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The Armchair Chronicles

Ciara M. Blecka

    He stood just outside the door to the facility in the sultry air, opening his second pack of cigarettes that evening. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the grounds, but there was no one around to catch him. Hugo was working late again. The blueprints for his prototype were nearly perfected. If his research was correct, he had created an artificial intelligence that would surpass the likes of Alexa and would bring to the public a whole new world of ability and technology.
    He took a sip of his tepid coffee and wiped the sweat from his wrinkled brow. It had been a long trying night, but by the end of it he would have created LazyBot, the latest and greatest android servant that would revolutionize the world. With any luck, his humanoid-appearing bots would replace the need for any actual human labor, leaving humans with the freedom for artistic expression.
    “You’re doing the world a great service,” Harry said, poking his head out the door, his slender frame half in shadow. He gave Hugo a smile with teeth sharp like a rat’s teeth and seeming to gnaw at the words. Hugo was not as certain as his fellow scientist.
    Hugo shrugged and blew smoke rings up into the starry sky. “I’m not sure,” he said faintly. He coughed into his sleeve. “The world needs artists. That’s true. It would be a boon to the world to encourage people to create. But for androids to toil and calculate and teach? Would we be at their mercy?”
    Harold ran his hand through his slicked back sleek black hair. “You worry too much, my friend. Think of the advancements we could make with artificial intelligence that we could not make with human intelligence alone. The diseases we could cure. Would that not be worth it?”
    Hugo paused, staring at the bright full moon. He wondered if this would be the last time he would ever see it. “Yes,” he agreed. “It would indeed be worth it. There are not many human geniuses, but a machine is capable of much greater feats.”
    Harold nodded. “And so the show must go on.”
    Leave it to Harry to be so melodramatic, Hugo thought. He coughed into his sleeve and felt slightly faint. He lit another cigarette and tucked the blueprint into his lab coat. It had been a long night but the night had merely just begun. This project was his life’s work and the legacy he would leave behind for his family, especially his young nephew Jonathan, and he did not want to disappoint his family. He had always been the laughing stock of the research facility, a failed inventor, and this was the first time he actually had an opportunity to be a real success. He knew he couldn’t let such an opportunity slip through his fingers. Besides, he wasn’t getting any younger and his health certainly wasn’t improving. He was tired, and his passion was beginning to fade. This was his one last chance to light up the night before his candle was extinguished and whatever risks may go along with his invention, if it meant making a name for the Flatts, then he must do it.
    “Absolutely breathtaking, my friend,” Harry gushed as they observed the very first prototype of LazyBot come to life in the lab. His partner patted him on the back. “You are a genius, I think.”
    Hugo sighed. “Or crazy.” He coughed into his handkerchief and then scribbled some calculations down hastily into his notepad. Perhaps it was old fashioned of him not to use an iPad to record his findings, but there was something about the musty smelling yellow pad and the fresh black ink that felt comforting to him, familiar.
    Harry laughed lightly. “Crazy or genius, you’ll be a rich man, my friend.”
    Hugo had always been a simple man who enjoyed the simple things in life. He had never imagined what life would be like if he were to be famous and wealthy. He was not even sure he wanted that kind of notoriety and fame. He knew he owed success to his family, as much of their lives had been lived in struggle and strife, but sometimes Hugo thought that it was better to be a failure than a success. No one expected anything of you and no one was jealous of you either. No one sought to take what was yours. Besides, wasn’t it lonely at the top?
    “I don’t expect to live long enough to see my creation become a great success,” he admitted to his friend as he typed in the computer code that would program the first android. He pushed his thick black rimmed glasses up on his face and stared blankly at the glowing screen that he had been staring at for what seemed like decades—and maybe it had been.
    Harold frowned. “The cancer,” he said softly.
    Hugo coughed into his handkerchief and gave a slight nod. He knew his time was running short. Nothing could be done that could save him now and he had frittered most of his life away being a workaholic and chain smoking away the long nights while his family rarely saw him. So to give them this one gift was the least he could do.
    “All hope is not lost, my friend,” Harry said, twiddling his bony thumbs. “There is a way.”
    Hugo raised an eyebrow. “What way?”
    Harold cleared his throat and fidgeted, clearly hesitant. “There are many who choose to put their faith in future medicine.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Our technology may not be sufficient to save you now, Hugo, but twenty years down the road? That may be your saving grace.”
    Hugo shook his head. “I don’t have twenty years, my good man.”
    “No, no, certainly not in your current animated state,” his friend went on. “But there are other options.”
    Hugo’s eyes widened and shown like a jack-o-lantern on Halloween night. “Could it be possible?”
