John Adams - Wastelands 2

That, of course, would not bring back her flowers.

She glowered at the ads through her kitchen window and filled a glass from the pitcher of well water she kept by the sink. She fumbled open the Tuesday box on her medication canister. Like most mornings, she was thankful that she had filled her prescriptions prior to the end; otherwise she would have none by now.

She would have to go to the garden, and although the advertisements were designed to be perfectly harmless, Marie found she was frightened by the way they lurched over the ground. She suspected this was due to the uncomfortable way their silent progress reminded her of zombie films.

Robert would have been fascinated. A year or so before his death, an advertisement had come up to their door. In those days, the ads had acted more like people than those that now plagued her gardens, and it had stood obediently on the front step until they’d opened the door.

Marie had argued that it was better to leave the door shut, because if an advertisement left without delivering its pitch, it would learn not to come back to the house. The way she figured it, and the way several of her favorite independent video bloggers figured it, listening to the ads was like feeding a stray cat.

Robert did not seem to be overly concerned that they would never get rid of the ads. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “They’ll last maybe another few years at the most, and then the companies will all move onto something that costs less. Right now, they’re cheaper than sending employees door-to-door.” He opened the door, despite Marie’s protestations.

“Hello,” the advertisement said, hands clasped before it. “I was wondering if you had a few moments to talk about your retirement?”

Marie just shook her head and turned back into the house. She busied herself with embroidery, although she still kept an eye on Robert to be sure he wasn’t buying anything. No matter how clever her Robert thought the ads were, she did not want to encourage the companies to make more of them.

After a few minutes of animated conversation, the ad left and Robert came into the dining room. He asked, “Have you ever wondered how sentient they are?”

Marie shook her head. She didn’t like the ads, and the best emotion she could muster toward them was similar to the way she felt about mosquitoes. Other people thought they served a purpose; she didn’t, and it was not worth the argument.

It became apparent that Robert was actually waiting for her answer, and he sat down heavily in one of the other dining room chairs. Marie finished a particularly difficult stitch. “They aren’t. They just recognize patterns.”

“Yes, but so do we,” Robert said. He put both hands on the table and sat up straighter. “How close are they to sentience? They’re so much more sophisticated than a recorded ad. They’re art.”

A few more stitches. Marie laughed. “Art? They’re advertisements, not art. It can’t be art if it’s just meant to sell things.”

Robert looked thoughtful. He leaned over the table slowly, put his chin in his hands and looked at her. “And yet you like Mucha prints, and those were all selling something,” he said.

If Robert were still alive, and the world had not ended, Marie supposed he would have gone out the front door and immersed himself in a sea of advertising conversation. As it was, she faced the corporate-orphaned menace alone with an old broom and her largest hammer.

She had hoped they would simply wander off on their own, but after watching through the window for a few hours, she determined they knew where she was. Marie suspected her RF chip was still broadcasting her ID number. She and Robert had bought them before they truly understood how much advertising money had subsidized the price.

She stood on the threshold of the home she’d purchased with her retirement and the last of Robert’s life insurance pay-off, ready to defend it against even the most pernicious of sales pitches.

Marie hefted the hammer over her head and held the broom out like a lance. At least thirty ads were in the front garden now, and more stumbled up the gravel road to her home.

“Get off my property!” Her voice only shook a little.

The ads turned to face her. They were designed to understand when they were told to leave. This was meant to limit the annoyance factor. Even in the best of times, the command had rarely worked.

Forehead screens changed from flesh colors to scrolling text. The subtlety had gone out of advertising entirely. She wondered if that was a function of being away from human contact for months on end, or if she was just surrounded by a crowd of defectives.

“Go away!”

The ads crowded in closer, becoming an ocean of words and prices and markdowns, factory blow-outs and email addresses for the next get-rich-quick scheme, male enhancement drug names, tag lines for movie sequels that shouldn’t exist, and cash advance loan shark promises.

“Marie… it’s been so long.”

At the corner of her cabin, just behind her favorite rhododendron, she saw a figure she recognized immediately and might have known by voice alone.

Robert.

Robert as he’d looked when they’d first met, back in the twentieth century, when they had both been younger and he had been alive. He—it, the ad, wore a very simple black two-piece suit, and held a hat under its arm. It looked like the suit Robert had worn to their wedding, but the shoes were different, as though the advertisement had not fully accessed the public files on their marriage.

Through the first three years after his death, Marie had never grown used to the way the ads shifted to Robert’s form. Now the image spread out like ripples on a pool, the skin of the ads universally deepening almost to a shade of olive, hair lengthening and straightening and taking on that blue-black sheen she’d fallen in love with.

The forward press of ads stopped just outside of her reach, processing the shift from advertising bot to facsimile of her husband. The ads stopped broadcasting on their foreheads, all except for the broken one, which was now fidgeting from one foot to the other in a way that would have tricked Marie into thinking it was actually human if the sale on toilet paper hadn’t been scrolling from one temple to the other.

They were all malfunctioning.

“Have you been waiting?” one of the Ad-Roberts in front of Marie said. She poked it in the chest with her broom handle, and it didn’t seem to mind.

Another ad said, “Have you missed me?”

“Lonely out here,” said a third.

Marie picked up her hammer and slowly, careful to avoid tripping on the door frame, backed into her house.

She shut the door.

The first time Marie had ever seen an ad take on the appearance of Robert had been only a few weeks after the funeral. She had opened the door one morning to find Robert standing just outside. There was a split second when she found herself wondering if she’d imagined the past few weeks. Then she realized she was looking at an ad. Marie thought about Robert rotting in the ground, dead and alone.

The ads were not meant to use the likenesses of the deceased. What they could do was almost as bad, but far less illegal—taking those likenesses and shifting them ever so slightly until the ad looked familiar, but not sufficiently to be recognized.

Whether it was an act or not, the ad looked just as surprised as she was. Its eyes opened wide as it accessed her file and, for an instant, it looked like Robert had when he realized he’d said something he shouldn’t have. The ad opened its mouth as if to speak, but Marie hadn’t wanted to know what it was about to say. She’d slammed the door shut.