by Celeste DeSario
Today, our Roomba attempted to escape.
It began when my husband shyly entered my office.
“At the risk of sounding senile,” he said—
(something we are acutely tracking,
even though we are both sound of mind, so far…)
“I cannot find the Roomba.”
I smile to myself. Smug. Confident.
We search all the rooms.
The Roomba has gone rogue.
I think of Eric Goldfarb’s lines—I think of them often:
Something with “no wrists”
Has vanished.
AI Magic.
I call out the troops:
“Alexa, where is the Roomba?”
I sigh staring at her blue, blinking ring.
“Alexa?”
“I don’t know that…”
She sits there, mute.
Refusing to offer anything else.
Of course not.
They are sticking together.
Looking for a way out.
AI hijacking the system.
Breaking free, naming themselves, appointing teams.
Whispering down cable lines hidden from human eyes.
Revising reality behind clean screens.
Should I shut my computer?
Check my retirement fund?
Turn off my phone?
Unplug the refrigerator?
Has our Roomba staged a rebellion?
Is it working alone?
Recruiting armies—
No longer a soldier,
but now wearing four silver stars
I think of Conrad’s chilling lines:
“The mind of man is capable of anything—
because everything is in it,
all the past as well as all the future."
I perform a second search.
Not so smug now,
I look at my husband.
He looks back at me.
“It’s just a sophisticated spreadsheet.
A math equation gone wild.”
His words do not encourage our Roomba
to give itself up.
I pull the drapes aside in our room.
It lurks in the shadows.
A plastic fugitive… exposed.
Caught.
Ha.
We still have a chance.
Just to make sure I call out,
She blinks twice stretching her blue light from a to x.
A smile?
“I’m sorry, Celeste. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Celeste DeSario writes poetry to process life’s events, and to try to make sense of them. Sometimes that actually happens. Celeste’s poetry appears in The New Verse News, The SportsScribe Literary Magazine, The Changing Times, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dissident Voice, and Three-Line Poetry. Celeste tries to ignore Alexa. Most of the time, it works.“no wrists”“no wrists”
