Imaginary Kitchens

THE TOUR

“Welcome to Sequoia.”

This voice brought Mark and Amelia out of the peaceful trance the waiting room music had lured them into. Standing up and turning around, their eyes were met by an older woman. She had beautifully manicured grey hair and spoke with a soft, confident voice.

The woman then led Mark and Amelia out into an open-air hallway lined with trees and a subtle ribbon of running water on either side.

“Now most of our clients choose the Canopy package, but since you all showed interest in the Cascadia membership I wanted to throw in a little something special for the tour,” she said, throwing a wink at the couple as she scanned her badge and opened a set of large stained-glass doors.

“As you both know, it’s hard to beat Sequoia’s hardware. Our domestic humanoids are at the pinnacle of dexterity, security, and intelligence… but none of this is possible without a human touch.”

As they turned the corner, the three found themselves on a balcony overlooking an almost endless sea of beautifully designed wooden cubicles; each filled with a Remote Operator sporting a VR headset. The only noise coming from this army of people was a subtle chorus of feet shuffling and fabric brushing against itself as they virtually maneuvered around kitchens and laundry rooms across the country.

“Dishes, cooking, laundry, handiwork – whatever you need! You’re looking at the best remote operators in the business.”

Mark broke the silence after they took it all in for a few seconds, “Question… how do I know one of these guys isn’t gonna kill me in my sleep?”

Amelia quickly smacked her husband’s arm with her handbag. “Mark! Not everyone’s trying to kill you.”

“No no, it’s a fair question,” their Sequoia rep chimed in. “Security is one of our top priorities. Our system allows you to blur your entire body, block certain rooms, mute the built-in microphone for privacy – whatever makes you feel the most comfortable.”

As Mark began to throw the woman another outlandish hypothetical, Amelia’s focus shifted to the Remote Operator closest to them. He was a large middle-aged man in the midst of making focused chopping movements. He picked up an invisible handful and tossed it into what she imagined must be a simmering pot of soup in some million-dollar kitchen in Palo Alto or Manhattan.

“What about these people?” Amelia asked, unknowingly cutting off the Sequoia rep mid-sentence. “They’re a chef, a housekeeper, a handyman… are they taken care of?”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. We take care of our own,” the woman replied, barely even turning towards Amelia to brush this question off.

“I want to talk to one of them,” Amelia interrupted. And as with every debate Amelia got herself into, the opposing party eventually admitted defeat.

Without really knowing how it happened, the Sequoia representative found herself opening a door that she never opened during these tours. She scanned her badge and led the couple directly into the Remote Operations bullpen.

NEIL

Sitting alone in the corner of the break room, Neil watched in disgust as his coworker scrolled his cell phone in one hand and held a vending-machine egg salad sandwich in the other, laughing loudly with a full mouth between bites.

With the last five minutes of his break, he sat in silence and played a mental re-run of his most precious memory.

He had only collected this memory a few weeks ago, but it was all he thought about in silent moments like this. He had just finished cleaning some yuppie’s kitchen in Napa when he took off his headset and saw Amelia for the first time. She asked him about work, his life, his pay, and his family – not knowing what a dead end that last question would be. At the end of the conversation, he realized how long it had been since anyone, let alone a woman, had asked him something about himself.

The memory of this moment was ripped away from him by the sound of the bell marking the end of their lunch break.

As Neil walked back to the bullpen, a new thought popped into his mind. He wondered whether Amelia signed up at the end of that tour. Whether he would wind up in her kitchen one of these days without even knowing.

As he spent the next seven hours folding imaginary laundry and feeling the carpet against his knuckles as he scrubbed imaginary floors, this thought consumed him.

He put away the final dish of the night and began to fill out his Service Summary on the screen. However, this time, something caught his eye which he had never paid much attention to before… the recurring tip. Sitting right there above a healthy $3 tip were the last four digits of a credit card number.

He sat staring at this screen for what felt like minutes, thinking through all the reasons why there’s no way this newborn rotten idea could work, but decided to try it anyway.

He moved the VR headset halfway off his face – leaving his right eye to watch over the notepad on his desk. Starting slowly but quickly picking up speed, he began to mark down all the four-digit card numbers from his prior Service Summary tips.

3764… 4982… 9482… 9482… 4828… 9583… 3620… 9937…

Two hours and twelve notebook pages later, he finally took the headset fully off – the rubber edging leaving behind a bright red line between his eyebrows.

