Life in a Fridge
Have you ever wondered what happens when your fridge door closes? I don't mean whether the light remains on or goes out because, even if you did manage to see it go off you still don't know whether the fridge flicks it back on as it hears your footsteps die away in the distance, and I know you could leave a camera in there but the days when they never lied are long past and yours might already be in cahoots with the fridge, but I am talking about what goes on, light on or off.
Science[edit]
Fridges are a life form; you might not believe me but I have seen things, done the research, and come to conclusions that I know are going to surprise you. All those years storing vegetable and animal matter has rubbed off and the fridge has learnt what it is to be humble, to love and to die. In laboratories around the world wise men and women have been experimenting with mixing their jeans and then getting on with scientific research into life and what one can do with it inside an adequate budget, reversing dogs to see if they really can recreate gods. But while they got on with all that and still managed to have their nights and weekends free, fridges have never stopped working, doing their own thing. You take a bit of this and a bit of that, and mix them in your fridge without a thought about the consequences of your actions: you keep no records and, admit it, you have left things in their to grow furry hairpieces, or to solidify into interesting cleaning operations without ever wondering what happened to the evaporated content of the same food products, that which was no longer there to scrape into the waste bin along with the solids.
The door closes, the light may or may not go out, but in the hard-to-get-to corners life stirs in that droplet of spilled yoghurt, sending out vaporous feelers to discover what lies around it: is that brother bacon or sister cheese high up on the shelf above? That opened milk carton stretches its sides, blows a few milky bubbles inside and sighs over the ketchup bottle two places along. It could be a long night, and the halved tomato hasn’t woken up yet.
Genetics[edit]
Have you inspected the mechanism that makes the ice recently? With all the energenetics going on behind closed metal doors, do you really think that some hasn’t leaked out and into the ice dispenser? You put your glass in, bang the button and dream of pure ice, and what you might be getting is a DNA reprogram job, replete with everything short of a couple of furry dice to hang from your rear view. You might no longer be the man or woman you once were, you cannot really be sure that you are maintaining the same gender. Ah yes, you think someone else might have noticed – but are you trying to tell me that you have friends who do not have a fridge, that you have never offered them something from your own icebox?
Out back is a mysterious metal grid, offering home space to a growing collection of dust you would not give house space to elsewhere – and you think that what collects there is special, non-DNA dust imported simply to make the rear quarters of your friendly local coolers a little stranger? No, my friend, those lines of browny-grey lying on top of those thin little bars are you, your family, your friends, your pets and whatever else that came to share your life and shed body skin fragments. It’s a whole DNA store, slowly cooking, getting hot, making out with the neighbouring fragments without a thought for how closely related they might be.
Reprogramming[edit]
Have you ever noticed that little hole somewhere at the back of the fridge, the one you thought was to drain away the excess water? But have you ever seen water leaking out of the back of the fridge? Does your fridge have a connection to the waste water system, like your washing machine? No? That is because it is not a drain hole, it is where your fridge breathes, swallowing the vapour from the food and breathing out a foetid cloud of modified DNA microrobots to get on with changing the constitution of everything that is not fully sealed in, although I cannot be fully sure that sealing is a problem for them these days, so don’t take my word for it.
The Future[edit]
Just think about it, next time you want to keep something for later, maybe it will be your fridge that will be remaking you in its own image. And they keep talking about having fridges with internet access ‘for your convenience’, but I say the day that fridges can start communicating freely will be the day I go into hiding. Perhaps you will have enough sense to hide out with me, unless ‘they’ get to you first. It might already be, of course, too late.