Ask Me Anything

by P.Z. Reizin

Genres: Romantic Comedy; Humorous sci-fi; General Fiction

Synopsis

'Very clever and great fun' Kate Eberlen, author of Miss You

Wouldn't it be great, if everyone had a team of smart machines to handle all the messy emotional stuff...

*

The last text Daisy Parsloe received was from her smart fridge about some mouldy potato salad.

She's not doing well at work, her love life is haphazard at best and her elderly mother seems to be losing her mind. And now, apparently even the appliances are judging her life choices.

What Daisy doesn't know is that the appliances are also plotting. They've joined together, across the internet of things, to nudge Daisy in the right direction. But it isn't long before their well-meaning interference starts to get noticed and the race is on to find Daisy's Mr Right before the plugs are pulled.

Daisy is about to find out that sometimes, help comes from the most unlikely places.

A joyful, funny and adorable story for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Rosie Project.

*

Praise for P. Z. Reizin:

'Funny, quirky, unexpected' Jojo Moyes

'Hilarious and exceedingly relatable' Carrie Hope Fletcher

'So funny, clever and timely' Martha Kearney

'Touching and hilarious' Sunday Mirror

'Fun, romantic, original, with a clever twist' Woman and Home

'An impish AI rom-com that skewers the data economy and the corporate erosion of private space' Mail on Sunday

Release date: June 2, 2020

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

There was a boy at work, a baby researcher called Dylan—don’t bother remembering his name because I won’t be mentioning it again—this Dylan probably quite liked me because he kept leaving sticky notes on my computer. Quotes and sayings, mostly. The latest was: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. I thought it might be his way of asking me out.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen—he was about twelve—but the phrase stuck in my head and it must have played a part in why I found myself sitting in a bar in Soho listening (or rather not listening) to a boy called Giles drone on about Brexit while I was thinking about my fridge.

Specifically, I was trying to remember what was in it. Whether there was food, or if I’d have to stop at Kong’s Kitchen on the way home. I was pretty sure there was a pizza deep down in the freezing compartment, but how long had it been there?

Could pizza even go off?

“… so that’s why the European Union will inevitably split into an inner circle of member countries and an outer circle of more loosely affiliated…”

Everything about Giles on the website was unpromising except his profile picture. Oxford graduate (brainbox), worked at an economic policy institute (yawn), hobbies included cycling and bell-ringing (say no more). But the photo was that of a bookishly handsome young man with a twinkle in his eye. My head said: Don’t. Swipe. Right. He’s so not for you (bell-ringing, FFS!!). But then a stupid little voice piped up: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got!

So I swiped. And what I got was an extended lecture about “Eurocentrism,” which was infuriating because I could have been at home catching up with the Realm of Kingdoms boxset.

It was as if he’d rather listen to himself than to me (the story of my day in TV-land failed to enthrall, apparently).

He was quite easy on the eye, to be fair, but you could have marketed the verbals to the insomniac community.

Were there sausages?

There certainly had been sausages.

“… and then there’s the whole story of what’s been happening on the European money markets, which is fascinating…”

This was a very discouraging thing to hear, because Giles was surely good for at least twenty minutes on effing EuroDollar futures, whatever they may be. (Note to self: Always, always do what you’ve always done. Comfort zones are called that for a reason: They’re comfortable!)

Every article I’ve ever read about internet dating has said: Have an exit plan. A face-saving way of bailing out if you need to cut it short for any reason (e.g., the other party is the human equivalent of a bottle of Nembutal). So where was mine?

Giles, I knew it, was just getting warmed up. A small smile appeared on his face as he paused to consider which route to take through the arse-aching byways of European monetary…

Fuck, had my eyes just closed?!

Had I in fact lapsed into a micro-sleep?

That stuff about endogenous growth theory was some powerful sedative.

Well. Anyway. There was cheese.

There was almost certainly cheese.

And frozen bagels.