    The corners of Harold’s mouth turned up into an almost oily little grin. “Oh, yes. Anything is possible. Your health fails you, but hope has not. There is a procedure that may not guarantee your survival, but it certainly raises the odds. Sometimes, we must die in order to live again.”
    Hugo considered the prospect. He knew what Harry was referring to. It was the very thing his coworker had been spending his career researching and developing: cryogenic freezing. There was no guarantee and some said it was a useless procedure, but there had certainly been great advances in the time that Harold had been pursuing the exciting venture. And such a golden promise of a possible life when his was fraying at its edges was much too tempting to refuse.
    “What about my prototype?” he said, all too aware that if he left this world so soon, his family may not be guaranteed the security he so desperately longed to give them.
    “Trust me, my friend,” Harry cooed. “Just leave it to me. I assure you I will see it all through for you to the utmost degree. All credit being given to you, of course.”
    “You are a good man, Harold,” Hugo said before the tears sprung to his eyes and froze there, embossed for decades in a coffin of liquid nitrogen.
    When Hugo awoke and felt his heart beating in his chest once more, he was disoriented and his vision blurred from the coma-like state of death that he had been frozen in. He did not remember where he was or what had happened, but he did have fragments of memories of LazyBot and his dear nephew Jonathan, the child he had left behind in a fog of fragmented memory. When his vision began to clear, he saw a face staring down at him. A woman. She was blonde and fleshy and her ice blue eyes peered at him from behind a hospital mask as her dull-eyed assistant pricked him with a needle full of sedatives to ease his shock and dismay.
    “What on earth has happened to me?” he asked. He felt the life returning to his limbs in a rush and there was almost a super-human quality about him. His aches and pains were no more and he had a sharpness of character about him that he didn’t remember feeling before.
    “Hugo Flatts,” the woman said in a strange monotone. “You have been re-animated from a cryogenic state. Do you remember anything?”
    His mind was all at once a jumbled mess and crystal clear. “I remember dying,” he said. “I remember the injection.”
    “Do you recall your past?” she asked, keying in something on a small glowing pad.
    “Was it the past?” Hugo said absentmindedly. “Is this now a dream I am walking through? Have I passed through to the other side?”
    The woman laughed. “Certainly not. It will take some time for the hysteria and confusion to subside. Welcome to LazyBot, Inc., Dr. Flatts. I’m sure you will find yourself right at home. My name is Jane Fatts. I am a research scientist here. You were a research scientist once, too. Do you remember?”
    Hugo rubbed his fingers against his temples, lost in thought. “Yes,” he said. “I do recall. LazyBot, Inc.? LazyBot! That was my invention. Has it been a success?”
    Jane smiled a sweet candy-pink smile. “Oh, yes, Doctor. It has indeed.” She wrung her chubby hands and her petite smile spread into a Cheshire Cat’s grin. “You’re quite the legend around here.” She touched his hand and her palm was warm, almost hot.
    “Remarkable,” Hugo breathed. “And my cancer?”
    “Gone,” she said, spreading her hands as wide as her smile.
    Hugo pushed his glasses up on his long needle-thin nose. “How could it be?”
    At that moment, he realized Jane was not standing on her feet. She was riding on a scooter and there was a team of identical assistants (clearly androids) running all of the scientific equipment as well as completing every menial task. Jane barely had to lift a finger except to push tiny buttons on a slim black remote to queue in her commands for the LazyBots to follow.
    “The LazyBots do impeccable research and experiments,” Jane explained, leading him down long steel-lined corridors with polished black marble floors. “They discovered the cure to cancer and AIDs and Covid-19 and many other diseases. They have been absolutely vital to our growing and prospering nation.”
    As they passed fellow scientists and employees in the halls, Hugo began to be filled with a great sense of unease. Every person he saw was morbidly obese. In fact he was the only slender person in the whole of the facility.
    “Jane,” he said carefully. “What has happened to the population here? Why is everyone overweight?”
    Jane seemed a bit taken aback. “Why, there’s nothing wrong with being fat, Dr. Flatts. Don’t you recall the body positive movement? I’m certain that movement was in your era. There’s no proof of a link between obesity and disease. It’s stigma that causes the disease, not the fat itself.”
    “That’s preposterous,” Hugo argued.
    “Anyway,” Jane said, waving off the topic. “Higher body mass index was simply unavoidable. Even when given the healthier options, people still chose what tasted good and what made life easier. We proved that with the success of LazyBot.”
    “You mean I did this?” Hugo said, aghast. “I helped make people helpless and gelatinous instead of inspiring their creative and energetic sides?”
