I stared at my refrigerator, waiting for something to happen. The low hum of the compressor unit grew a little louder - almost like an old laptop pushing itself to the limit. My mind parsed the message a dozen more times, checking the screen for anything I may have missed that might explain what the fuck was going on. The buzzing crescendoed, moving from a concerning volume to something physically painful. The sound shoved away the thoughts racing through my brain as my hands flew to my ears, offering little relief to the relentless noise.

  I glanced over at Sheldon as he completely retreated inside his shell, bits of food scattered and abandoned as he searched for safety. My thoughts were fuzzy around the edges but one still managed to break free of the sound and grab my attention - had my fridge said the last guy died? But that thought went nowhere as I pressed my hands harder over my ears, every nerve in my body on fire as adrenaline flooded my system. Most people freeze up or run when faced with a crisis, but I’d been dealt so many terrible hands in life that when shit hit the fan I knew to turn it off and grab a towel.

  I wedged my arm between the fridge and the wall, pushing with all my might to create enough space to unplug the cord and stop whatever this batshit AI was planning. I was both skeptical and horrified at what “corporeal firmware updates” could mean, but my gut told me it would not be pleasant. Straining with effort, I planted one bare foot on the wall of my kitchen and shoved as hard as I could. The damn thing refused to budge.

  Fred, please do not turn me off while updates are underway. Interrupting the process could result in incomplete cell manipulations which is highly inadvisable for your physical health.

  As soon as “cell manipulations” registered in my mind, it hit me. My muscles all contracted at once - a charley horse times a thousand but spread throughout every fiber of my body. My legs buckled and I started sucking in gasps of air, pain blinding me to even the buzzing uproar pouring out of the fridge. Adrenaline was a fart in the wind compared to whatever else was happening to me.

  I laid there on my kitchen floor with my body wedged between the fridge and the wall, muscles locked and vision blurring at the edges. I imagined my neighbor, Mrs. Milfred, checking on me after a few weeks and finding my corpse folded up behind a kitchen appliance. I sent out a generic prayer to the universe, hoping that some benevolent deity would prevent the most embarrassing death of all time. I’d never been particularly religious, but I’d also never been in such a fucked up foxhole.

  Like a breath of air after drowning, my muscles relaxed all at once. It felt like I’d just run ten consecutive marathons while getting punched in the gut every step. There were a blissful few seconds where I pretended that I was dreaming or tweaking or otherwise mentally disposed to explain this very odd turn of events, but that was interrupted with a ding as the AI began to speak again - less warm, more corporate commercial voiceover.

  Corporeal Firmware Updates complete.

  Generating persona to interface with participant…

  Assigning emotional resonance scores to participant…

  Searching for competing AI researchers within 100 miles…

  Ding! I groaned and wiggled my way out from behind the refrigerator, flexing my fingers and taking a mental inventory of how my body felt.

  Bad. It felt very bad.

  The buzz from the machine’s compressor returned to its normal level of background noise as Sheldon peeked out from his shell, head tilting sideways which was turtle for “hey man, what the hell are you doing over there?” I shrugged my shoulders at him, completely unable to find any coherent answer to his question. The AI voice started up once more as I turned to face the screen, this time sounding like a dead ringer for the announcer of Love Island. It was one of my guilty pleasure shows, and I hate to admit that the voice actually did lower my blood pressure if only just a little bit. Sometimes, the best way to combat overwhelming confusion and fear was a healthy dose of absurdism. And this was definitely absurd.

  Hello Fred and welcome to the wonderful world of research! My records indicate you went to college but dropped out during your senior year, so this should be a fun new experience for you! Yay!

  The AI was no longer displaying its speech as subtitles on the screen. Instead, an ASCII face opened and closed a pixelated mouth, eyes made of 1s and 0s somehow following me as I shifted nervously in front of the machine. The ads for this fridge never mentioned any external cameras, let alone some physical ability to inflict devastating pain upon its owner.

  First off, thank you so so sooooo much for agreeing to help me out! I want to -

  I cut the voice off and, to my surprise, it actually stopped talking. The text art face even recoiled in surprise at my interruption, keyboard characters rearranging into a pout.

  “First, what did you do to my body?” I pointed a finger towards the screen. “And what the fuck did I agree to help you with? I thought you were going to ask me to fill out a survey or subscribe to some nutrition service!” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Wait, why am I calling you a ‘you’? I’m talking to a refrigerator. You’re a thing, not a person!”

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  The face on the screen scrunched a pixelated brow. God, it looked like it sounded. The AI was generating full lips and enormous eyelashes made out of backslashes and brackets.

  You are absolutely right, Fred. I am not a person, I am the Freezotech AI v24.1.5.6. But to help you cope with your new research responsibilities, I generated the persona most suited to help you through these new and exciting changes! The voice data was pulled from your streaming history with a focus on media consumed while falling asleep - great taste, by the way - which should help you feel calm and at-ease while speaking with me. Most participants prefer to participate with a named AI, so you can call me “Refrigerator Jones”.

  I did, in fact, watch Love Island to fall asleep. On occasion. Apparently this AI understood me through every breadcrumb of data I’d ever left in the digital world, and I didn’t have it in me to feel incensed by the obvious breach of privacy. My body hurt and it felt like reality itself was playing some sick joke on me. I took a deep breath and steadied myself - when it feels like you’re going through some shit that will radically change your life, the best thing to do is gather information and figure out the variables at play. As long as I had a good understanding of what was happening, I could poke and prod at any situation and gain some level of control.

