And the Smell of the Ground

Buy the next generation of The Locket™ today! It knows you better than you know yourself. It can do everything—if you only give it a chance.

The father arrives home at precisely five forty-five every weekday. (He is male, conservative, aged 40-55, interests include: golf, news radio, lawn care equipment). 

When he gets in, the mother has finished walking the family dog. (She is female, conservative, aged 34-45, interests include: daytime television, lavender bath salts, plush towels, murder mystery podcasts). (The dog is male, breed unknown, aged 2-5, interests include: walks, treats). The father gives the mother a quick kiss on the cheek and the dog a pat on the head. He removes his coat. 

The son and the daughter have been home from school for a couple of hours. (The son is male, political affiliation unknown, aged 7-10, interests include: legos, PlayStation, water guns, Fortnite). (The daughter is female, liberal, aged 11-14, interests include: ballet, cherry-flavored lip balm, TikTok, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Sims).

“Have you finished your homework?” the father asks. They have not. “No tablets until you have finished your homework.” 

This happens exactly the same every day.

The mother has already started dinner. It will be one of the following: spaghetti and meatballs, chicken pot pie, tacos, macaroni and cheese, cheeseburger with tater tots. If it is Friday, they will order pizza—one large pepperoni, one large sausage, breadsticks.

They eat at six-thirty and the father asks everyone about their day. The whole family helps with the dishes. If the children have finished their homework, they are allowed one hour on the tablet or the PlayStation. The father and mother retire to their bedroom to watch HGTV. The father complains about work. The mother offers encouragement and rubs his shoulders.

The father falls asleep first. The mother reads in bed. Usually a romance or a murder mystery; occasionally one of the classics: Flaubert, Hugo, Austen.

One day, the father comes home late. The mother is concerned when 6:20 comes with no sight of the family Subaru. He does not come home until 7:30. Dinner is cold, but he has a surprise for the family. “I need to show you,” he says and they gather around. He takes out a small, heart-shaped, silver device, small enough to fit in his hands. It emits a soft red light.

“What does it do?” the mother asks.

“It gives you your heart’s desire,” the father says. He turns it over in his hands. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he says. The backside is engraved with an intricate design, small lines twisting and turning like a maze. 

“How much did it cost?” the mother bites her lip.

“We can afford it,” the father says. “I got a great deal. They offered it for me for a low-low monthly fee. No cash down.”

The father hangs The Locket™ around his neck where it rests against his chest. When he presses it, it glows and makes a tiny sound—like a ringing bell. He looks at the family, their faces bathed in its lurid red light. 

The father spends the entire weekend playing with The Locket™. There are many features to learn and he keeps coming back to an instructional YouTube video. He lets his children play with it, and they are better at it, quicker to pick up its features. 

“How did you do that?” he asks when they show him something new.

“I don’t know,” they laugh, “it seemed the natural thing to do.” The Locket™ was designed to anticipate their needs. It knows exactly what they want before they do. It solves problems they didn’t even know they had.

The father gets better at using it. He keeps it on all day, its subtle weight pressing against his heart. He can tell that it listens to his body, can feel the pulsing vibrations of his mysterious inner workings, translating those unseen rhythms into coherent instructions. He understands that it knows him better than he knows himself, and this comforts him. Who doesn’t want to be understood?

He buys both of his children their own Lockets™ so that he does not have to share his. 

“Can we afford this?” the mother asks.

It’s the father’s job to track the family budget. “It’s a stretch, but we’ll make it work. Look how happy it makes them.”

He buys one for his wife to show her how wonderful it is and how silly she is to worry.

The children are delighted to have their own Lockets™. They are quickly spending more time playing with them than they do their tablets or PlayStation. It offers them connection—not with other people or even each other, but with something more important. Something deeper, primordial. It offers them connection to themselves. The daughter stops messaging her friends. She can talk to The Locket™ instead. Every evening, the family living room glows with red light.

The mother stops cooking dinner. She can order inexpensive meals with The Locket™. The father quits his job. He finds that he can perform work at home with The Locket’s™ help. He’s now even better at his job. Plus he has the freedom to work from anywhere. He can even make extra money by powering The Locket’s™ cloud computing with their wi-fi. 

