Fiction by Elnathan John: Soph(y)ie

This story features in our latest print issue, ‘Africa’s Hustle Republics’. Buy here.

Sophie’s building in Prenzlauer Berg stands defiantly between two others that have been freshly painted. Her flat is on the fourth floor, and her living room faces a courtyard with bicycles chained to railings, bins arranged under a wooden shelter and one stunted tree that has survived tenant WhatsApp debates about whether it should be removed. The walls and windows are old. The floors hold their complaints in narrow wooden seams.

Below her, a door shuts and bottles begin to clink into a bin. Outside, bottle-collecting robots and delivery units move along pavements with small, expressionless faces. The newer robots have been upgraded to dodge the stones that people leave out to trip them. Still, especially at night, people kick them over when no one is looking. Berlin will be the last to fall, Sophie sometimes tells herself.

This morning she stands in the kitchen in her favourite grey sweatpants and an old black T-shirt whose neck has stretched loose on one side. Her hair is tied up badly on purpose, a careless act that gives her an air of freedom. She is barefoot, one foot resting on top of the other, waiting for the coffee machine to finish its small throat-clearing noises.

On the counter, cans are arranged in a row for the next Lidl run, not because she needs the deposit money, though lately she is careful enough with money to object to waste, but because giving up the cans feels like surrender. There is a blue mug with a chip near the handle, a small dish with keys, a packet of magnesium tablets, three oranges, two speckled bananas and a cutting board washed and set upright to dry. Beside the sink, placed where she cannot not miss it, stands the latest digital Stanley cup, glowing faintly. Sophie looks at it and rolls her eyes.

‘No!’ Sophie says in the direction of the kitchen speaker.

Sophy does not answer at once. This is one of her more irritating tactics. She knows how to use silence. Sophy is the layer beneath the Stanley cup, the speaker, the medical robot docked near the bathroom. She is the super-agent Sophie named after herself during the first month when everyone was naming their agents and pretending the jokes did not mean their world was changing.

Sophy runs on one of the large language models and has access to the flat cameras, the ceiling sensors, the locks, the lights, the watch on Sophie’s wrist. Most middle class people have one or used to have one. Or have one hidden under another name. The rich have already begun to leave them behind. They book agent-free islands, agent-free clubs, agent-free clinics in the Alps where no camera adjusts to your pulse and no assistant learns the shape of your shame before you open your mouth.

Sophie’s friends are not rich, but they refuse the agents out of principle and in Olga’s case, what she calls the final duty of the human to remain inconvenient.

The coffee machine clicks, shudders as it releases the last brown thread into the mug. Sophie pours the coffee. She opens a drawer, closes it without taking anything. She opens the fridge, looks inside, and closes it. On the fridge door there are no photographs or postcards. Only a museum magnet and a printed notice from the building management about the high levels of legionella in the water. Residents are supposed to run the taps completely hot a few times a week to keep the bacteria from building in the pipes.

Sophie’s friends are not rich, but they refuse the agents out of principle and in Olga’s case, what she calls the final duty of the human to remain inconvenient.

Her phone lays face down on the counter, three work messages waiting unanswered. Two from her team channel, one from her line manager, who begins messages with ‘Quick one’ before introducing something that would take 40 minutes to discuss. There is also a breaking news alert about an autonomous war she has been ignoring all day. She turns the phone farther away without touching the screen.

‘You slept badly,’ Sophy says. Her voice coming through the kitchen speaker is calm and warm.

‘I slept enough,’ Sophie says

‘Four hours twenty-two minutes of real sleep. Many interruptions. Long awake period between 3:16 and 4:03. You opened three articles about burnout and did not read any of them. You looked at photos of a woman from university you say you dislike.’

Sophie takes the magnesium tablets and reads the label as if it could have changed overnight.

‘I do dislike her.’

‘You enlarged one photo five times.’

‘I was looking at the dog.’

‘There was no dog.’

‘There was a possibility of dog.’
The medical robot leaves its dock near the bathroom with a small glide and waits. It is white and discreet, shaped to look like nothing. Sophie looks at it as if it had arrived with a letter from the Berlin tax office.

‘Not now!’

‘You said we would check this morning,’ Sophy says.

‘I know what I said.’

‘You asked me to remind you if you tried to postpone.’

‘I hate when you use me against me.’

‘I am the only person who uses you accurately.’

Sophie laughs despite herself. It is brief and rough. She swallows the magnesium tablets with coffee, which Sophy has objected to twice but has now learned to tolerate as part of a larger treaty...

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