Mechancial Dissonance Synopsis:
A mechanic gets freaked out when the robot furniture resembles her childhood home.
Author's Note:
I wrote this as a part of my English class in Sophmore year I think. I like the main character. She's from Texas jus like me ❤️
Date Written:
February 17th, 2022

Mechanical Dissonance

  Rooms upon rooms upon rooms. The bedroom and living room only had a single piece of furniture. A bed and a couch respectively. The algorithms messed up again. “Mobius!! Get down here!”She called towards the ceiling. The bedroom hologram collapsed and a small robot wheeled itself to her feet.

“Has something gone wrong? Please report any problems in my ‘help’ function.” Mobius was programmed to have a friendly disposition, but it only came off as condescending.

“Why yes, Mobius. Why on EARTH did you only generate a bed for the bedroom?”

“Is it not a bed room?”

“Oh, my godddddd.” She groaned. “It’s not a ROOM with a BED it's a BEDROOM!” Mac collected herself. “Mobius, please conduct more analyses before you show me something like this.”

“Noted.” Mobius said and wheeled itself to the entrance of the factory.

Houses were no longer built, they were manufactured. Individual floors were meticulously built then placed inside of a larger frame. Humans no longer were in control of architecture and interior design, because people of the past built machines that automate all of that work. Any living architects lived inside communities with other human beings and designed houses for them. Mac’s job at the AHD Factory was to prepare housing for future generations. Due to a multitude of factors from a century ago, the human population has dwindled to a pathetic number. People who can afford to live inside a “hub” of other people can enjoy living in a close-knit community.

Others, like Mac, need to take jobs in desolate fields outside of communities in an effort to maintain machinery built decades ago. Supposedly automated machinery that takes care of every part of manual labor that humans used to do themselves. Agriculture, irrigation, sewage, electricity, groceries, anything, and everything. They’re built to repair themselves and are entirely powered by solar energy^[a]. Despite being designed to be “self-regulators,” the machines still find ways to break down and have to be manually repaired by humans. Most of these machine factories are located in the middle of abandoned cities.  Mac herself lives on a completely empty street where she’s the only resident. She rarely has contact with other people, save for Mobius, who technically isn’t a person.

After long days of work, Mac would return home to her small shack with a tin roof. It was shabby in terms of size and looks but it was comfortable enough. “Did we have any eggs delivered today Mob?” Mobius was outside carrying a basket full of eggs, rice, and vegetables. “Perfect!”  she said, and took the basket from Mobius and set it aside. Her room was severely cramped and the basket barely fit in between the space from her bed to the stove. “Too bad I don’t feel like cooking, though…” She relented.

“Mobius, would you happen to  have a skillet function?”

“I’m not a stove..” Mob’s pixelated face scrunched into a frown. Mac let out a hearty laugh and laid back on her bed. The sheets were thin and the blankets were kind of scratchy, but in that moment Mac felt a semblance of peace. Her roof had a big window over the bed and she could see the night sky was lit up with stars. Being in complete isolation usually meant everything was quiet all of the time, but nature still found ways to make rhythmic music anyway. Tree branches rustling against the walls of her shack were in harmony with crickets chirping in the grass. A dreamless sleep was Mac’s favorite remedy for any and all stress during the day, and she fell into one peacefully.

The following day, the AHD machine produced another home design for Mac to look at. She drove again to the factory and a hologram for the house was already running. The holograms the machines created were always detailed and 3 dimensional, with accurate colors and vibrant imagery.

        Today, the machine made another error. “Why does this look so… raggedy?” Mac said to Mobius. The outside frame for the house had peeling paint, and the wrought iron fences outside had already started rusting. The interior was similar in terms of quality. “Why’s there garbage everywhere?! Mob! Why are we in a hoarder’s house?” she shouted.  A clutter of toys and old knickknacks were stacked on top of a dining room table. Papers and trash were scattered everywhere, with a thick layer of dust on top of every chair. A bold aroma of rotten eggs and moldy insulation clogged the entire house.  

“Last time you submitted that there was a lack in the number of furniture items in the house,” Mobius said.  “And now-” “And now there’s way too much! It stinks in here for god's sake!” Mac swiftly exited the house, Mobius followed her out.

“Listen Mob, I don’t know what kind of houses this thing has been analyzing, but tell it to at least make the rooms habitable!” Mobius began recording her words. “The homes we make should be cozy and inviting, not gross. A good home is a place that you can come back to again and again and never get tired of. Having a great home is like always being wrapped in a warm memory that you…never want to leave-” She started to trail off.

“Comfort. Togetherness. Stability. That’s what a home should be, right?”

A once-happy family, she remembered. A mother sweating over a stove with a smile on her face. The faint tickle of a soft rug under her own feet.  A prolific symphony of raindrops hitting roof shingles. Huge, snug blankets that swallow you whole. Walls that surround you on all sides but don’t feel suffocating. The whooshing of a ceiling fan on hot days. Something that Mac doesn’t have anymore.

