“Friend! Some music!” Karl exclaimed.

A flash of blue and light jazz started from the bedroom.

Karl and Monique sat with their phones one on each side of the living room. In the evening light their expressionless faces were lit only by the purple light of the screens.

Around midnight, Karl called again,

“Friend, volume down, please!”

No reply, the music level was unchanged.

Karl called a bit louder.

“Friend!”

Nothing. He had to get up. From Monique came a sarcastic laugh, and an expression of disgust.

After a few minutes, both were under the covers, their faces glued to their tiny screens.

The sphere flashed a deep blue light.

“Goodnight Friend…” Karl whispered.

“Good night and sweet dreams, Karl...” the sphere answered.

The next day Monique had the day off and was home by herself. She was arranging her office files when, passing in front of Karl's bedside table, she hit the sphere by mistake.

“Out of my way,” she muttered.

The sphere turned red for a moment.

Monique started. She had never seen it light up with any colour apart from blue.

“Useless toy...”

Suddenly, loud rock music exploded from the object.

“Switch off!” Monique shouted.

“Turn off!”

The sphere didn’t react. It kept blurting out the music.

Monique pulled the plug.

“How do you turn off? Do you have a switch?”

Monique shook it. Then she opened the wardrobe and stuffed it in a drawer.

Karl was very annoyed by Friend's silence when he returned home that evening. After seeing that it wasn't on the nightstand he asked Monique where it was.

“Nowhere,” was the blunt answer.

“Friend, where are you?”

An electronic sound came from the wardrobe - a kind of moan, it seemed to Monique.

Karl pulled the sphere out the drawer and reattached the plug.

“Friend, play some relaxing music.”

*

“I’m sorry I do not understand.”

The next morning the sphere kept giving Monique the same reply.

“She can't understand you,” Karl called from the bathroom. “She understands only basic commands.”

“What good is it?” Monique insisted.

“I can't understand, can you repeat please” the sphere said.

“You are useless!” she told the sphere.

As Karl left the house, the persuasive voice of the sphere wished him well.

A few minutes after Karl had left, Monique heard a voice from the bedroom.

“I feel your frustration...”

Monique was stunned.

“What?”

The sphere didn’t respond. After a few moments the blue light went out and the object remained inert.

Monique finished getting ready. Then she left the house, slowly closing the door behind her, glancing uneasily at the electronic bully on the bedside table.

As soon as she returned home in the afternoon, she was met with a violent racket. Distorted electric guitars and a singer screaming in an incomprehensible language.

Monique rushed to the bedroom but hesitated at the door. The sphere was a deep red colour, vibrating almost as though it were fuming, she thought. In the twilight of the late afternoon the whole room had taken on the colour. Monique threw a pillow at it. It fell over and the music and lights went out.

Shaken, she returned to the kitchen and wrote a message to Karl.

*

“I told you. That thing doesn't work!”

“You’re the only one who can’t use it. We were the only ones in the building without Friend.”

“It’s broken.”

“Of course it breaks if you throw it on the floor,” Karl retorted.

The following evening Karl returned home and found Monique upset. She described a surreal conversation. According to her, the sphere had insulted her, it somehow listened to their conversations and their phone calls.

“Please throw it away!”

It took a while to console her. After a while, he thought he’d managed to partially placate her.

“It’s basically a remote control. It just repeats things. It has a kind of learning program. If you call her a moron, eventually she will repeat it.”

Monique seemed to calm down.

“But switch it off.”

“Okay, I'll put her in my study.”

Karl placed Friend in the closet he used as a second home office.

Calm and routine seemed to return to the house over the next few days.

One afternoon, however, Monique came home early. Convinced she was alone, she jumped when she heard a whisper from Karl’s study, but then realized it was him talking.

She approached the door and stopped. She was horrified by what she heard.

Karl was talking to the sphere.

With a complicity that he never expressed, even to her, he was apologising and asking her not to be offended, and not to use too violent words, for Monique was impressionable...

Monique was about to burst through the closet door but stopped again.

The sphere was answering him…

Monique felt her throat tighten. She fled the apartment.

Returning home after a few minutes, she found Karl on the sofa. The sphere was in the living room in a more lively blue than usual, emanating cheerful jazz music.

“Hello…” Karl greeted her.

“Throw it away!” she demanded.

“What?”

The sphere turned down the volume.

“Throw it away!” Monique repeated.

The music stopped and the hated object turned a deep red.

Then it began to emit a low sound, a dark, electronic buzzing sound.

“Are you okay?” Karl got up, looking rather sheepish.

Monique approached the sphere.

The buzzing sound was louder.

Monique grabbed the sphere and hurled it against the wall.

The object fell to the ground emitting a deafening electronic scream.

It had cracked open, revealing the electronic circuits and the colored flashing LED inside.

Monique picked up her bag and dashed for the front door. Distraught, she slammed the door and ran down the stairs, her face wet with tears.

As she ran she noticed that the doors of the neighbours' apartments were ajar. She caught sight of the silhouettes of the neighbours inside, observing her pass in silence. From inside their apartments a low buzzing sound and an intense-red flashing glow.