Over Again

Flash Fiction by Dan Bornstein

The truck that delivered my savior stopped in the driveway. Two company workers wearing robe-like uniforms hopped out, unloaded a large box, and wheeled it all the way into the living room. I knew better than to try to tip these holy deliverymen, who called each other “brother” and looked around the house with disgusted faces as if the mere sight of the place could defile them for eternity.

They left me alone with the box. All I had to do now was open it by pressing the button on the side and watch the rest happen by itself. There was nothing to assemble, no manual to figure out. The savior was already online and alert when I first laid my eyes on him. He bowed with joined palms, greeted me, and said he would spend a few days in learning mode, during which everyone in the house should behave normally and try to ignore him. While he was talking, I stared at my reflection in his polished metal body, and was appalled by how tired and outdated I looked compared to him.

The savior sat down in the corner of the living room, next to the floor lamp, and remained immobile in meditation posture with his eyelids half-closed. His presence made me uneasy, so I decided to go out for a walk. My wife and the kids would be back soon, but it wasn’t necessary for me to be there when they arrived. They had been expecting this newcomer for weeks, and would only be relieved to see him in person at last.

The first two days were uneventful. Nothing at all had changed in my routine, and it was easy to forget that the life I had known was rapidly drawing to a close. Then, on the third day, the savior left his corner and started moving curiously around the house, studying every detail under the warm glow of his sensors. His main object of interest was, of course, me. He shadowed me day and night, indoors and outdoors, with no regard for my privacy or that of the people I interacted with. But it was necessary, and nobody objected to this temporary inconvenience.

A few days later, the savior began to grow skin, external organs, and, finally, a face—all identical to the corresponding parts of my own body. Now it was time for him to get dressed. Without waiting for an invitation, he opened the closet in the primary bedroom, picked a few of my favorite clothes, and wore them in a typical combination that made him look just like me on one of my better days. Then I knew that the learning phase was about to end. And sure enough, that same night, while I was washing the dishes after dinner, the savior suddenly put his hand on my shoulder and uttered the words I had been waiting to hear: “Let me do it.”

What came next was officially known as the handover phase, but in reality, it was more like a hostile takeover. In less than twenty-four hours, the savior relieved me of every role I had played in the lives of others. Now he was the one handling all interpersonal aspects of my existence, whether at home, at work, or in my social circle. The other members of the household were happy to transfer their full attention to him, and from that moment on, I was a non-entity. In other words, I was finally free.

In the small hours, I quietly left the house, taking nothing with me. The driveway was again occupied by a company vehicle, this time a luxury SUV. The driver, another thickly robed brother, congratulated me on my newfound freedom and started the engine. Out of courtesy, he asked where I wanted to go, even though we both knew that a private plane was already waiting for me at the airport.

The trip to the company’s island resort in the South Pacific was long and exhausting, but the moment I stepped into my new home, I instantly felt rejuvenated. I was now the resident of an unadorned thatched hut with a window overlooking the vast ocean. Only one item, a monitor on the wall, represented modern civilization in the room. All the rest was a timeless antithesis to the cheap technological fads and obsessions of the world I had successfully escaped.

The monitor was remotely connected to the savior’s neurosensory system and enabled me to follow everything he experienced in mind and body. The company encouraged me to devote at least thirty minutes a day to this “vigil,” as they called it. I did so without fail, because I knew only too well how much it meant that someone, however distant and however more fortunate, really cared about you; that you were not totally alone in your little suburban hell.

For a while, everything was going well back there. But after a week or two, I could sense a slight deterioration in the savior’s eagerness for the job. Hardly a surprise, given that he had faithfully replicated my peculiar personality, with its inbuilt disdain for virtually everything he was now expected to do. It was clearly only a matter of time before he felt the desire to pass my former life on to a newer, even more advanced successor, as soon as such a model became available. Fate seemed to have decreed, in these particular circumstances, that those who came to offer salvation would invariably end up seeking it for themselves: my own predecessor, too, had done so when he had me delivered in a box to take that same hot potato of a life off his hands.