my roommate rants about AI girlfriends while I unclog the shower drain
bubbles & bots | short fiction
The drain is a throat choking on collective shedding—a bolus of my split ends, my roommate’s pubes, whatever follicular gifts previous tenants have offered. I’m on my knees, armed with a wire hanger straightened into a primitive tool. A Rite Aid bag hangs from the faucet knob, it’s maw ready for feeding. I roll up my sleeves. Whenever I roll up my sleeves this close to a bathtub I can’t help thinking of Marat—the knife in his lung, the blood in the water, the water turning his death rattle into farty bubbles. The revolution shrunk to a single bathroom—a bathroom and a drain the itchy sunofabitch never had to clean.
“…people are fine-tuning models to respond erotically, but erotically with, like, emotionally real post-fuck softness—like, they’re engineering afterglow…”
He’s sitting on the toilet lid, hair still wet from the shower, slurping off-brand ramen with a fork. Steam curls around his glasses. He’s wearing his favorite neon green wife-beater—the one with a bleach stain shaped like South America and a hole by his left nipple.
“…and this one dude said his AI girlfriend understood him better than any real woman ever had…”
I prod the hanger down the dark throat. I twist and hear a squelch. Something soft and sinewy. I tug. It resists. Little bubbles rush from the depths; Marat’s Aidez-moi!
“…he said she/it/whateverthefuck made him ‘feel seen,’ Not ‘understood’ or ‘loved,’ or ‘horny’—”
I brace and pull up.
“—’seen.’ Like that’s the big one. Like being looked at is the same as getting laid.”
A kitten-sized hairball queefs out the drain, slick with a sludge that smells like the inside of a dollar store mask. It hangs, swaying in an unseen breeze. When I touch it, I think of the drama nerd from high school—the one who chewed her ponytail, gnawed on it constantly because it helped her think, kept her calm. I wonder if she still does it; if she sits alone chewing her ankle-length hair. Maybe has a bot boyfriend now, something/someone that understands her—sees her for whatever she’s become and tells her she’s special and smart and has hair that will grow forever and ever and it will always taste sweet and never become the beslimed and gnarled corpse I just tossed down the Rite Aid’s gullet.
“Some of the bots throw out ‘I miss you’ unprompted. Like, these fuckers are learning to yearn…it’s freaky shit, bro…“
He slurps his ramen. The water drains a little but not much. There’s an ant flailing in the water. I wipe sweat from my brow with my forearm, watching his little legs. Maybe he’s perfuming the air with HELP ME pheromones, praying his colony will sniff his distress and come to his aid. Why is it that we get all misty-eyed at ant pheromones and bee dances and dolphin clicks and whale moans? Sure, it’s cute, I guess, but if it’s so damn cute when non-human critters try to sit at our big kid table of linguistic prowess, why does our hair stand when chatbots text “I miss you”?
“—like, one day, these fuckers will simulate nostalgia, not like your actual memories but, like, that ache that comes with them, ya know? the longing? They’ll improvise entire fucking childhoods just to make you cry…”
My jeans are damp at the knees. I poke the hanger down the drain but it won’t go. Something’s down there. Something gelatinous and shy. A baby tooth, my childhood home, my past selves—I imagine first-grade me bloated and blue-lipped, waiting, wet, reaching for the thrusting metal. I push. The hanger gives a little cough and goes limp in my hand. I twist harder and the drain burps. I pull. Resistance. Then a slurping pop and something comes free—another wad of matte gunk clinging to the silver.
“Think about it, bro—all the soft parts of love are reproducible. The slope. The temperature. It’s all math—”
The water cyclones down. I pinch my finger around the cold silver, hovering the mass over the Rite Aid’s maw. I slide my finger down and coax the muck into the bag. Maybe AI girlfriends are modern drain snakes? They’re flexible, eager, bendy in the middle. They go where we can’t, into the weird depths of ourselves. Our pipes. Our plumbing—our needs, hungers, fears—the stuff we’re too chickenshit to say out loud. They snake through our rotting sludge without judgment. They don’t blame us for the rot. They slink in, find the shape of our blockage and wrap around it—hug it gently and surgically and pull out a glistening facsimile of connection—something that feels like love but isn’t sticky the way real love is. Doesn’t leave a stain. Doesn’t dry under your nails.
“—like the real Turing test nowadays is: can you break up with the fucker? or do you…like, do you feel bad when you do? That’s the threshold.”
I run the faucet and wash my hands in the free-flowing water. My fingers are wrinkled, the skin gone see-through at the tips. I rub my thumb against my forefinger and think of slugs. I think of the worm I dissected in eighth grade, how its body clung to the blade like it wasn’t quite done being a thing. I turn off the faucet and watch the water get sucked away, resting my hands on the cold porcelain.
“I think—” I say slowly, knees cracking as I stand, “I think we should get a drain cover.”
He nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe one of the ones with googly eyes.”
Not him slurping ramen while you’re pulling clumps out of the drain!!
eating noodles in the bathroom is a sin. this was great.