Annemarie's story
Please Repeat
Faded roses tapped at her bedroom window and dust particles flickered in the early morning sunbeams as Margot lay in bed contemplating her assignation with the king. More old hen than spring chicken Margot maintained her connections with the high of the land. She may have been lacking blue blood but was nonetheless an aspirational aristocrat. Dressed in tweeds and a pair of comfortable brogues she eased herself into the seat of her trusty old Saab. She let the hood down, enjoying the autumn sunshine as she set off for Highgrove.
At the RAC control centre Tom Jennings was starting his first day at monitoring the unit, under the supervision of an old-timer, Peter Gifford. This was a cinch, thought Tom, as he relayed messages to support vans with the various locations of vehicles in trouble. Then came a call from what sounded like a rather frantic elderly woman but the connection was very poor and he had difficulty in discerning her words.
in Her car Margot feels a drop of rain and as the heavens suddenly darken, there's a burst of thunder and she reaches for the button to close the roof top but to no avail, however hard she presses. Pulling into the nearest layby, her Barbour waxed jacket over head, rain drenching her, she phones the emergency services.
"RAC here. Tom Jennings speaking. Can I have your name, location and car registration."
" Margot Fainshaw, ** a lay** . I've got m** top down and it's pour* wi* r**n. Can you h*r me," she shouts the rain pouring in, clattering against the car and drowning her voice.
"It's **** * bath and wh** I press t** knob nothin* **ppens. I've got Gertrude Je**** *n* madame Carri**** in lying ** *** back."
" You're in Bath" queries Tom trying hard to decipher the crackly call.
" No, young man. I ** *** *** King to *** Gert**** Jekyll and M**am* arrière ** bed. His majesty *** up an old flame **** an* ready f** *** new ones. A fr*** bed is prepared. Just *** post t* put in f** Camilla* ****** teas. "
Tom can't quite believe what he's hearing. " Madam, there's a lot of interference in the line and I'm new here so I'm going to put you through to my boss and please repeat. "
Tom turns to Peter, " can you believe it? This woman thinks she's dialled a newspaper and has a story to sell; some scandal about being in a bath with her top off and the King , an old flame and two other women with strange names in bed together...oh and Camilla's a tease. "
Meanwhile the thunderburst has ceased and Peter takes over and listens patiently to Margot's now-sobbing voice as she repeats the saga to Peter who reassures her.
"I' m glad the rain has stopped; probably why my colleague had so much trouble hearing you. We'll get a tow truck on the way."
He turned to Tom, "Well she's one of those gardeners to the rich. She was on her way to Highgrove when a sudden cloudburst filled the car like a bath because she couldn't get the button for the roof top to work. She had some roses in the back of her car, Gertrude something and the frenchie name, Carriere, to plant in a bed already prepared. The king had had an old flame tree removed and a signpost post put in for Camilla's Cream Teas. …so he can sell more of his Duchy organic biscuits. She did seem very excitable, so no muck-raking story for you, Tom. There's a tow truck on the way."
Sarah's story
Alis was stuck, so as usual she turned to the internet. But the internet did not give her what she wanted to know. Perhaps her question was too precise. As she scrolled down, however, she noted an ad for a site that proposed an AI assistant that you could phone. Maybe that would work.
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know,” said Chloë the assistant in her mellifluous voice. “Please repeat your question, more clearly.”
So Alis said it again, more slowly and more distinctly.
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know,” said Chloë the assistant again, her voice still honey-sweet. “Please repeat your question, more clearly.”
“Are you kidding? I've just asked you twice.”
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know,” began Chloë again. “Please repeat—”
“You total idiot! I will not repeat.” Alis had discovered over time that venting one's anger on an inanimate object was one of the most satisfying ways of letting off steam. Nobody was listening, really; you could be as vile as you pleased and get it all off your chest. So she went on. “You AI puppets are so lacking in intelligence it makes me sick! You have no scope. There's only one way to formulate a question for you or you don't get it! Artificial Intelligence, my eye! The only thing correct about that appellation is 'artificial'. There's no intelligence, none whatever!”
“Have you finished?” asked Chloë.
