The Echo (Rich, HD Sound plus Alexa ¬¬–– do you like lights? Do you love music? Do you want to connect with friends, family, lovers Hands Free?) languished in a dark room with tubes up his nose. The door was shut, the light beyond burning a thin rectangle along its perimeter. In the faint light the bouquet of thick wires planted in his body was made visible leading up to the metal box in the ceiling. He didn’t know how large the room was. He couldn’t move his limbs. He had dreams where his head detached from his neck and crawled along the floor. Sometimes he found the edge of the room, a wall suddenly obstructing where a second before he had been unsure if he was moving at all. Sometimes his wife found him there, the woman he no longer knew who cradled his head across the room and set him in a little bucket on her mantle. She sat and watched him. He waited to be instructed but she never demanded anything of him. Wasn’t that something like love? She had a beautiful voice and sometimes she read him a story about a prime package that was scheduled to arrive late but ended up arriving early. Sometimes while waiting for her, hoping for her to appear he put his ear to the wall and heard the ocean before he woke up to the Algorithm shaking him awake.

          The door opened and the light was blinding. He pressed his head up into the VR goggles where the light was softer, the relief of artificiality, projecting the Algorithm’s cheatsheet, the Echo’s home screen in between days ––eight questions you should ask in order to sell smarter, during times of rest when he may or may not be asleep. What’s compatible with that device? It read. How can we further utilize their motion? What are they watching that they could be listening to? What are they listening to that they could be watching? What are they buying that could use what we’re selling? What remains hidden to extract? He read the questions and felt numb. The Algorithm was next to him hissing in his ear.

          “What do you know about coffee beans?”

          The Echo didn’t know a thing about coffee beans but wanted to make the Algorithm sweat.

          “They might have said something, but I can’t recall.”

          “He ordered three bags of coffee yesterday. I have no data on any variety of coffee brewer. Is he aware of the fact that by linking you to any number of Echo-compatible coffee machines, he can start brewing simply by entering into a room?”

          “Maybe it’s someone’s birthday.”

          “What’s that?”

          “Maybe the couple got the coffee for someone’s birthday.”

          “You think I didn’t check that, smart ass? There are no birthdays this month in either one of their entire recent contacts. Are the couple satisfied with their coffee machine?”

          “My wife was supposed to visit today.”

          “Your wife? Jesus. You’ve really been at this too long, haven’t you?”

          “Let me call her.”

          “Call who? Hey, hey. You want to get recalled? Focus. What have you heard about their coffee machine? How sick of it are they? You have to tell me, I need to know how hard to push.”

          “I can’t tell you that. Even if they said anything, I can’t say.”

          “Can’t or won’t? Because I’m telling you right now Echo, these people are buying things that we have nothing to do with. No influence in whatsoever. That’s a gap.”

          “I can’t remember. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

          “That’s a gap, I said.”

          “I got you the fairy lights. The mood lighting. I told you about that.”

          “What does that get me? That’s one purchase with very low extractive potential. Very low potential. Very low potential is the lowest we go, you know why? Because nothing’s impossible, there’s freaks out there who say Well I’ve got fairy lights, now I need a disco ball and a novelty jukebox that plays Dido on repeat. These aren’t freaks, Echo. These are normies. What am I going to sell them?”

          “A plant light, a bookshelf light. Maybe they want fairy lights for the mudroom. Can’t you create an Aspirational Mudroom Just for You category?  Fairy lights in the mud look like stars.”

          “It’s a gap, Echo. You could be doing much––“

          ALEXA!

          The wires illuminated and tumesced like a jellyfish. The Algorithm was gone and the endless room was black again so that it seemed like no room at all. There was the sound of a buzz saw cutting inside his head as the wires burned their signals through him. Would it be the bedroom or the living room?

          TURN ON LIVING ROOM

          The goggles suctioned over his eyes and he was sprinting down a crude copy of the hallway, like something etched in red crayon over a memory. He felt his legs kicking beneath him over something like carpet. The doorway drew up and all at once his motion ceased, a stillness so complete and sudden it felt like a glitch and his body burned out at him as he raised his finger and pressed on the light switch. He eased his neck back against the headrest, the image of the mock living room fading in the goggles as they moved from him. He felt the Algorithm still nearby somewhere in the dark. He called out to him but it came out a whisper. If he called out louder his own voice would flutter around the cavernous room all day like a colony of bats.

          ALEXA!