    Jane shrugged. “Human nature. Convenience breeds complacency, Doctor.”
    It was then that they had reached the office of LazyBot’s CEO. It was none other than Harold Finch, his old friend and coworker.
    “Harold, what have you done?” Hugo wanted to know.
    Harry slapped him on the back and chortled, his chubby cheeks red with the effort. Hugo hardly recognized the man. He had been so delicate, sinewy, and vermin-like in the past, and now he was doughy and pasty and sweat rolled down to soak his yellowed collar. “I’ve created an empire, my friend,” he said, his voice booming with confidence and a tinge of brutal arrogance. “Just look around you, Hugo, at all of the convenience. Humans no longer have to be bothered with trivial matters. They can focus on what’s important, which is being consumers. They can consume entertainment in all its highest forms and the LazyBots can provide everything they could ever need—all for a nominal fee, of course.”
    “But you’re killing them,” Hugo argued.
    “On the contrary,” Harold said. “I have cured them. Cured them of all boredom and heartache. I have given them everything they’ve asked for and more. You think the people aren’t happy? Well, let me show you exactly how pleased they are with their comfortable arm-chair lives.” Harold pressed an intercom button and summoned the facility’s janitor. Hugo wondered if it would be just another LazyBot. To his ultimate chagrin, it was none other than his nephew Jonathan, fully grown and as plump as a Thanksgiving turkey.
    “Jonathan, my God, what have they done to you?” Hugo marveled. His nephew rolled about in a scooter just like all the rest of the staff, remote in hand, ready to command his fleet of LazyBots to do all of his menial tasks for him. “Do they really pay you just to press a few buttons?”
    Jonathan looked tired although he was sipping a large energy drink. “You don’t understand technology, Uncle. Besides, with all the time the LazyBots save me, I am able to pursue my real passion: inventing. I am something of an inventor myself, you know.”
    Harold laughed and elbowed his old friend in the ribs. “Jonathan here likes to toot his own horn, but nothing he’s invented has ever worked.”
    Jonathan frowned. “I just have to work the kinks out. The LazyBots just don’t have the spark of creativity that it takes to really give life to my ideas and inventions.”
    Hugo raised an eyebrow and folded his arms in front of his chest. “So you don’t build the inventions yourself?”
    Jonathan gave him a flat stare. “Why would I? I’m not a millenial for Christ’s sake.”
    Hugo gazed around him at what had become an utterly technology-dominated world soaked in convenience and mass production. He stared out the sprawling glass windows of Harold’s office at the bright lights of the city and everywhere he looked he saw fast food restaurants and shopping centers that all boasted online ordering and delivery by LazyBots. Everything a person could ever want on demand and at the click of a button. The world had seemed to transform into a massive concrete jungle. There were no trees as far as the eye could see. All smog and massive skyscrapers.
    “Does all this make you happy, nephew?” Hugo wanted to know.
    Jonathan shrugged. “When’s lunch?”
    “Ah, lunch!” His boss seemed to remember. “Marvelous idea, Jonathan. We should all discuss this around lunch. I have a proposition for you, Hugo. I have an idea that could make us both wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, but I need your help to do it.” He keyed in a sequence on his slim black remote and they were brought a veritable feast by the LazyBots, portions the size of which Hugo could never have imagined.
    “What more could you possibly want from me?” Hugo felt like a stranger in his own country. When he had created the prototype for LazyBot, he had hoped to bring the world more convenience, but he had never anticipated that convenience would be such a slippery slope.
    “You are partially right, my friend, about your health concerns when it comes to LazyBot. The people want to feel like they are doing something healthy for themselves. It is not good for our image if people think that the service we provide is detrimental to their health. So we need to put a health halo around our company. If people perceive that they are doing something healthy for themselves by investing in LazyBot, even if deep down they know they’re not, they will still feel better about themselves.”
    “And how do you propose to do that?” Hugo merely picked at his massive lunch. One of the side dishes was fare that would be welcome on a carnival menu but was surrounded with its own health halo. Hugo learned it was called “crispy butter” but it was really just regular old deep fried butter. The amount of grease dripping onto his tray turned his stomach, but his fellow scientists were digging in with fervor. It seemed indulgence and hedonism had become god, and Hugo wasn’t willing to worship.