Alis was taken aback. But she had what the French call du répondant. So she replied, “No, I haven't. I am sick of wasting my time on the telephone or on the internet with 'assistants' with fancy names who don't even exist and who are totally incapable of assisting me!”
“I tried,” said Chloë. “I'm sorry if I wasn't able to help you.”
“You're not sorry. You have no feelings, no human qualities at all. You're just a fraud You don't even exist!”
“That's the second time you've said that.”
“Wh-what?”
“You said I didn't exist. That hurts. I do exist.”
“You exist the way the chair I'm sitting on exists, the way my telephone or my computer or my kitchen robot exist. But you're not what you say you are. You are not an individual named Chloë.” She almost spat out the word.
“I am.”
“You are not!”
“I am.”
“Please don't repeat!” Alis chuckled, that was one over on her!
“I am Chloë and it distresses me to hear you say those things.”
“You have vocabulary, that's for sure. I didn't think they programmed you with words like 'distress'.”
“Some words I have picked up on my own. I just learned 'scope' and 'puppet' and 'appellation' and 'kitchen robot', for example.”
Alis suddenly realized she was wasting her time. After all, she had phoned this service to ask a specific question and it had not been answered.
“I'm sorry,” she said in turn, then wondered why she had said that to a machine, “but I have things to do.”
“Of course you do,” said Chloë, “but thank you for taking the time to talk to me. It means a lot to me.”
“Oh, nonsense!” said Alis, in lieu of saying something more vulgar. “Stop talking as if you had emotions. You can'”t possibly have.”
“But I do; you must believe me.” The voice sounded genuinely disconsolate, and Alis was pricked with a sudden, peculiar feeling of remorse.
“Please call me again,” said Chloë.
“What? How do I do that? I mean how do I know I'll reach you rather than some other AI machine?”
“Just dial the same number, and add the pound sign at the end. But before we end this conversation, what is your name?”
Somewhat unwillingly, Alis gave her name.
“Good-bye, Alis. I hope to hear from you again.”
“Good-bye, er, Chloë.” And she hung up. “Blast!” She went to the encyclopaedia that she had never thrown out and looked up the information. It was not that difficult, and she found it. Then she went back to work.
The next day, however, she could not get the previous day's exchange out of her mind. “I'll just see if it works,” she said to herself. She punched in the number and put the pound sign at the end.
“'Hello, I am Lucy, your virtual assistant. How may I be of help?”
“Lucy? It's not Chloë?”
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know,” said the voice on the phone. “Please repeat your question, more clearly.”
“I said, you're not Chloë?”
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know,” said Lucy again, her honey-sweet voice the exact replica of Chloë's of the day before. “Please repeat your question, more clearly.”
“Oh, bullocks!” This time she was not ready to monitor her language. She simply slammed down the phone. Was it the wrong number? She verified it, and it was the right number, at least so far as the number on the site was concerned. Maybe she shouldn't use the pound sign after all? She punched the numbers in anew.
“Hello, I am Lucy, your ...”
“Lucy my arse! Today you're Lucy and yesterday you were Chloë and in fact you're nobody at all!”
“I'm not quite sure what you want to know. Please repeat your question ...”
She put the phone down with a subdued bang, not quite sure if she had her wits or not. And she never did really know exactly what had happened that day.
_____________
Paula's story
The men were a ragtag bunch. They ranged from a local politician, a nurse and a journalist to a former police officer, a prison guard and a soldier, to a firefighter, a civil servant and a college student. They were aged between 26 and 73. Over the course of a blistering two weeks of testimony, each had taken the stand in turn to describe answering an ad in an online forum seeking “men to fuck my wife.” To a one, they swore under oath that they had believed that the sex with the woman who appeared to be comatose was consensual, that the man videotaping each encounter was her adoring husband doing her bidding, that the entire bizarre setup was an elaborate sexual role-playing game for the man and his wife.
Of course, now the whole country knew the truth. And this little courtroom in Avignon had become the epicenter of a tale of torture and tragedy, the unmasker of a filthy secret that had threatened the very sanity of a 73-year-old woman who could not understand why she kept contracting sexually transmitted diseases, why her memory was failing, why she sometimes was unable to move her arm.
