Ask Me Anything

sensible decision making is an impossibility. If a walking dog turd can hold sway over a fragrant flower like Daisy Parsloe then we are in a crazy universe where the laws of science have broken down and x squared minus y squared equals, I don’t know… a banana.

With the elderly, things are a great deal simpler. Where did I put my spectacles? And what day actually is it?

The Auditory Companion will, I am in no doubt, prove a boon to humanity. The old and confused will benefit in the first instance, but gradually the product may be rolled out to serve all sections of the population. To the young, it will be a wise counsel; to the middle-aged, an invisible friend who can gently point out that a 250 ml glass of Sauvignon blanc contains four units of alcohol. The ignorant will have their lives improved and enriched (bats are not blind; the moon has no dark side); even top professors sometimes leave the supermarket without buying bin bags. At the end of the day, who wouldn’t want a friendly, well-informed intelligence directly available in their ear? A wise and—if I may say so—pleasing voice; one heard as easily, as frictionlessly, as the very words you are now experiencing in your own head.

These words.

And this one.

And here’s another.

How cool would that be?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due as always to my agents, Clare Alexander and Lesley Thorne, and to my publishers, Cath Burke and Maddie West; and to super-cool film producers Bonnie Arnold and Bruna Papandrea. I’m indebted to Andy Hobsbawm for the masterclass on the Internet of Things—any mistakes in the text are all his fault—to Dr. Lee Hunt BDS CDS RCS for polishing the dental references; to Bill Bingham for the John Gielgud story; and to Rachel Reizin for the lively discussions about machine consciousness. Appropriately it was our fridge freezer that provided the germ of this plot, when an engineer called and replaced its faulty central processor. Odd as it may now seem to thank a machine, one day it will not.

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P.Z. Reizin worked as a journalist and producer in newspapers, radio and television before turning to writing. He has been involved in several internet startup ventures, none of which went on to trouble Google, Twitter or Facebook. He is married with a daughter and lives in London.

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