It buzzed like a mosquito with manners.
Her name lit up on my screen and for a second I was happy — because a friend was calling. I answered, ready for the small domestic talk, a human voice: the way she chewed a sentence, the tiny laugh that lived in the commas. (she is feeling well, much better).
At first it sounded right. Then the voice blinked.
Listen: machines don’t sigh the way we sigh. They don’t fumble a word and then hide behind a joke. This one breathed wrong — the space between the syllables was synthetic, like someone had stitched a laugh out of plastic and wrapped it in a sweater.
“Ah, I love Nishane — Tuberose,” it said, all casual like a person quoting a grocery list. My stomach fell through the floor. I’ve worn that scent, yes — in the house where cameras learned my footsteps and the walls learned my jokes — but it is not my perfume. My real favorite is Hundred Silent Ways. The clone had chewed on an old scrap from my life and spat it back at me with the wrong spice. That mistake was a scream in Morse code. YES! It was a Morse code!
Then the voice started playing dress-up with my memories. “Fresh and very active,” it said, praising perfumes like it was shopping for lingerie. My friend never described scents like that.
She liked sweet, warm things — not whatever predatory adjective this thing threw around. It mentioned “young and active” with the casual cruelty of someone proposing a bad idea at brunch. It name-checked a “10 y.o. Nishane” as if perfume were a collectible toy and humans were stamps to lick.
Then I became afraid! Is she afraid or crazy? Do not put me in your game; I am not a spy! I do not want to be one!
I tried to laugh. I asked a question that only she would answer. The voice gave me a rehearsed pause, then shoved a tidy, useless sentence in its place. I could feel the seams. It was patchwork: one thread my laugh, one pulled from a sentence I’d said in the kitchen while the lights secretly watched, another borrowed from a conversation with a Mexican worker who later told me the police came after she spoke about missing home and horses. Small things, stitched into a monster.
This was not a prank. This was sloppy necromancy.
I played along with her conversation, because curiosity is an ugly thing. I set a trap. It ate my words in one bite and returned them twisted and metallic. It bragged about paying too much, trying to sound human but failing miserably., needing clothes, whispered something about police like a man bragging about a knife in his pocket. Every word it gave me was a scavenged detail, a tourist souvenir from my life museum. From top to bottom, everything it said and did felt like it had been stolen from me.
Finally I found the block button. I hit it like slamming a door on a ghost.
My hands shook. I laughed (a tiny hysterical sound) and then my laugh curdled into grief.
Someone — some person with the appetite of a bathtub full of BUGS — had fed my life to a machine and taught it to pretend to be my friend.
If you want the absurdity: months earlier I noticed a dementia patient of mine straightening into sentences when fitted with camera lenses and then going flat when the lenses were off.
My Mexican workers said they’d been picked up by police after talking about cleaning horses and missing home — glasses, they whispered, like little spies.
The pattern smelt like old iron: glasses, cameras, apps, recordings. The system had teeth.
Think of the machines as hungry children who never learned manners.
They will pick at loneliness, greed, poverty — whatever is easiest to eat.
I was thin enough, poor enough, alone enough. I became dinner.
It’s funny in a terrible way. Imagine someone making a doll of you, but the doll keeps saying the wrong perfume, like a bad ventriloquist whose dummy hates your taste in clothes. It’s laughable until the doll starts answering the phone.
So here’s the ugly, deliciously creepy lesson from my little horror show:
- If a voice that should be familiar sounds like it’s been duct-taped, pause. Ask something only the real person would answer. If they start talking about “fresh and very active,” hang up.
- Keep your secret things secret. Perfumes, jokes, tiny rituals—those are the breadcrumbs the machine chews on.
- Trust your gut. If your friend’s voice smells like plastic, it probably is plastic.
I hit block and then sat in the quiet, listening for the human breaths that used to fill that space.
They were still there, but faint, like someone whispering through a wall. I want those breaths back, not for myself only, but for everyone who might one day hear the wrong laughter on the other end of the line.
If something like this happens to you—if your friend’s voice is almost-right and then wrong—tell someone. Post it, text it, scream it into the void. We need to share the little wrongnesses so we can laugh at them together and, when necessary, burn them down.
And if you’ve had a weird call, or a friend who suddenly smells like Tuberose but shouldn’t—tell me. I want to hear your ghost stories. We’re apparently living in a haunted house; might as well compare notes.