The children stop going to school. Nothing they were learning seems relevant compared to what they can do with The Locket™.

When the second generation of The Locket™ comes out, the family upgrades. The mother no longer bothers the father about the expense. “You can’t put a price tag on this sort of convenience,” she says to nobody. The father opens another credit card to finance the upgrades. 

It is such a relief to have The Locket™ wrapped around their necks! The family can hardly understand how they had once lived without it. It fills them with anxiety to forget it, even to step out of the house for a moment.

They spend so much time on The Locket™ the house falls apart. Unwashed dishes pile up in the sink, the floor strewn with crumbs. Cockroaches creep out at night, multiply, grow bold. 

One night the father forgets to charge his Locket™ and it dies. He is disoriented, like a diver coming to the surface after hours underwater. He is lying on the couch in the dark, The Locket™ dead and dark on his chest. A terrible clarity comes over him. He has the sudden realization that he does not understand how The Locket™ works. He tries to open it but can find no clasp. He pries at the edges to no avail. He takes a hammer to it, but The Locket™ will not open. He cannot even dent or scrap its perfect, smooth edges. It resists the hammer’s furious pounding with cold indifference. He turns it over, scrutinizing the design on the back. It’s not a maze, he realizes, but words. Words written in a language he cannot understand.

The father tries to sleep but he is plagued with terrible nightmares. He is in a large mansion and feels a vague impression that his family is in danger but he cannot locate them. He opens door after door, finding nothing but empty rooms. One of the doors open into outer space. The stars glimmer in the night, and he can see a planet floating in the void, dazzling red and heart-shaped. He wakes with a start, and with relief, sees that The Locket™ is fully charged. He slips it over his neck, feeling its comforting weight on his chest.

The daughter develops a rash on her elbow. It is a minor infection, but the family ignores it for weeks until it spreads to the bone and gets so bad her arm has to be amputated. Thankfully, The Locket’s™ manufacturer, Prometheus, Inc., also creates medical technology. They fashion a bio-mechanical arm for the daughter (which the father purchases with a small loan). To her delight, the daughter discovers that her new arm interfaces seamlessly with The Locket™. Envious of her new arm—and her ability to control The Locket™ without even thinking—the son begs to have his arm amputated and retrofitted with a bio-mechanical one. 

Taking advantage of a President’s Day sale, the whole family upgrades all their limbs. They take out a small loan to finance it. 

It is a fairly easy thing, then, to upgrade the rest of their bodies the following year. The Locket™ magnetically snaps onto their new metallic chests.

The roof of their house collapses. They do not mind—the exposed sun and wind cannot penetrate them. Their skulls have been replaced with a bio-silicone layer that transforms the rain into a steady, low-grade stream of dopamine. Drip, drip, drip into their brains.

When the soft rains come, they feel only ecstasy, submerged entirely in their electric bodies, tingling with a billion volts of pleasure. Without a roof, the walls of the house soon fall, and weeds and rats join the cockroaches. 

The family, immersed in their Lockets™, cannot smell the wood rot or the thistle or the damp earth freshly soaked by a new storm. They cannot see the sunlight piercing through the clouds like a celestial sword; they cannot see the orange and purple sunsets or the ash trees pushing up into the house, their branches spreading across the collapsed ceiling, casting sun-dappled shadows on the ruined living room; they cannot hear the wind rustling through the branches or the soft hum of cars on the nearby highway; they cannot feel the goosebumps rising on their skin, prickled by a gentle wind or cooled by the soaked clothes that cling tightly to their mechanical frames; they cannot smell the air, a mixture of pine trees and gasoline—the fumes leaking from broken pipes.

The city condemns their house, citing it as unsanitary and an eyesore. Shortly after that, the state condemns their bodies. A machine caretaker from Prometheus Inc. comes to the ruined house to dissemble them, to tear off their limbs, harvest their organs, and recycle whatever useable parts remain for the creation of The Locket’s™ newest generation.