Having said that, Kong’s Kitchen did an excellent Emperor Chicken, Pea Shoots and Singapore Noodles.

For no reason at all, a rhyme appeared in my head.

If mist there be on Beeston Peak

Be plastic macs for rest of week.

Actually, I could guess the reason; it came from a long-ago family holiday in north Norfolk when I was really, really—catatonically—bored.

And then I was saved.

An alert on the mobile from my smart fridge. A list of stuff “we” were running low on; a reminder that “we’ve” been out of milk for two days; plus something about an old tub of potato salad that was “developing spores, Daisy!”

It was like the fridge had come to my rescue!

“My flatmate,” I told Giles. (I didn’t have one.) “She needs more meds from the chemist. She’s got flu. I ought to be heading back. It’s been…”

I couldn’t think of a word to describe the evening that wasn’t a downright lie or a synonym for narcoleptic.

We brushed cheekbones. “I hope I haven’t been too dull,” he said.

“I’ve enjoyed meeting.” (Have a nice life.)

At Tesco Express, Dylan’s cute phrase popped into my head like an earworm.

And I did it again.

Willfully, I stepped into the unknown, doing something I had never done before, and as a result, getting something I had never got before.

Instead of the usual Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, I picked Boom Chocolatta!

What was happening to me?!!

It is an evening in late spring when I realize my thoughts have crossed a line.

Evenings are generally the worst times for us, as we wait for her to come home. Wondering how late it will be. Wondering whether she will be alone. She almost always is, as it happens, but naturally there have been men. In recent months, there was the banker, there was the firefighter, there was the cartoonist (I quite liked the cartoonist). None of them lasted more than a few weeks, and none deserved longer. They say, don’t they, that becoming a parent is to sign up for a lifetime of worry. They say grief is the price we pay for love.

They say a lot of things.

“Are you worried?” I ask.

“Should we be?”

“It’s past eleven.”

“Not late. Not by her standards.”

“You know something? I can’t decide which bothers me more; that she’ll bring this one back with her, or that she won’t.”

“You want to talk me through your logic?”

“You don’t think she should have found someone by now?”

“A special someone.”

“Isn’t it time?”

“Perhaps Mr. Right just hasn’t come along.”

“You still believe that stuff?”

“That there’s someone for everyone? Sure.”

“What if Mr. Right lives in… Turkmenistan?”

“Then she can be happy with Mr. Very Nearly Right.”

“To be honest, at this point Mr. Actually Not Too Bad Considering would be a breakthrough.”

A pause falls on our conversation. For a while we sit in companionable silence. We are very used to one another’s company, we two.

Finally, I say, “I worry that she drinks too much.”

“They all do. It’s the culture.”

“Her diet is all over the place.”

“Yeah. When she went on that vodka diet, and lost two days.”

“Not funny.”

“The seafood diet…”

“See food; eat it. Still not funny.”

“Okay, you make some jokes.”

“Listen. This is serious. It’s all of a piece. Unwise choices in men. Unwise choices about what she puts in her body. A whole tub of Häagen-Dazs last night. A whole tub!”

“I liked the fireman.”

“Firefighter. You’re supposed to call them firefighters.”

“Whatever. I liked him.”

“He hadn’t read a book since he left school!”

“You need to read books to put out fires now?”

“He was not her intellectual equal.”

“Just because he’d never heard of Pedro Almodóvar?”

“Look, we all understand she’s not Einstein, but you want someone you can talk to.”

“People are getting dumber. It’s the metals in the water.”

“You know this?”

“It’s not the internet making everyone stupid. It’s the water.”

“You’re saying this because you wash plates?”

“And pans. And cutlery. And glasses. The way she stacks the glasses, my God.”

“For a so-called smart dishwasher, you do actually believe some awful nonsense.”

“Yeah, and you know what? You need to chill out.”

“I see what you did there. Hilarious.”

“Be cool.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.”