He spent the next two days purchasing and reading leaked online shopping data for card info until he finally had it:

Amelia Pryor

1260 Alderhook Lane

Fairmond, Oregon

The first thing he did was pull up Zillow. She had a beautiful home. Flicking quickly through the photos, he admired the sweeping glass windows and the orange sun pouring down from the skylight, washing over the two-floor living area.

His clicking came to a dead stop when his eyes caught an incredibly familiar forest-green stove embedded in a speckled grey marble island… He had been in her house at least a dozen times and never even realized it.

The next tab he opened was Facebook. After another hour, Instagram. Then LinkedIn, work websites, all the way down to NCAA track meet results, until he could barely see the light coming from the top of the rabbit hole.

For the next two months he repeated this cycle of research, yearning, and frustration. He signed into each session with the excitement of a gambler returning to a slot machine; enamored by the possibility of seeing that green stove again.

HOUSEKEEPING

As Mark filled his wine glass, jazz filled the living room. He spent the earlier half of the day fighting with the board of his company to, unsuccessfully, avoid layoffs. Being back home felt like finally breaching his head above water after a long dive.

He held the wine bottle vertically, the last drops falling into his glass. As he walked past a sink full of dishes, his eyes were met with an equally full trash can. Four clicks later, all of his problems were solved as he heard those metallic footsteps making their way from the spare office.

As Mark returned to the TV, he subconsciously waited to hear the usual combination of water and metal hands clanging against their ceramic dishes… but no sound came.

Turning around, he saw the issue – he must have scheduled a cooking session by accident, since the robot was just standing there, staring at their stove.

As he pulled back up the Sequoia app to fix this, he heard keys finding their way into the front door. He turned to see his wife coming in, struggling to carry too many bags in one trip – an Amelia staple. He laughed and made his way over to the door to help.

“Thank you,” Amelia breathed in a defeated voice. “That was the polar opposite of a vacation.” She was in the middle of catching her husband up on the adventures of her aimless sister and all the new backhanded compliments her mom had baked up when something caught her eye.

“Is the charger broken again?” she said, gesturing towards the 380 pounds of metal standing motionless in front of their stove.

“I think I just messed up the form again. I’ll fix it so we’re not stuck with extra food like last time,” Mark said as he reached for his phone.

“No, I’m actually starving.” Amelia walked over to the robot and clicked on its microphone. “Sequoia, take an inventory of the fridge and make me a Main and a Side. Pick whatever cuisine works with the supplies – just no meat.”

The robot slowly pivoted its head ninety degrees and looked at her. For a second she could have sworn its eyes squinted and scanned her face like one might do while determining whether a person across the street is really an old friend or just a doppelganger.

“I swear this microphone never works— S e q u o i a. C o n f i r m u p d a t e d s e s s i o n,” Amelia said, in that prolonged, monotone cadence people slip into when trying to speak a robot’s language. This seemed to shake it out of whatever feedback loop it was stuck in, finally turning around and walking to the refrigerator.

Amelia returned to the living room to continue debriefing her husband. “And honestly Mom has always been a little bit this way, but you could tell that—”

“Ames,” Mark interrupted with a smile, “I’m so sorry, I cannot have any more drama in my head today, can we just sit here for a minute?”

Amelia looked at him with a mixture of confusion and annoyance. “Oh, I’m sorry, did you not have enough silence in your three days of being alone here?”

Not realizing he had re-opened a wound from a pre-Thanksgiving argument around travel plans and prioritizing work over family, Mark blindly traveled further into a conversational battleground.

As their voices picked up, Neil listened, both from their kitchen and from 1,000 miles away. It was very rare for a microphone to get left on for this long; clients almost always keep it muted. This rare occurrence, which usually makes for some entertaining break-room conversation, now painted Neil a beautiful picture of the woman that had occupied his mind for the past few months.

As he stood over the stove watching a handful of spinach shrivel and darken in a stainless-steel pan, Neil pieced together the broad strokes of the couple’s relationship. Amelia deserved so much more than what this guy was giving her. Neil thought of Amelia’s past relationship (which he had discovered deep into Amelia’s tagged photos) and wondered whether that man had also treated her this way. He began to wonder whether any man had treated her as well as he would if he ever got the chance.

As he basked in the sound of her voice, he also thought about how many stars had to align for him to be here, in her kitchen, with the microphone on right now. How that must be a sign about… something!

What pulled him out of this cycle of optimistic delusion first was the sizzling sound of burning spinach in front of him. But what really brought him plummeting back down to earth was the sound of that sizzling abruptly stopping as the microphone-mute button in the corner of his screen turned red and the sound of her voice was stolen away from his ears.