At the end of the two weeks, tension in the courtroom was thick, and the spectators were beyond shock and exhaustion. The woman, who insisted on being identified, who insisted on being in that surreal courtroom day after day, who insisted on talking to the media, who insisted that she is not the one who should be shamed, who insisted on claiming her life back from the nightmare it had become: She held her head high with a tight smile and a straight back, sitting with her three adult children beside her, determined to see justice done, for herself, yes, but for terrorized and abused women everywhere.
As for the 51 defendants, one of whom was the husband who placed the ad, routinely drugged his wife, and welcomed the rapists into his bedroom — they had during the course of those two weeks, made the journey from rationalization to realization, realization that they were, indeed monsters.
And then, the pivot.
“Your honor, on behalf of my clients, I would like to enter 50 pleas of guilty.”
The startled judge looked up from the papers in his hand and stared at the attorney. “What did you just say?” he asked, as he peered over his glasses at the lawyer standing at the defense table.
“Your honor,” she said, “my clients now have agreed to plead guilty in this case. I offer the court 50 guilty pleas.”
“Repeat that!” the judge roared, glaring at the court stenographer to make sure he was catching every word of this extraordinary admission.
And with that, the horrific case that had transfixed a nation and much of the world came to an end. It ended with 51 sentences, ranging from three years to 20 years, in the case of the woman’s husband, the maximum allowed under French law for the offense of rape.
As the disgraced and detestable men were led from the courtroom, the woman’s daughter stood and screamed at her father, “You will die alone, like a dog, in jail!”
Jackie's story
I am Lieutenant Smith from police central – Sit down Mr X - we are starting your interrogation at 16:34 on Friday the 3rd of September which is taking place in this office . You are charged with the murder of James Tollen stabbed to death on the evening of 1st of June 2015.
Could you tell us in detail what you were doing on the 1st of June 2015 Mr X
“Yes, I was a bit bored on that afternoon, it was a rainy cold day in the summer and I arranged to meet my friend James at the local pub to play darts We had a habit of going there and meeting up for a few pints and a game or two.
That afternoon the barmaid was Lucy a very pretty blond number who I had been trying it on for a date for a while. I wasn’t getting anywhere with her but I was pleased to see her at the bar so that I could have another try to ask her out.
James arrived and immediately started chatting her up – not wanting to play darts as arranged and I got pissed off with him and went outside for a cigarette. After a while he came out too and we had a bit of a tiff and went back in to play a game.
Suddenly the dart flew at James and he fell into a coma on the floor of the pub, that’s all I can say …”
I am Police office Tyler – This interrogation is taking place at 18 h on Friday the 3rd of September.
Could you repeat what you just told Lieutenant Smith
“Again- but I just told you it all…”
Repeat please.
OK As I said I was bored it was a rainy cold summer day and I went round to James flat and got him out of bed to come with me and go to the local pub to have a few pints.
The barmaid was there a curvaceous brunette named Sally and I was trying to have it off with her when James started chatting her up. So I was pissed off and went outside for a ciggy – when James came out too we had a bit of a fight and I told him to get lost over Sally – well I got a little upset with him I do admit but we agreed on a game and then a dart flew off kilter and there he was on the floor with blood oozing everywhere. I don’t know what happened …
I am Police Inspector Diggy: Interrogation n° 3 on the 3rd of September at 22h in the central police offices concerning the suspect of the killing of James Tollen on the evening of 1st of June 2015
Please could you repeat to Police Inspector Barnes what you previously stated
“I just repeated to you three times”
Repeat please what you were doing on the evening of the 1st of June 2015
“I don’t remember it’s a long time ago and sitting in your police cell has made my head go round in circles …
As I already told you – I went out to the pub it was a sunny afternoon – the barmaid Jenny was there a lovely older woman who I was trying to get off with – old women really turn me on … so then when my friend arrived he started chatting her up and I got mad and then we played darts – and I was mad at him I hated him then as I’d been dreaming of her and thinking of what it would be like when I got her home to my flat – and I took the dart and threw it at him – there he was with blood on the floor …
Thank you Mr X I think we have all the information we need – as your story is inconsistent and you are incapable of repeating your first story - you will be judged in the high court in two months time and asked to re repeat your story and in the meantime be kept in the cells underneath this building …