“I see,” said Mobius. Its words snapped her back to reality. “I will submit this feedback to the factory.” “It better work this time!” she huffed.

Another day came, and the AHD machine had produced more results again. Mac wasn’t exactly sure on how Mobius transmitted her feedback into a language the computers could understand, but it must’ve worked because this time the house turned out beautifully. The exterior had bright red bricks and the fences outside were sturdy. “Wow,” Mac said. “See THIS is what all the prototypes should look like, Mob!” They walked into the house and everything was well kept and placed accurately. The living room had coffee tables and the bedrooms had not only beds, but dressers and lamps too. Something still felt off, though. “This looks familiar to me somehow..”

Mobius switched the display to another bedroom, supposedly upstairs. There was a cute pink rug on the floor. They were inside of a building but the window was tinted outside to look like it was raining. The hologram further conjured a girl sitting with her feet dangling off the bed, staring at the floor. Mac’s heart skipped a beat, her head started to pound. It was herself. Mac’s ten-year-old self in an empty home. This is my house, she thought. How? She quickly turned towards Mobius. “Did you do this...? How do they have my image? Why do they have my image?” Her breathing became laborious and ragged. “Only your criticism was submitted.” his robotic voice sounded taunting in her ears. Mac forcefully gripped the sides of Mob’s screen. “You tell me how a machine knows my face and memories or so help me I will turn you into scrap metal!” Mobius didn’t respond and only showed a big question mark on its face.

Mac’s childhood wasn’t great.  After both of her parent’s untimely demise, she was left alone in her house for a year. They lived far out from other hubs of civilization, and Mac was only found after the government sent someone to claim the empty land. She was taken into one of the hubs and lived there, barely scraping by until she was 18. Only then she was forced to work as a mechanic and had to live in isolation. Since then her subconscious has blocked out any memories she had relating to her parents.  And here she was now, confronted with a memory that she forgot she had forgotten. Why?

“Forget this. I’m shutting it down.” she groaned.  Mac let go of Mobius and dispersed the hologram. The house’s walls collapsed and they were only surrounded by the facility’s cold, white walls. Mac pulled a map out of her pocket that detailed the locations of every site within the factory. They were in sector 2 located in the south part of the building, where the designs were previewed. Sectors 1, 3, and 4 were all used to build and assemble the houses together. In the center was the “Mother Console” which was the core controller of what kind of houses were built and where Mobius’s feedback was sent.

“We’re heading towards the main console, and from there I’m rebooting everything. I have the permissions to do that, yes?” Mac started towards a long sterile hallway towards the console room. Mobius followed behind her. “Access to inside the room was allowed, but access to the machine’s code was denied.” Mobius cited to her.  “I think I have a nice workaround for that.”

When they finally made it to the doors of the console room, Mac scanned her employee card at a registry and the doors opened. Inside was a stark contrast to the rest of the factory, with the room being completely dark, save for the dim blue lights emitted from computer screens and console lights. The low hum of machinery and energy were drowned out by the massive piece of hardware Mac was headed towards. Thick wires and cables tangled around each other all led to the same machine in the center of the room. A monitor about 70 inches wide hovered 2 feet off the ground, with dozens of keyboards and buttons surrounding it.

Behind it an even grander structure, stood a mass of gigantic, black cables that reached from the ground all the way up to the ceiling, then spread out across the rest of the building like a tree. It was perpetually stuck swaying back and forth, its own cables and wires jostling itself back and forth.  The “Mother Console” wasn’t just the giant monitor and it's keyboards, but the monstrous contraption of cables behind it called the “Wireframe”, that connected it all to every other piece of machinery in the factory.  It twisted and writhed as if it were alive.

“Good god, that’s what it looks like?” Mac whispered to herself. “I believe I’ve already displayed pictures of the mother console to you.” Mobius chimed in. “No offense Mob, but this looks nothing like the pictures. It feels like we’re in a medieval torture chamber..” Mac approached the giant monitor and tried accessing it through her employee card, and was denied. Instead she turned towards the Wireframe. Upon closer inspection, she found that the inside was hollow, and big enough for a human to crawl through.  “Would it be against protocol to climb inside this thing Mob?” she called out. “It is against company rule to tamper with machinery that is currently in use!” it said, almost timidly. “Great! ‘Cause I’m quitting this stupid job anyway.” With that she dived inside the machine and adjusted to its movement.

The Wireframe was still in constant motion. Its movement threw Mac back and forth, left to right over and over, like a perilous, and much more threatening bouncy house. Mac struggled to stay upright, but eventually found a rhythm to move to. As she began to move further in, the space became more cramped and harder to breathe in. All of the electricity being conducted through the wires made the air hot and humid. Sweat dripped down from Mac’s forearms  to her hands, and made her grip loosen. She had already been climbing for ten minutes, the weight of exhaustion already pulling her down.

