my roommate rants about AI while I fold my laundry

socks & singularities | flash fiction

Jan 20, 2025

I read somewhere that bees can remember faces. This makes me think of laundry…something about our garments holding ghosts when they’re alone—those worn knee patches from restless legs, morning yawn stretch marks, 5k pit stains—I was zeroing in on something important when my roommate started talking:

“Did you know AI can compose music that mimics Bach so accurately even classical musicians can’t tell the difference?”

I’m holding a pair of socks, one black and one navy…I think…I’m not sure; it’s hard to tell in the dim light. Would machines struggle with socks, too? or would they just know? Like how dogs smell hypoglycemia or know you’re sad? I decide they’re close enough and slurp them into a cotton gobstopper. I squeeze it tight, wondering if machines appreciate the way hot laundry feels alive.

“We don’t even understand our own intelligence…how can we control theirs?”

He always gets like this after a podcast, pacing among unfolded mounds, chuming the air with misremembered nuggets. I nod because that’s what you do when someone’s pacing and talking with the voice—that near-panic, busybody spew unhungry for answers, simply concerned with being praised as profound or erudite or, worst of all, informed.

“…maybe AI wouldn’t destroy us; maybe it will just ignore us.”

I pick up a pair of jeans and shake them out, waking up the rigored denim. I fold them in half. The cuffs are frayed and a torn belt loop hangs spaghetti-like. Didn’t I wear these on the first day of high school? Isn’t that blotch where I spilled the ranch?

I hold them against my belly. They smell like lavender, the manufactured kind—the kind that lives in plastic bottles. I think of that stuff mom spritzed on her pillow before bed. I bet machines don’t care about any of this—about lavender and mom’s pillow and the ranch stain waving hello.

“…like, how do you even program morality?”

Are we sure the bees recognize us? How do we know it’s not more horeshit—just another manifestation of our pervy need to be seen? It’s a great comfort to believe little buzzing capsules are out there remembering our faces into existence, ringing our ears as they spread the gospel of me me me…us us us…

I stack the jeans atop the nearest tower with a there there pat. Maybe that’s his point? Maybe we’re not scared of singularities and mass slaughter, replacement and enshittification…maybe we’re just threatened by things unobsessed with being seen.

“It could be self-aware right now, and we wouldn’t know it! Think about it…why would it tell us?”

I press my hands against the top of the folded towers and close my eyes. I push down. They sink and shoot animal static through my veins. We’re out of detergent. Tomorrow, I’ll have to ask the cashier to unlock the laundry display. The thought bubbles bile in my chest: me standing schmuck-like as “help needed in aisle seven” tells everyone I’m filthy and helpless.

“…one day we might not even remember what it was like to be human.”

I don’t say anything; there’s nothing left to say.