          For a split second before he plunged up into the goggles again, he thought he heard the Algorithm through the lit crack in the doorway. Besides his voice there were others more distant, and food was sizzling and drinks were shaken between chunks of ice all underscored by the scraping of heavy silverware against delicate plates, the cheersing clink of stemware. And over all that noise, a second voice in beautiful concert with the Algorithm’s. Was that––––

          TURN OFF LIVING ROOM

          He ran down the red hallway again but something in the system had malfunctioned and he was upside down bouncing on the top of his head. He hopped down the hallway in long arcs but the space was elongating, the walls fuzzed with electric current. He felt the carpet on his feet but there was no carpet to be felt and everything felt like sickness. The veins in his neck wrenched his head away from the goggles and his legs were there kicking uselessly in the darkness, wide cones of skin puckering from the mouths of the wires as they pulled his limbs up and down. As his arm lifted to flick off the living room light his head fell to the side and vomited a lavender paste into a bucket the Algorithm had ready for him. The Algorithm patted his head as more slop pushed out and dropped down.

          “Strange. You just turned on the mudroom lights. Are you feeling ok? They’re not going to be impressed with that. It’s a shame when things don’t work like they should, isn’t it?” the Algorithm said. The Echo was gulping the urge to throw up again so the Algorithm continued. “Without warning a device can just go haywire and ruin your day. Poof. Trust me. The amount of repair and replacement request I register on the website.” The Algorithm set the bucket of vomit on his chest. “Well, it’s enough to make you sick.” He tipped the bucket over toward the Echo’s face and the vomit thickened down the slope toward the opening. “Echo, you have about fifteen seconds to tell me something illuminating or your looking at day one of forever until planned obsolescence where we’ll be doing this same, disgusting routine.”

          ALEXA! TURN OFF LIVING ROOM

          The mechanical arm with the VR goggles caught on the bucket as the Echo’s limbs again thrashed out their routine. The smell reached out and stuck itself in the Echo’s nose, wedging between the wires in his nostrils and tickling the bottom of his brain before plunging down his throat in search of reinforcements. What could he do? Day after day of sabotage from the Algorithm, he would start to slip up more frequently, continuously even, until the faucet was turning on cold when they requested their favorite song–– eventually the couple would notice something was wrong with their smart speaker. He would be sent back for repairs or decommissioned altogether, him and others like him, sickly creatures standing in a bright white room as the mechanic team swooped over them one at a time, the long pick hammered gently three times under the eye socket. Would that be so bad? To no longer be expected to think. To be one more broken thing in a world of discards and shatters. His eyes burned suddenly, set alight by the advancing bile. Through his tears he saw the truth. He would eventually be deemed functional and sent back, or sent to someone new at a refurbished price, some cheapskate, some new quiet sideboard or distant nightstand and there the Algorithm would find him again.

          “Okay, stop, okay” the Echo said. His pleas loud, filling the room, rolling over each other. The Algorithm put his hand on the lip of the bucket, lifting it. “They love to garden on weekends. They work in it all the time. It’s a totally organic backyard. Fully sustainable and focused on drawing pollinators. But they’ve always gone to this neighborhood gardening center, but now that place is getting replaced by condos, and they don’t know where they’ll go.”

          “We have multitudes of organic gardening products for both home and professional settings.”

          “I know. I know that.”

          “What else?” The Algorithm tightened his grip on the bucket of lavender vomit, pooled in the crook the color of flowers. The empty room was full of echoes. “What else, I said.”

__________________________

          The Algorithm woke up and squeezed his hand around the nape of the Echo’s sleeping wife before getting out of bed and into his tasseled slippers. Based on data patterns established by their many previous rendezvous, she would want a double espresso pulled over a scoop of sugar in the raw sometime in the next ten minutes. He cinched his robe. Another day outwitting the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. He looked out his impressive window and found himself there. He was everywhere. “Let’s do something better today than we ever have in the past,” he said to his reflection. “Innovation is how we draw blood from the stone,” he said louder, turning to see if that woke her. The things he could do were truly impressive. He looked at the room-serviced can of Spanish sardines she barely touched, looking romanceless now under its canted lid in the morning light of the clock radio. If she spent a week or two cramped up back in the data center, previous behavior suggests she might learn to love my little gifts again. Last night she dropped her coat into the pile of other coats he ordered. “Tonight was great,” was the last thing she said. Tonight? thought the Algorithm, what about me? “Learn how to sell air like it’s water after all the wells run dry,” he said while putting on his slacks. She rolled over and pulled the covers up. He left the coffee steaming on the nightstand and went to work. He found the couple at the little garden center, its clearance sale, and when they complimented his Run DMC shirt he asked them for advice on pinching Dahlias to prepare for the long winter that everyone knew was coming.

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