I’ve gone too far just to slip all the way to the bottom! She tightened her grip. A small flash of light jogged her memory of something else.  Two funerals, a double burial. Confinement. A tiny, primitive robot in her big empty house. She pushed the scenes that came into her mind elsewhere, and kept climbing. Soon the area inside the Wireframe smoothed out, and it was flat again. Blue light was being emitted from a mysterious device. “Wait! I remember this from a textbook.” An ancient piece of technology embedded deeply into the console’s heart. “A sircutt breaker?” Mac mumbled. “This’s probably been around since they built the poor thing..”

Mac wiped away centuries of built up cobwebs around the circuit breaker and looked around it's switches. Pulling all of the switches most likely meant that every machine in the entire facility would shut down at once. No information would be distributed to their programming so they wouldn’t have anything to do. That was Mac’s line of thinking anyway. In quick succession she flipped all of the switches off and the Wireframe ceased to move. She heard the collective winding down of thousands of machines at once. Their collective drones sounded almost like a pitiful cry.  A few seconds later the cables around her began to jerk and writhe again. Dim lights turned back on. Mac heard the computers from inside the console room turn back on again. “What? Everything should’ve stayed off!” There were no emergency generators in the entire factory, the machines couldn't have turned themselves back on.

“Is our service not needed anymore?”something whispered. “Has our job finished?” another said. “WHO SAID THAT?” Mac whipped her head around and around, looking for the voice. A screen appeared from behind stray cables. It showed blueprints of human beings inside of their homes. Kids playing board games. A woman at a desk. People watching movies on a couch. Then, it showed Mac’s younger self standing in the doorway of her house, alone. That same sense of fear struck again. “If our results have not been satisfactory, please submit more information via the ‘help’ function,” it said.

At this, a threshold in Mac’s mind snapped.  

“HOW CAN YOU SEE INTO MY HEAD?” She screamed into the monitor. It didn’t have a face like Mobius did.

“We only try to exact the true desires of our mechanics. Due to your behavior, we see now that our outputs were miscommunicated. We apologize.”

An apology?

“However, our calculations are absolute, and we will not cease production.”

Its screen grew glaringly bright.

“It is what’s best for humanity, and it is what’s best for you, Machiazelli.”

“SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP SHUT UP!! This is too much, this, this, this is- STOP TRYING TO CONTROL ME!!” Mac drove the heel of her boot through the screen and cracked it. She tore the monitor from its mount and slammed it into the floor over and over and over. Shards of glass flew up to slice her hands but she didn’t care at the moment. The wireframe, which was still in its jagged motion, ground to a halt. Every other computer quieted again and everything fell silent. She fell back, out of breath, and looked at the broken monitor. This isn’t real.

Sliding back down the cables proved much easier than climbing up them. Mac clumsily fell out the bottom and hit her head on the concrete. Mobius’s tire tracks were everywhere, meaning he must’ve been pacing back and forth. “Awww were you worried about me?” Mac said, peeling her face from the floor. “Are you severely injured?” he asked. “Not physically, at least.” she responded.

“While you were tampering with the console, I approximated a solution.”

“Oh? Please enlighten me.” Mac was still on the floor.

“The systems in control were acting in the notion of ‘lacking’ something. It believed it ‘lacked’ information and must continue.”

“You know you remind me of a cat, Mob” Mac giggled to herself. Mobius continued speaking.

“I was programmed with a back door into the mother console, capable of making it accessible to your employee card.”

“I see. Now you're encouraging me to break the rules! No wonder you got put out of commission.” Mac gave her card to Mobius and he inserted it into the console, as well as plugging his own hand into it.  The monitor came to life, all of its core code was accessible. “Haha!” Mac yelled triumphantly.  “You know, this makes me wonder why you didn’t tell me you could do this in the first place!”

“You hadn’t informed me that you wished to quit then.”

“Hmph! Well anyway, I’ve got to rewrite this thing and I think I see the real problem. It wasn’t properly analyzing the old layouts of houses and was only taking my feedback as its sole source. A bit too personal.” Mac clicked a bunch of things on the screen and typed a bunch of words on the keyboard, and it was done. “The machines should be unbiased now, they should’ve been more objective in the first place! It’s up to the people in the future to decorate it the way they see fit anyway, don’tcha think?”

Mobius was looking up towards the wireframe. It wasn’t shaking anymore and seemed at peace. “Were you alone up there? I heard screaming.”

Who was talking to me up there? 

“There was something up there. It must’ve been an old AI or something. Just spoutin’ nonsense, Mob.” Mac wiped her nose and smiled. “Nothin’ I’m gonna worry about anyway, cuz we’re getting out of here! How about moving to California? I hear it’s breezy there this time of year.”

“Enjoy your trip, miss.” Mobius sounded solemn.

“Why’re you so sad? I’m taking you with me! I don't think the factory would take you back anyway, you'd be too rowdy for any new recruits.” She winked at him.