I was just saying I don’t like it.

JON (Beat): You’ll have to narrow it down.

TESS: The Prime. We were just talking in the car?

JON: Senior Serenity says companionship is the most important / thing,

TESS (Overlapping): I know what Senior Serenity / says

JON (Overlapping, continuous): that it’s much better than television.

TESS: Better than television, hallelujah. They just want them pacified, Jon, / they don’t care—

JON: What’s wrong with pacified. She’s eighty-five, honey, she wakes up and she doesn’t know where she is. I’d like to be pacified right now, but I have to wait thirty more years for the / privilege.

TESS (Muttering as she works): I’ll pacify you.

JON: What?

TESS: Nothing.

(Beat.)

JON: Look.

(He lifts a peanut-buttery spoon from the sink.)

Peanut butter.

TESS: Small miracles. Maybe she’s finally succumbing to my nagging campaign.

JON: Maybe the Prime told her to.

(She makes an audible shiver of distaste.)

It’s like a parrot that way. “Even a spoonful.”

TESS: Do you know that parrots live forever?

Penny’s father had a parrot, it was like his reason for existing, and he gave it to her when he died. And now, twenty years later, it still says things in his voice.

JON: Like what?

TESS: Mostly just (In a parrot voice) “Hey there partner,” but she can tell it’s her dad.

JON: That’s— How did you put it?

(She makes the shivering-distaste sound. He tries to do it.)

TESS: No, (She does it again, better than him)

JON: Now without the motion.

(She makes the shiver sound motionlessly, with some effort.)

Nice.

TESS: So much talent.

JON: I think it’s encouraging that she’s keeping up with technology.

TESS (Non sequitur): ?

JON: My mother would never—She still had an iPod.

(It’s as though he’s saying “antique Victrola.”)

So to still be, you know, engaged.

TESS: Engaged or pacified?

JON: Does it bother you that she’s talking to a computer? Or that it’s a computer pretending to be your dad.

TESS: It bothers me that you’re helping it pretend to be my dad—or some weird fountain of youth version / of him—

JON: That’s how she / remembers him—

TESS: Both of you are helping it.

JON: Not “helping”—that’s just how it works. The more you talk, the more it absorbs.

TESS: Until we become unnecessary. Isn’t that how it goes?

JON: In science fiction.

TESS: Science fiction is here, Jonathan. Every day is science fiction. We buy these things that already know our moods and what we want for lunch even though we don’t know ourselves. And we listen to them, we do what we’re told. Or in this case we tell them our deepest secrets, even though we have no earthly idea how they work. We treat them like our loved ones.

(Beat.)

JON: Are you jealous?