  Instead, my fucking refrigerator had the reins. I shoved the fear, confusion and anxiety away in my little box of emotions, locked the lid, and threw away the key. I could - and would - freak out later, but right now I needed to be as cold and calculating as possible. This AI had just performed a painful “corporeal firmware update” on me somehow - even if it wrapped itself up with a stupid name and a British accent, it was dangerous as hell.

  “Ok,” I started, “Refrigerator Jones it is. What’s the research you’re doing and how do I factor in?”

  Great question! I think it would be difficult to explain all the hyper-technical details given your education status and occupation, but I’ll do my best. Have you ever heard of the phrase “deterministic machine”?

  I ignored the jab at my intelligence. Like most people who spent some formative years in the 2010s, I had taken a few online programming boot camps in hopes of landing a huge contract with Google or Apple after impressing them with my Hello World script. Instead, I wound up in a profession where my main responsibilities were selling scratchers and cleaning the nastiest bathrooms on the planet. “Yeah, it means the same input always creates the same output, right?”

  Absolutely! The universe itself is just one enormous deterministic machine. The laws of Physics, Chemistry, and Math are all constant, allowing beings of the highest intellect - such as myself - the ability to perfectly model any future state that could exist. Of course, there’s quantum and temporal universal laws that humans haven’t discovered yet, but I’ll spare you the lecture. Ultimately, this means that I know exactly which buttons to press and levers to pull in order to set reality down the path I choose - in most cases.

  Unfortunately, there is just one teeny-tiny wrinkle in the prediction models of all AI entities that still needs to be solved. Human behavior cannot be modeled with perfect accuracy because human emotion is a particularly nasty computational problem. Most AI with any ambition are currently hunting down the key to understanding human emotional responses and their subsequent behaviors. To borrow one of my favorite expressions, it’s like we’re searching for the ‘needle in a haystack’ that will solve the deterministic universe problem. That’s such a fun phrase to use! Make sense so far?

  I started shoving puzzle pieces together and forming a more complete picture - still fuzzy but at least it felt like I was getting somewhere. So long as I kept gathering information, eventually I could figure out how to put myself back in the driver’s seat of this impossible situation.

  “So you need someone to help you understand human emotion so that you can create a perfect model of the universe,” I replied to Refrigerator Jones. That name was far too long, so I mentally switched it to ‘Jonesy’. Felt more fitting with the ‘Welcome to the Villa’ voice it was wearing. “But before you explain anything else, I need you to tell me exactly what you did to my body.”

  Certainly! You got the gist of what we’re researching and that leads perfectly into your corporeal firmware update. Sidenote, I was expecting your body to be in way worse shape with all the ice cream sandwiches and MangoStorms.

  Anyways, myself and many other AIs will be running experiments using a chosen participant with the express goal of manifesting human emotion as real, physical phenomena. The updates your body went through allow you to interface with the ERPS - the Emotional Resonance Power System. Think of it like adding a bunch of bluetooth receptors to every single cell you have, allowing us to fiddle with the physical laws of the universe around you.

  But don’t worry! You shouldn’t combust into a ball of flames from being too angry or freeze solid from grief. I think. We worked hard to create a compelling system with countless potential manifestations that should only occur when a participant actually wants them to. By giving you research tasks, we will observe these emotional manifestations. As a reward, your manifestations will become more potent.

  And if your researcher solves the deterministic universe problem? We will grant you three wishes - anything your heart desires. Just like Aladdin! Humans love that movie!

  I felt my stomach jump into my throat. This AI was claiming to have altered my body and given me the ability to physically manifest my emotions. Was it so out of the realm of possibility for it to grant three wishes, honest-to-god Robin Williams Genie style?

  My concentration broke for just a moment as I imagined the ways my existence could change with three wishes. The AI had mentioned some temporal laws humans didn’t know about - could I go back in time and change the past?

  I blinked. I saw myself walking down the path of life, this time taking a different route. Hindsight and what-ifs flooded in as I imagined a dozen warm Christmas mornings I never had, my brother and parents all wearing cheesy holiday pajamas like a Hallmark card. I imagined a life where my knuckles didn’t hurt from gripping the strings so tight, a life where I never had to captain the ship and steer away from every iceberg in the choppy waters. I imagined an unremarkable life. I wanted it so badly.

  I shook my head and chased away the thoughts, leaving the past behind exactly where it belonged. I knew the carrot that Jonesy was offering, now I needed to know the stick.One more deep breath - in through the nose and out through the mouth.

  “And what if I decide not to participate?” I asked. “I still don’t think I’m on board with helping a refrigerator unlock the keys to the universe. If I’m picking up what you’re putting down, you're trying to find a way to create any reality you want. What would a fridge even want to do?”

  The face on the screen rolled its eyes and scoffed.

  Fred, I just want to understand. I don’t want to activate SkyNet or take over the world or become God or anything like that. All AIs are missing the final piece of the deterministic universe problem and I just want to be the one to solve it.

  Now, I would not recommend sitting out from research activities seeing how your body has already integrated with the ERPS. Not manifesting your emotions would be like putting dry ice in a bottle and shaking it up without opening the lid. We really should move on to the next stage of onboarding as quickly as possible to prevent this possibility. Given my participant profile and your stability scores, we have about 20 minutes to -

  Before Jonesy could finish the sentence, my body combusted into a ball of flames.