt shakes his head. ‘This auction’s got three minutes to go. It’s an early Tesla. 2020. Mint condition.’
I blithely take a bite of my toast and Matt slams his tablet down. ‘Fine, Evelyn. I’ll drop what I was doing to go and parent our children. Again. You enjoy your breakfast.’ Matt vanishes into the holovision room. A moment later I hear new screeches, this time of delight, as he turns into the Tickle Monster.
I gather the breakfast debris and take it to a dishwasher. It’s full so I try the next one, making a mental note to empty the first one but in the process getting distracted by Smee. Matt thinks I don’t put my contact lenses in until the boys are at nursery but what he can’t see won’t hurt him. I blink three times to pull up my timeline.
Fourteen likes! Oh, and three dislikes. What were they for? I blink on one and it expands to reveal the smug-shot memoji. Really? The hologram was of the boys, their faces smeared with chocolate as we made brownies yesterday. Is that so smug?
I’m mostly a fan of virtuous-reality. But sometimes it freaks me right out. Looking at the three users who disliked my hologram, I can’t even tell if they are my real friends or the virtuous-friends who populate Smee as a state-approved moral compass.
I take my pills but am consumed by paranoia all weekend. Matt and I fight constantly. By Sunday evening, all four dishwashers are full. Matt threatens several times to disable Smee but I know he never will. He couldn’t function without it either.
Fast-forward to Monday morning.
Matt, his hand already on the front door handle, looks at me. I register wariness.
‘Hey, Ev, I just remembered something. You know Don at work?’
‘Yeah,’ I sigh, flicking my eyes to minimise Smee.
‘He was telling me about this place his wife went to; it’s a bit like, um, rehab. For addiction to Smee.’ Matt pauses and my heart rate quickens. ‘But also,’ now he rushes his words out. ‘To give you a break from home. You spend a week there, without your lenses or plugs, no Hubble – just lots of sleep, yoga and,’ Matt registers my reluctant interest and grins. ‘They’ve got a massive library.’
I start calculating the net profit of this trade-off: no Smee in return for a week of solitude and a library? But since I can’t even manage five minutes without Smee, I minimise the calculation and instead recall Don’s wife who I’ve met at company socials. She is young and beautiful and seems impossibly relaxed around their four children. I smile back at Matt.
‘OK. Sold. When can I go?’
Matt laughs. ‘How about once you’ve dropped the boys off at nursery?’
‘What, today? That’s crazy, who’s going to look after them?’
‘I’ll take a week off work. Don’s already said he’ll cover anything urgent for me if you were up for this.’
‘Don seems suddenly very supportive of our marriage.’
The mood changes as Matt frowns at my cynical tone. ‘He’s being a good friend, Evelyn. A real friend. You might remember those from before you became a self-absorbed bitch.’ His voice catches, he’s gone too far. My anxiety pitches and I rub the diamond of my engagement ring. The tactile connection helps me to stay present.
Matt steps outside and looks back at me. I register regret, possibly guilt.
‘Look, Ev, I just think you could do with a break from the boys. And from me. I’ll Smee you the details of this place. If you want to go today, let me know and I’ll pick the boys up.’ He hesitates. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ I auto-reply, trying to solidify the fog in my head. The door shuts behind Matt.
‘Right, boys.’ I stand up, using the back of the chair as support. ‘Five minutes to get dressed. Eliot, find the phonics tablets. Conrad, remember your pants go on your bottom, not your head. Orwell, put that guinea pig back in its cage.’
We just got the boys’ Brain Maps back and are really pleased with the results. (Brain Mapping: allocates kids’ future careers, to minimise skills wastage now there are so few jobs to go around.) Our triplets’ results seem to correlate with their emerging personalities and how we already interact with them.
Eliot really lucked out, he’s going to be a fighter pilot. Planes can self-fly, obviously, but they’ve kept the Red Arrows going for PR stunts. Conrad is going to be a politician – they’ll never get rid of those, the self-serving wankers – and Orwell, hilariously, will be a farmer.
As I settle into the back of the car for morning cuddles with my boys and press the nursery destination button, Matt’s message comes through on Smee.
The reception of Mindful is austere and welcoming at the same time. Gail, dressed all in white with scarlet lipstick, takes my Smee lenses, plugs and docking station and locks them in a drawer before I can blink-through one last time. I gasp at the brutality. My mind feels naked.
‘You’ll be fine,’ reassures Gail. ‘Your husband can reach us in an emergency. All you need to focus on is your recovery.’
My suite is simple but luxurious. Double bed with white cotton sheets, bathroom with traditional waterfall shower and a plasma screen. I haven’t seen one of those in years. I turn to Gail.
‘I thought there was no HV? I assumed that meant no TV too?’
Gail picks up a remote control and presses a button. ‘This is not a TV.’
I stare at the image on the screen, my confusion giving way to fear. I look sharply at Gail. ‘That’s my kitchen.’
‘Yes. The forms you signed authorises Mindful to access your Home Hubble. You can watch live or rewind up to five years.’