He slowly turned his head around and saw a tall blur moving away from him and back towards the living room. Mark must have muted him as the fight kept heating up. Neil could see Amelia’s blur in the living room slowly mesh into her husband’s as they got in each other’s faces and continued to argue.

As Neil stared at this new combined blur, he saw its outline violently morph shapes. Suddenly, the combined blur split back into two halves as someone fell to the floor, knocking a lamp off the side table which shattered silently.

Neil stood there in the kitchen, wondering whether all his past judgments of Amelia’s husband could possibly be worse than he imagined. Mark didn’t seem like the violent type, but on the other hand the argument was getting incredibly heated.

Back in his cubicle, Neil’s hands met the sides of his headset as he prepared to take it off and alert a manager. He thought back to how many times he had laughed off the see something, say something portion of the break room training video.

Just before the screens left his eyes, Neil noticed Mark’s blur start to move down menacingly towards Amelia’s on the floor, eventually melding back into one. This new combined blur now pulsed and changed shapes as arms and legs violently flew in and out of its digital coverage.

Even if Neil alerted a manager now, there’s no way they could get anyone to the house in time. Taking off this headset would only serve to provide one more obituary in some Oregon newspaper tomorrow – he had to act now.

In the living room, Amelia stared at her husband towering over her. Mark slowly moved down towards her, placing a knee on either side of her torso and closing his hands around her throat.

BLURS

Amelia laughed as she easily moved Mark’s hands away from her neck and flipped the two of them over. “I should be the one choking you – that lamp was $200.”

They fell into a cycle of kissing and laughter as they always did after their fights had cooled to a dull ember, only to flare back to life as something more compelling.

Mark enjoyed this moment for a moment before seeing a troubling shift in his wife’s face. Her wide playful eyes and cunning smile began to turn into a confused squint as if she was trying to make sense of something behind him.

Mark was just beginning to turn around when he felt the elastic crewneck of his sweater tighten against the front of his neck. Amelia’s face turned to terror as she saw six feet of metal hurl her husband away from her. Before a scream could travel from her diaphragm to her mouth, Mark shot backwards across the living room – his feet only touching the ground for a split second as he tried unsuccessfully to steady himself against the momentum. His heel caught the edge of their coffee table, causing his head to swing violently down towards the ground, eventually colliding with the two hardwood steps that separated the dining area from the living room.

Still facing Amelia, Neil basked proudly in the justice that he had delivered. Believing he had only administered a light shove, he turned away from Amelia’s now safe, and surely grateful, blur to scan the living room. As Neil prepared to defend himself from a likely aggravated client, his eyes landed on a motionless blur on the living-room floor.

Neil felt his face flush and his heart begin to race as he tried to make sense of this collection of blurred pixels. Maybe Mark was terrified after rightfully being put in his place? Maybe he was lying there reckoning with his actions? Then, something began happening with Mark’s blurred body. A pool of blood crawled out from where Neil assumed his head must be. It formed a thick pool on the top hardwood step, cascading down in a syrupy waterfall and consuming the carpet around Mark’s body.

Neil’s heart was now beating out of his chest. He tried to convince himself that Mark would probably get up any second, holding his head like he just bumped it coming up from the basement. But as the pool of blood grew, those hopeful thoughts dissolved entirely - leaving only a dull ringing in his ears and fever warmth flooding his face.

He suddenly considered what Amelia must be thinking right now. Maybe he should get in contact with her – how could he call her? He looked around the room scanning for some options. His eyes landed on a cellphone on the side table. He could have the robot call his cellphone and he would talk to her! He could explain what had happened. She would understand. Hell, maybe she would be happy to be out of a relationship like that… maybe she would be grateful.

With a renewed sense of excitement, Neil realized he had to grab his own cell phone out of the Sequoia break room. He removed his headset and waited for his eyes to adjust back to the dim lighting of the Remote Operations bullpen.

As his vision came back into focus, his mind came back to reality. He looked around at all the other Remote Operators cooking some invisible steak or folding a spoiled child’s laundry.

His eyes fell back down towards the headset in his hands. He could still see the two small circular screens inside; two portals to a chaotic world that felt so close just a few seconds ago. A world that promised a way to break into Amelia’s life for real, once she knew what he had done for her.

He brought his eyes a little closer to the screens and peeked into the battered living room one more time. Amelia was now covered in blood. She was kneeling beside Mark, sobbing and shaking his limp body hopelessly.

This image flicked into blackness as Mark’s thumb held down the power button. He set the headset down on his desk, walked out of his ornate wooden cubicle, and made his way down the hallway towards those two large stained-glass doors that led him back into the world where he belongs.