Alone

The smell of sourdough loaf permeated the cold mansion, but something was off. It smelled too harsh and sour, even for sourdough.

Ken knew he probably ignored the dough for too long. He had first prepared it last week but got distracted by a list of chores his wife had left for him. A lot of them seemed superfluous, like she asked an AI assistant for help.

She wanted a “morning sweep” that included checking for things that might have happened at night. Leaks, blown bulbs, security alerts. But they got those alerts on their phone. That’s how he knew his wife must have asked an AI assistant.

When they’d first gotten married, almost a decade ago, he was worried about her assistants at the bank, each of whom seemed younger and hunkier than the last. But he had a mind.

Now he was worried about these AI assistants. He knew technically they were mindless: they didn’t think at all. The hunks just seemed mindless. But the AI assistants could fake it in a way the human ones never could.

He tried to tell her what she wanted to hear, he really did, and usually he got it right. But he was no competition against something trained to please. He’d been trained the best he could be, but he still had independent thoughts. The AI assistants told Barbara exactly what she wanted to hear, and did so in a compelling way.

But they couldn’t bake sourdough bread. Right now though, neither could he. He was busy wiping down the kitchen like she wanted him to do every day now when he decided he had to do something about the smell. The problem with baking bread though was that there was nothing you could really do once it was in the oven but wait. Worst case scenario, the bread would be ruined but he’d have something to bring the birds at the park.

He liked taking a daily walk to the park. It reminded Ken that he was still alive. The mansion itself always felt so sterile, even the greenhouse. He hadn’t been to the park in days because of the new daily chores his wife had left him.

He’d often asked Barbara if they could bring plants into the mansion itself, but they had a cat, Buttercup IV, his wife insisted would die from nibbling on a plant if any were brought in.

She was on Buttercup II when they first started dating. Buttercup II was a golden yellow Maine coon so the name still made sense. The original Buttercup was a yellow tabby Barbara had gotten as a teenager.

Buttercup IV, on the other hand, was an ugly gray mongrel Ken hated. He’d never been particularly violent but enjoyed kicking Buttercup IV away on the rare occasion the cat made an appearance in front of him. It started innocently enough, or accidentally, at least.

Ken simply hadn’t seen the nasty furball the first time his foot kicked the cat, sending it scurrying down the hall like something out of a cartoon. It made him laugh out loud.

He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. He could go all day without making a noise. Sometimes he’d say something to himself to break the silence, but he didn’t want to make a habit of it.

So the next time he saw the cat, a few days later, he gave it a firm kick and soaked in the laughter. He knew it was mean-spirited. It wasn’t Buttercup IV’s fault it was so ugly and neither was it the cat’s fault that his wife seemed to have more affection for it than she did for him.

Despite the chores his wife saddled Ken with in her fury over him wasting his time and her money alone in the house all day, there were no cat-related chores. Barbara already had to get up two hours before her work day started to deal with her hair and make-up, but she still made time for Buttercup IV.

Meanwhile, he’d stopped trying to vie for Barbara’s attention in the morning years ago. It used to be his favorite time to be intimate with her, a beautiful way to start the day and remember what life was for. Now he took intimacy whenever he could get it, which was not that often.

He’d brought it up when Barbara first gave him the list of chores. Would there be a reward?

Yeah, she replied. He’d get to keep living there.

But he had tried to keep up the house on his own. Once he even ordered flowers to put out in the kitchen and living room, hoping to leave a romantic impression for Barbara. She freaked out about Buttercup IV, even though he’d gone over the order with the florist to make sure none of the flowers could possibly be allergic to cats.

She didn’t believe it. The florist, she argued to Ken, would be motivated to sell flowers, not to make sure there were. She almost had him. Barbara had a way of explaining things, framing them, that made it hard for Ken to think it through in a different way. It made him feel discombobulated at first.

Eventually he learned these were intuition pumps, and sometimes he’d be able to identify them, though often not until after the fact and he had already been pumped.

He was holding his list of chores in one hand, scratching his head aimlessly with the other and half wondering where exactly Buttercup IV hid all day when a knocking on the door interrupted his train of thought.

-Who could that be?

He listened to his voice echo off the walls of the vast kitchen. It was the first thing he’d said all day.