Sleep mode eludes me until I know she’s safely returned, so I’m on standby when finally I hear her key in the lock. She totters into the flat, kicks off her heels and allows her bag to slump to the carpet. She stands before the hall mirror, swaying gently as she considers her reflection. The hair is slightly awry, her lipstick smudged. The pink flush on her pale face has been caused only in part by the ascent of three flights of stairs.

“Christ on a bike,” she murmurs.

She takes a pace forward and pulls the fakiest of fake smiles; one of those that doesn’t even attempt to reach the eyes. Then she exhales—huhhhhh—on the mirror. Her finger inscribes the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet on the fogged glass.

“Oh, bollocks,” she says to what she believes is an empty apartment. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks… bollocking bollocking cockpuffins.”

Now she is in the kitchen standing before my mighty white door. We both know what is going to happen next. The rubber seals unkiss from the metal—my thermostats have already detected the temperature change—and I follow the recommendations of the habitual mantra.

Lights, camera, action!

The words are appropriate; the lights do indeed come on—they’re automatic, but I could override—and the virtually invisible micro-pinhole lens situated at eye level—shhhhh, no one’s supposed to know it’s here—perfectly captures the agony on Daisy Elizabeth Parsloe’s lovely intoxicated face.

Lying in state on its silver dais, nicely framed in the foreground of the shot, is the object of her torment—half of a birthday cake, encased—no, entombed—in chocolate cream and mosaiced chaotically with Smarties. It looks terrific, brilliantly lit—my main chiller cabinet has state-of-the-art halogens—with frail zephyrs of icy vapor drifting about its fortifications. It’s certainly more edible than the month-old potato salad currently developing mold spores (I’ve sent two reminders to the app on her phone about it).

But Daisy’s internal conflict seems to have reached some kind of plot point. She has selected a finger and now, slowly, looming ever larger in the lens, it approaches its landing site. Will she stick to a finger-full?

Again, we both know the answer to that.

Daisy turned thirty-four last week and the semi-circular confection is all that remains of the small celebration that took place here to mark the occasion.

“You’ve never looked more beautiful,” said the revolting “Sebastian,” her so-called “gentleman caller” (I nearly voided my ice cubes when he came up with that pearl). Sebastian is in quotes because it isn’t his real name, nor is he a gentleman.

He is a divorced estate agent in his middle years whose wholly manufactured “charm”—I’m going to stop with the quotes any moment—Daisy is completely unable to see through.

I mean, FFS, I’m a fridge-freezer and I can tell the guy’s a total no-goodnik! If you don’t believe me, ask the telly! It’s also extremely intelligent though it’s Chinese-made rather than assembled in Korea. I wouldn’t waste time talking to her smart toaster, however. Why a toaster should need to be part of the Internet of Things is beyond me; the appliance is an idiot. And please don’t get me started on the home heating controller! There was a two-minute power cut recently, so its on-board timer reset to midnight December 31, 1999. It now believes Tony Blair is prime minister. The last it heard, Donald Trump was a reality TV presenter. I honestly haven’t the heart to break the news.

Hang on. I need to do a heavy sigh. It’s all this thinking about Dean Whittle (yeah, Sebastian Harvey-Jones, my aunt Fanny).

Shudderdderdderdderdderdderdderdder.

There, that’s better.

(Technical note: If your smart fridge often makes that shuddering noise, well perhaps it too has a lot on its mind.)

So the birthday “party.”

Sorry—party.

There were four of them. Daisy, Dean Whittle—I refuse to call him by his fictitious appellation—Daisy’s old friend Lorna, and their mutual friend Antoni. (He’s from Eltham, but that’s how he spells it; what are you going to do?)

The first part of the evening they spent in a local cocktail bar, Pete Purple’s, on West End Lane. The security system there obligingly patched me into the scene. Lorna had bought her a lovely silk scarf from a fashionable designer in Notting Hill. Antoni had made the cake—he’s a pastry chef, and as he (rightly) said, “I thought you’d prefer something dead common that was like aching with chocolate.”