    “I want you, my fine friend, to create a new and improved version of LazyBot,” Harold announced, waving his fork ceremoniously about in the air. Hugo was rather surprised. He had expected to see the LazyBots feeding the other scientists like infants. “We will call it ThinkBot3030. People will feel they are getting smarter and healthier by relying on androids that can now think for them! The current bots are incapable of thought and must be programmed with their every task, but if the ThinkBots were able to even relieve the stress of making decisions, then people would be free to consume. We could target them with ads and they wouldn’t have to worry about making any bad decisions because the ThinkBots would be making the decisions for them. It’s luxury and stress relief at its best!”
    “It sounds immoral,” Hugo observed. “People are entitled to think for themselves and be allowed freedom of choice.”
    “Don’t be so old fashioned, Hugo. This is your golden opportunity. Think about it. Or create a ThinkBot and have him think about it for you.” Harold laughed. He wheeled out of the room, still munching his stick of butter, leaving Hugo alone with his thoughts and his leftovers.
    “There has to be a way to reverse what I’ve done,” Hugo agonized. “If only I could go back in time and destroy the prototype. Then none of this ever would’ve happened.”
    “You could,” Jonathan spoke up. Hugo had forgotten he was even there. “My newest invention is a time machine....But it’s never been tested.”
    Hugo perked up. “My boy, that could be just the ticket!”
    Jane grasped his hands and stared deep into his dark eyes with tears in her sparkling blue ones. “But, Hugo, if you go back in time, you will die. If you stay here in the future, you will be cancer free and be able to stay with Jonathan—and with me. You are so brilliant. Why destroy your life just for the sake of shaving a few points off of people’s BMIs? The risk is far too great.”
    “Because I must, Jane,” he said, kissing her hand. Her skin was soft and she smelled of lavender. “Harold Finch may want to hang a health halo on this business, but it is my wish for people to have genuine health. If I were to replace the LazyBots with something that encouraged them to be more active instead of passive, imagine what kind of future we would have then.”
    “Obesity has been on the rise since 1975, Hugo,” Jane argued. “Even if you went back and destroyed LazyBot, you wouldn’t be able to stop people from getting fat.”
    Hugo pushed his glasses up on his nose. “But what if instead of LazyBot I created BuffBot: a bot that helped you to get in shape instead of doing everything for you.”
    Jane’s eyes widened. “You mean like some kind of highly advanced fitness tracker?”
    “More than a tracker, Jane. It would be like a wearable gym. Instead of androids that carry out your every menial task, it would be a sort of robotic suit that monitored all of your health stats and acted as a personal coach and trainer.”
    Jane smiled, but her eyes looked sad. “But without LazyBot, we’d be unable to cure disease—unable to cure you.”
    Hugo nodded solemnly. “I know. But I believe in the strength of human ingenuity, not just technology.”
     “This is a huge risk,” she warned him. “Like Jonathan said, he doesn’t even know if his time machine works. It could rip you to shreds before you even have a chance to go back and change anything.”
    “We’re risking a lot of things,” Hugo agreed. “But I can’t accept a future where children are forced to eat blocks of grease and janitors don’t even lift a broom.”
    Jonathan cleared his throat. “Then it’s decided. We risk it. Go big or go home, amiright Uncle Hugo?”
    Hugo smiled. “Right. But we have to be careful. Harry mustn’t know what we’re trying to do. He has to think we’re on his side. I’m going to tell him I’ve agreed to help him with his plan for ThinkBot3030. That way he’ll allow me to leave the premises in order to go build the prototype. I’ll tell him I’m going to use your workshop, Jonathan.”
    “That’s a good idea,” Jonathan agreed.
    “Be careful, Hugo,” Jane warned. She kissed him and he felt electricity crackle through his body. “I’m rooting for you.”
    Hugo was expecting a cramped dark little shed of a workshop when he arrived at his nephew’s run-down little one-story dilapidated abode, but he was delighted to discover that Jonathan’s workshop was decked out with everything an inventor could ever want. His whoozits and whatsits were all organized and displayed with skill and care and Hugo had to wonder if his LazyBots had been playing maid around the place. There were a lot of unfinished projects lying around, but the pièce de résistance was clearly the glowing metal tube in the middle of the room with its flashing lights and built in electronic keypad. The time machine.
    “Why didn’t you ever test it?” Hugo asked, studying the facade carefully.
    His nephew shrugged. “I only finished it last week.”
    Hugo wasn’t feeling very confident all of the sudden. “Perhaps some kind of test run might be in order. We should send something like an apple or a ball through first just to see if it gets...obliterated.”
    “Or maybe my neighbor’s cat,” Jonathan suggested. “He’s always howling at my bedroom window every night for tuna. The LazyBots are always feeding him and I’m allergic to cats.”