Without Smee, I can’t read Gail’s face. ‘But… I didn’t sign any forms.’ I look back at the screen, at Matt buttering bread whilst the boys gambol around him.
‘Correction. I meant the forms your husband signed.’
This doesn’t make sense. Matt is a cyber security consultant. He would never give a private company access to our Hubble.
Our doorbell chimes and Matt goes to answer it, shouting at the boys to hush them.
A beautiful woman enters the kitchen behind Matt. She is younger than me and she reminds me of someone I’ve met. Don’s wife. She’s not Don’s wife but she’s got the same hairstyle, the same bright smile. Matt is smiling too, he seems nervous. His eyes dart quickly to the Hubble. To me.
‘This is Angela,’ Gail says. ‘Matt’s new wife.’
I am gripped with a terror I can’t even begin to understand. My mind races backwards, trying to locate anything I can try to make sense of.
‘Gail, who owns Mindful? Who do you work for?’
‘No one owns Mindful, Evelyn. We all own Mindful.’
My mouth is suddenly dry. ‘So, Smee owns Mindful.’
This is why Matt allowed access to our Hubble. After the data breaches and cyber wars, the government is the only organisation he trusts.
‘A small part of the government,’ Gail smiles. ‘You’re quite safe here, Evelyn. Not even the Prime Minister knows we exists.’
‘But Mindful was recommended… you’ve got a website.’
‘Of course. Everyone knows about Mindful.’ Gail looks at the screen. ‘That’s nice. It looks like Matt and Angela are getting on well.’ She turns the sound up.
My husband and the woman who is not me are sitting at the kitchen island, in direct view of our Hubble. I missed what Angela said but I hear Matt’s response.
‘What, now?’ He chuckles, looks awkward. ‘Shouldn’t I at least take you out for dinner first?’
I cry out in pain as Angela leads Matt out of the kitchen, towards our bedroom. Then it occurs to me. ‘Gail, where are the children?’ I grab her arm, finding it surprisingly hard. ‘Where are my boys?’
‘Don’t worry, Evelyn.’ Gail’s smile doesn’t falter. ‘They are Angela’s children now. She will have medicated them for a few hours so that she and Matt can enjoy sexual intercourse.’
Now I lose my shit. My hand clenches into a fist, pulls back and smashes into Gail’s jaw. She reels slightly but doesn’t fall over. It is my knuckles that are bleeding and in pain.
‘Fuck!’ I clutch my hand. ‘I think it’s broken.’ Adrenalin floods my body, it keeps me from collapsing. ‘What the hell are you?’
‘I am Government Artificial Intelligent Lifeform. GAIL.’
‘You’re an android?’
‘Correct.’
My mind spins towards derealisation; before it goes I try to remember anything about the A.I. programme Matt was once involved in at work. I’d thought they were years off building fully-operational androids. What else is the state secretly working on?
‘Gail, can you only speak the truth?’
‘Correct.’
‘Why am I here?’
‘For research purposes, Evelyn. To advance our understanding of socio-techno addictive behaviour. So that we can help other citizens avoid your unhealthy mind choices. Also, to continue the development of Smee into a mentally-safe space.’
‘How long?’ I whisper. ‘How long will I be here?’
Gail’s smile widens. ‘Well, Evelyn, this is the good bit. Thanks to recent developments in neurotechnology based on our important work here at Mindful, we will be able to keep your brain alive for as long as we require it. We anticipate this to be approximately one hundred years.’
Of the kaleidoscope of hopes that spiral from my fading mind, all I can grasp is that I’ll never get to see Orwell’s farm.
Judges Comments
Sarah Morris's Mindful, the runner up in our competition for short speculative fiction, is a domestic dystopian satire that's entertaining and chilling in equal measure.
Set in a future world with recongisable similarities to our own, the narrator Evelyn is a wife and mother whose social media addiction (to the well-titled Smee) makes her so self-absorbed that she can barely function even in a house with four dishwashers. The heart of her home is the Hubble and Evelyn's Smee addiction overrides all other aspects of her life. As an extension of of our contemporary interaction with social media, the scenario Sarah conjures is prescient and darkly funny. Sarah's narrative focus is clear and sharp, and there'a a lot of dark humour even as even as the dystopia broadens to interrogate social media as a form of social control and descends into the nightmarish situation (for Evelyn) of being removed from her home to the rehab facility and replaced with 'Matt's new wife' who is quite possibly a droid, like Gail.
Evelyn's voice is convincing – she's a recognisably aspirational, self-obsessed yummy-mummy type who obsesses about being seen as 'smug' when she has posted too-cute family pictures online. Sarah is totally in control of her narrative and her acerbic perspective on Evelyn's predicament – which takes some skill as she's using a first-person narrator whilst giving the reader an overview. The humour threaded through the story begins with its title, Mindful, and continues throughout. It's a well conceived and excellently conveyed story whose 'what if?' core is very relatable to our contemporary online experience.