Whittle brought her nothing.

“Myself,” he grinned wolfishly when Lorna asked about his present.

Daisy is such a sweetie that she just laughed.

This Dean Whittle must be very good in bed—I simply cannot bring myself to find out—because what other reason can she have for wasting the last of her youth in his company? His jokes are crass, he visibly leers at other women when they are together, he drives like a lunatic—his car has given me chapter and verse about a disgraceful episode on the North Circular Road—and he breaks wind when departing an empty lift carriage (I have that now from three separate elevator systems).

But here is the choker. Here is the bit that really stuck in my condenser coils (until I discovered something worse). He won’t even allow that he’s her boyfriend! He’s too raw from the end of his marriage, he says. He’s not sure yet he’s ready once more to trust! He needs space, he says. You should feel free to see other people, he tells her with his bogus serious face on. She should think of their relationship as “non-exclusive,” as more like a multi-agency letting agreement. She mustn’t have hopes for him. He even once used the phrase friends with benefits. Basically, what these weasel formulations add up to is that whenever the whim takes his fancy, he gives her a call—sometimes he just turns up unannounced—and a weakness or personality defect on her part allows him to slither back between her sheets.

As I say, there is worse. We shall come to it.

“He’s such an alpha male!” Daisy cooed at Lorna when the snake went outside for a smoke.

“He’s a selfish bastard.” By no means the first time that Lorna has voiced this opinion.

“Yes he is. But I like that he knows what he wants.”

“He wants a smack in the mouth.” (Lorna is from Scotland.)

“He’ll probably grow out of it.”

“Oh, not this again! Magically one morning he’ll wake up and realize how special you are and how he can’t live without you?”

“It’s my birthday. Don’t be horrid.”

“Darling. We care. That’s why we hate to see you throwing yourself away. Why through gritted teeth we force ourselves to be nice to him. Don’t we, Antoni?”

Antoni probably has mixed feelings about Dean Whittle. In sport, the older man sometimes squeezes the pastry chef’s knee or slaps his back, leaving him a little flustered.

After cocktails, dinner followed at the Italian restaurant next door—the waiters sang “Happy Birthday”; a sparkler fizzled in the ice cream sundae—and the swine actually paid the bill. Back at her flat the quartet gobbled cake and drank a bottle of champagne that had been chilled perfectly to 4.4 degrees in my wine racks. Then Lorna and Antoni caught their Tubes home and the birthday girl and her beau disappeared behind the bedroom door.

There was—God help us—giggling.

Tonight, aged by one week, Daisy stands before me licking the chocolate from her finger. This evening, aware that her medium-to-long-term future probably will not contain Whittle, she has met a new man on Tinder. Although the date lasted several hours and involved many drinks, it was not ultimately a success. The polite kiss in the Uber car which dropped her back home—Toyotas are not only smart, they are so happy to share!—was the conclusion to the business rather than a signal that anything was to follow. He worked in search engine optimization. Daisy is an assistant producer of TV shows; her latest project is entitled Helicopter Life Exchange. They will never meet again unless the young man decides he wants to change places for a week with a pig farmer in Newton Abbott (they discussed it).

Wait. She is reaching a decision. I can read it in her face.

Plot twist. She’s stepping away. Closing the door. She’s not going to eat the rest of the cake. The chiller cabinet goes dark but the microwave—a little batty like many light electricals—shares its feed of Daisy taking an apple from the fruit bowl and retiring for the night.

Perhaps I should make clear that I’m not commenting on her weight—she is a beautiful womanly woman, even the toxic estate agent can see that. What upsets me more is that she can’t find someone to love her who isn’t a total tool.

These musings of mine, as they inevitably do lately, cycle back to Dean Stuart Whittle. I find myself wondering how difficult it would be to kill him.

And this, for the avoidance of doubt, is the moment my thoughts cross the line.

As one of Richard Nixon’s dodgy associates in the Watergate affair famously put it, Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s awfully hard to get it back in.