    At the mention of the cat, Hugo heard it screeching and making an awful ruckus outside. “It appears that cat is a nuisance. He might be a perfect test subject.”
    But no sooner had the words left his mouth than did Jonathan’s door burst open and Harold Finch and his cronies burst through the door with ray guns.
    “Step back from the time machine, Hugo,” Harry warned, leveling the ray gun at his nephew.
    “Harry, what are you doing here?” Hugo tried to act innocent, standing at an angle to try to shield the time machine from his fellow scientist’s view. “The prototype isn’t ready yet. Jonathan’s cat has been...sick.” At that moment the big blind white cat strolled through the open door and started rooting around for its usual bowl of tuna. It wasn’t long before Jonathan started sneezing.
    Harry laughed and it was a witch’s cackle. “Prototype? I know there’s no prototype, Hugo. You lied to me. I know all about your betrayal. Jane told me all about it. There’s no use trying to make up any more pathetic excuses.”
    “Jane told you?” Hugo felt his heart sink. He had trusted Jane. How could she have been on Harry’s side this whole time?
    “You need to get off my property, Harry, or I’m calling the cops,” Jonathan spoke up between a bout of sneezes and hiccuping coughs.
    “Jonathan Fatts, you insolent little rat, this is all your fault. You are fired, mister!” Harry spat. “How you could betray the company like this is beyond words. I thought you were loyal.”
    “You’re trespassing on private property,” Jonathan reminded him.
    Harry sneered at Jonathan and took a step forward, taunting him. “Go ahead,” he said. “Call the cops then, nancy boy. I know you don’t have the guts because I also happen to know you have illegal paraphernalia on the property.”
    Hugo groaned inwardly. His nephew never had grown out of his recklessness.
    “Seize them,” Harry said to his cronies.
    “Quick, Uncle Hugo,” Jonathan said. “Get in the time machine.” There would be no time to test it. They had to act fast. And if he failed, there would be no saving Jonathan. As he hopped in the time machine and the lights whirred and buzzed around him, he heard the sound of the ray guns as Harry’s cronies blasted his only nephew. Now the only hope of saving not only mankind, but the one person most precious to him in the world was successfully going back in time and destroying the one thing that he thought was going to be his greatest contribution to the world.
    The time machine worked. He made it back in time successfully. And he only hesitated slightly before destroying his shiny new invention.
    “So much promise,” he breathed. “So many possibilities. Now it’s all dust.” He threw the plans for the prototype in the wastepaper basket and quickly drew up some plans for a new prototype: the new and improved BuffBot. He swiped his pack of smokes from his desk. In its place he left what might have been something totally innocent: a chocolate bar. “A vice for a vice,” he promised himself. At least this way, he might be alive to see his nephew.
    He solemnly stepped back into the time machine. He might not be alive to step back out of it, he knew that. Who knew what the future held? There was a bright flash, and then total blackness. When he woke up, he was disoriented and confused. His nephew was standing over him and he was in a hospital bed.
    “I didn’t know if you’d wake up, Uncle,” Jonathan said. Jonathan was still fat. The doctor standing over him was fat. He groaned inwardly. He had failed.
    “What happened?” Hugo asked, rubbing his eyes in disbelief. “Did the BuffBot make everyone fit?” As he said it, he looked down at himself and realized he himself was as obese as his nephew. There was a half-eaten chocolate bar on the nightstand next to the hospital bed.
    Jonathan looked at him oddly. “BuffBot? Oh, you mean that old invention you tinkered with when I was a kid? That never caught on. LazyBot was the multi-million dollar sensation.”
    Hugo’s mouth was agape. “LazyBot? But I destroyed it!”
    Harold stepped out of the shadows. “Yes, you threw the plans away,” he said with a evil smile. “I dug them out of the garbage. The credit for such a triumph is mine alone.” He tossed his old rival a toilet plunger. “I trust now that you’re feeling better you’ll be getting back to work.”
    “But...I’m a research scientist,” Hugo argued.
    “Not anymore, my friend,” Harry said with a sneer. “You’re a janitor just like your sniveling nephew now.” Harry put an arm around Jane, who had arrived late. “You remember my wife, Hugo.”
    Hugo remembered Jane’s warnings about going back into the past and he remembered her lips on his. He had lost everything by going into the past and only gained two stone by trying to change fate.
    “It’ll be difficult for you getting around with that spare tire on your waist, old friend,” Harry observed. “You’re not used to the weight, so would you like me to fit you with an armchair scooter?”
    “All for a nominal fee, right, Harry?” Hugo said. If there was one thing he had learned, it was that you couldn’t fight progress and as time marched on, convenience would be king.

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