THE MIDNIGHT MACHINE
Tetsuya sat in a dark corner of the bar, nursing a quarter inch of lukewarm bourbon while staring at his screen. A jazz band played in the background, blending in with the low hum of twenty different conversations. He had been coming here for years, drinking from a perpetually half-finished bottle of whiskey that waited for him on the shelf behind the bar. He was a regular who would always leave at 7:30 before the evening rush, take the 8:15 train while playing Tetris on his phone, and come home to his wife cooking dinner in their studio apartment. They would talk about their day, dream about moving to the country someday, and argue about what plants they would have in their imaginary garden. It was a simple and good life. During the day, she would text him jokes while he was at work and at night she would always find a way to scare him by hiding in dark corners of their apartment before they went to bed.
His wife, Akiko, had been dead for six months now, the grief clung to him like stale cigarette smoke. She had died suddenly, no illness, no warning, just a heart attack that took her in the middle of the night. A night where he stayed all night at the office. He hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye. Since her death, he felt a dull ache that never went away, a coldness settled in that the whiskey could not warm, a hollowness in his chest that grew quietly.
He distracted himself with more work and old routines. In his quiet moments, he would stare at the stored images of her dormant feed on his screen. It was the first thing he saw in the morning and the last thing he saw at night. He kept reliving those old moments, but each day moved him further away from the life he knew and the person he once was.
He scrolled one last time as he paid his tab, but something happened, the feed abruptly stopped. An advertisement replaced her last photo. He refreshed the feed, the ad remained. He relaunched the app, the ad remained. He reset the phone, the ad remained. In the days that followed, the ad replaced her feed entirely. In bold letters, “Experience something you knew, with something new.” He had heard about synthetic humans. At first, they drove you to the bar, then they served you drinks at the bar, and now they were taking you home after the bar. He looked away from his screen, feeling guilty for even entertaining a germ of the idea. The idea that he could feel something other than grief. He felt he was betraying her memory. Days turned to weeks, as he kept catching himself unconsciously reaching for his phone and searching in vain for her feed.
Every time he saw the ad, it reminded him of the truth. The truth was that Akiko was not coming back, and that he didn’t know how to move forward. He was trapped in a feedback loop of confusion and despair.
One night, he turned to her side of the bed. She would snore softly in the early hours and find her way into the crook of his arm. He looked at the weeks of laundry that had piled up on her side and in that moment he yielded to the impulse to feel something other than emptiness and he clicked on the ad. Half-wanting it to go away, and half-wanting to know what would happen. He missed seeing her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her...
The advertisement disappeared and Akiko’s feed reappeared just as it was before. He started to scroll through the feed when the message appeared. It was a brief statement, a confirmation: “Your companion has arrived. Please proceed to the address.” The address listed was: Shinjuku-ku, Kabuki-cho, 1-19-1. It was his apartment. A moment later, there was a knock on the door.
He waited and listened. Maybe it wasn’t his door. Another knock. It was his door. He stumbled in the darkness and looked through the peephole. He let out a gasp. He saw Akiko, or something that looked like her. She looked so real, so alive. He exhaled slow and swallowed hard. Flashes of memories flowed through his mind, his hands went numb. Another knock. Another pause. It was a long silent moment, something turned inside him and fell into place. He opened the door and whispered, “Hello,” knowing he could finally say goodbye.
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