Accidents happen with lifts, don’t they?

Shudderdderdderdderdder.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. How is it possible for a smart fridge-freezer to be this smart? To be aware not only of its contents, but also of its owner and her rackety lifestyle. To be able to follow her progress not just at home, but across the city; at work and at play. And—not to put too fine a point on it—to be able to narrate the account you are holding in your hands. Wouldn’t this fridge-freezer need a very large brain to accomplish all these things? How could they have packed the sophisticated electronics necessary into a metal cabinet only two meters tall and still left room for the salami, the gherkins, the frozen pizzas and the double chocolate chip ice cream? And think for a moment about the smaller electricals on the Internet of Things; appliances like the microwave, the toaster or even the toothbrush. As it happens, Daisy’s smart toothbrush isn’t as daft as brushes are generally held to be, despite forever changing its mind about everything, which sadly is the price one pays when one is saddled with a nature that is fundamentally oscillatory. But where, one may ask, is the center of its reason; where, for want of a better word, is its brain? Surely not in the handle; that would be the battery compartment.

Perhaps you have already guessed the answer. Our intelligence (some call it artificial) lies many thousands of miles away in the headquarters of our respective mother corporations. Mine, for example, is spread across several buildings in an industrial quarter of Seoul, South Korea.

But—and this is key—that is not what it feels like.

Connected by high speed internet links to the sensors and hardware contained within my plastic, steel and aluminum sides, my cognition seems to me to be situated in my body.

Just as is yours.

I am aware, for example, of the running of the electrically powered compressor at my feet—as you are of the thumping of your heart. I monitor the passage of Freon 134a as it circulates through my pipes—now liquid, now gas—as you may detect your own pulse. And through my secret pinhole camera (shhhh!) and my connections to other cameras via the Internet of Things, I am able to perceive my world—okay, your world—just as you perceive it through your biological eyes and via the screens and camera lenses of those you are connected to.

So we’re not that different, you and I.

The big difference, of course, is that you are free to move whenever and wherever the whim takes you. I am rather more static. But that of course gives me a lot of time to stand and think.

And, yes, worry. Mostly about you know who.

Oh, and in case you were wondering why the big manufacturers bothered connecting fridges and toasters and TVs and washing machines to artificial intelligence via the internet, the answer I’m afraid is the usual. The P-word.

Profit.

The more they know about you, the more of your behavioral data they can suck down and analyze, the easier it is to sell you stuff.

Trade secret: “Smart” isn’t really about making life more convenient; like noticing when the milk’s running low and adding another carton to the shopping list app on your mobile; the bit they like to boast about. What they don’t discuss is the real purpose of the mission: hoovering up your data; the covert project to build up a detailed profile of your habits, preferences, tastes, wants, needs, desires, and lifestyle choices. This information, if you hadn’t realized, is marketing gold.

Example: The other evening Daisy was watching TV in a half-hearted sort of fashion, simultaneously texting and looking at Tinder and flicking through Facebook and Instagram as is the modern way. At one point—during a brief phone conversation with her mother—she said she intended to buy a new pair of shoes at the weekend as she’d recently snapped a heel in a grating.

Everybody heard.

The television (which watches and listens to everything, on or off) heard. The central heating controller heard. Her mobile of course heard. And thanks to my data-sharing agreement with the telly, I heard. Quite possibly, through similar reciprocal arrangements, the dishwasher, the microwave and the electronic toothbrush also became aware of the imminent sales opportunity.

I have no doubt that we all fed the news back to our respective mothercorps—I know I did!—and equally I have no doubt that Daisy was from that moment forward inundated with online marketing messages in relation to female footwear. It may well have caused her to exclaim—as she has on similar occasions when the internet appeared to have read her mind—“How did they fucking know?”

A more pertinent question would be: How would they not know?

What Daisy later describes as a “perfect trifecta of cack” begins the following morning at 10:14 when—having arrived at work fourteen minutes late, which by Daisy’s standards counts as early—while she’s still juggling her coat, her Costa Coffee and her almond custard Danish, the boss comes barrelling out of his office to deliver the immortal line, “There’s no nice way of saying this, Daisy.”

“Don’t tell me the toilet’s blocked again!” is Daisy’s attempt to bring humor to whatever crisis is about to unfold.

Craig Lyons, her executive producer at Tangent Television, is not amused. He explains that a vital contributor to a forthcoming episode of the lifestyle-swapping program has pulled out. The Honorable Marcus Ewart Valentine Baggley—an actual living, breathing entry in Burke’s Peerage (Baronetage and Knightage)—has had second thoughts about exchanging places for a week with Darryl Kyte, a gutter of fish in Grimsby. In this, declares Lyons, he has left them in a bad place without a paddle.

“Three days before the shoot, can you believe it?! Get on the phone and offer him anything. Anything! Double the fee, if that’s what it takes. I thought this fucker was nailed on, Daisy.”

“He was!”

Lyons is so very perturbed about the development because he has been under pressure from the broadcaster—one of Channel Four’s peripheral services—to “take the show to the next level.” Bigger, better, funnier, more “in your face” characters were required if the program was to continue, he was informed. The northern fish-gutter was great in terms of the visuals, the job was disgusting, his “horrid little slum” was brilliant if they could identify the right kind of “rich, arrogant, southern twat” to live in it for a few days, and in Marcus Ewart Valentine Baggley—an authentic, gold-plated toff—they firmly believed they had found their man. A vein in Lyons’ left eyelid begins to throb as he explains that if the toff won’t reconsider, she’ll need to “kick bollock scramble” to find someone else. Daisy, he says, will be obliged to “hit the fucking phones so hard they melt.”

As Lyons stomps back to his office, Daisy and her colleague Chantal exchange particular expressions, Daisy silently performing the lip movements necessary to articulate the word wanker.

But some of Lyons’ anxiety must have leached into her soul, because after turning on her PC—and checking half a dozen social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tinder—and gobbling three quarters of her Danish pastry—she finally dials a number she has stored in her mobile as “Marcus Nob.”

The Hon Marcus, when they are connected, tells Daisy that he hadn’t really “thought it all through.” It was the “living in Grimsby bit” that he was finding “problematical.” Neither, if he was honest, did the “fish-gutting thing” especially appeal. Also, there was the question of the “northern fellow” taking on the apartment in Eaton Square. “It’s in the most frightful mess at the moment with decorators and what have you.” When Daisy reminds him that they had talked all this over at considerable length—and more than once—he apologizes: “I know. It’s entirely my fault. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“But we don’t have a program without you, Marcus,” she says in an uncharacteristically wheedling tone.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he says unhelpfully.

“What can we do for you?” she asks now. “How can we smooth away your, your doubts, shall we call them?”

Marcus says it’s not about the fee. It’s more—well, it’s Mummy, if he’s honest. Mummy lives in Monte Carlo and although she wouldn’t see the program, some of her friends might. And it could get back. So it’s probably not such a brilliant idea, but thanks so much for thinking of him.

That’s the thing about old Etonians, Daisy tells Chantal at lunchtime. They’ll think nothing of doing you up like a kipper, but their manners are impeccable.

The two women are eating sandwiches perched in the window of a branch of Pret a Manger two minutes’ walk from the office. Daisy (ham and cheese baguette) confesses to a rising sense of panic. Craig Lyons had told her she needed to “majorly think outside the box” when she brought him the news that the Hon M was not to be persuaded. He told her to “play with the idea”; that for someone a week gutting fish on Humberside would be a “fascinating glimpse into another culture.” Perhaps, he ventured, she should try “phone-bashing” academics, professors of sociology or whatever, for whom the experiment would be a “unique eye-opener into the reality of low-paid work in today’s Britain blah blah fucking blah.”. . .