Object Conversion by Jessica Powell
I was 18 when I signed up for my first Object Conversion. It was a graduation gift from my parents, who were each about to embark on self-discovery voyages. This, they figured, would keep me entertained and out of trouble while they were gone.
I was nervous at first. I had never spent so much time on my back, had never felt someone lay on top of me.
“Just be. Relax,” Customer Service told me in a calm, female voice. Then it sang me the lullabies I had pre-registered, the ones my mother used to sing to me when I was little. Slowly, I felt the tension in my shoulders ease; I exhaled and let my body droop above the ground as intended.
I was a hammock stretched between two trees, a pillow at my head and another at my feet. It was the summer – the best time to be a hammock – and each day the children ran to me, scrambled across me, scaled my ropes like little pirates climbing a ship’s ladder. When the children left, then came the parents, who napped or spoke lazily with the trees above. Once, a teenage boy tried to deflower a girl while swaying in my arms, his member comically missing its target and poking through my large netting.
Every day was a different adventure. I got to be people’s confidante, other times I just listened in. I got to know their smells, the different pressures of their weight. The movement of their bodies told me more about them than any direct conversation could – what they worried about, what they desired.
Some people were skeptical of Object Conversion, saying it was unnatural and literally inhuman. But what was natural and human these days anyway? As far as I could tell, no one was doing much interacting anymore – most of my friends spent their day hooked up to the Wiremap or lying in silent gel baths. Was their alternate reality so different from mine?
At least as a hammock I was out in the real world, interacting with real people.
When my four-month stint as a hammock was up, I awoke – just as the company had promised – asleep in my own bed, back in my human body. Everyone had questions for me about my experience, particularly since Object Conversion had started to take off in popularity.
I was like a new hobby or toy. Some people wanted to see whether there were any residual strands of the hammock’s jute rope stuck to my skin. Others wanted to hear my opinion about the differences between camping versus poolside hammocks.
But after a while the novelty seemed to wear off. People wandered back to the Wiremap, or cocooned themselves in their homes, watching jellyfish float across their walls for hours at a time. When I talked about swaying in the summer breeze, their eyes glazed over; when I tried to broach the loneliness of my first few days, they’d nod mechanically without looking up from the device in their hands.
It was the opposite experience of being a hammock. If someone was there with you, they were there. You were their cradle, their temporary home. Their skin committed to yours – flesh like warm breath, their body curled inside the cupped palm of your body.
I took all of this as a sign it was time for my next Conversion. Besides, I was already waking up at night and finding my body fixed stiff as a board, yearning to be someone’s surface. It wasn’t sexual, at least not always. It was something else.
Next I signed up to become a bed for a young couple. This time I fell right into the rhythm of things: I enjoyed the even distribution of my weight across four solid metal posts; I loved the smell of fresh sheets laid upon my skin.
The woman cared for me as if I had always been hers. She replaced the sheets regularly, her legs straddling me as she leaned across to tuck in the corners. Through her thin shirt, her nipples grazed my body. In those brief moments, I could feel her everywhere, from my throat down through my body. It was so terrible and delicious that I didn’t know whether I wanted her to continue or stop.
The sex was fantastic, just like I had imagined it. The woman caressed me, let her hand glide across my sheets, then run along the man’s chest. We moved as one unit, my hips tilting rhythmically with hers, the man pressing gently into me as he raised and lowered himself above us. As the act grew more urgent, he grabbed on to one of my sides, groping me, palpating my corner under his palm. I screamed along with them, and I wanted to believe they could hear me, feel me like I felt them.
I wasn’t naive; Customer Service had briefed me clearly on these things: No human understands what their furniture really feels. But bodies speak something beyond language. The couple and I sank into one another, day after day. We fit together in a way words could not.
But after a few months, the couple began to fight.
Knowing the man’s obsession with germs, the woman stopped changing my sheets, sometimes applying lipstick and rolling her body across the bed to leave a passive-aggressive trail of kisses.
Knowing his girlfriend harbored maternal, nurturing instincts for me, the man intentionally began to skip my feedings. Something that was supposed to happen daily now became every other day, sometimes every three days. While his girlfriend was in the other room, he’d stand naked above me, dropping a banana or a handful of crackers into my feeding hole. Sometimes he paused an extra second and just stared at me – I mean, me, the bed – and he’d get a funny look on his face, as if he could see through the mussed sheets and blankets and right into my bones. Once, he put two fingers down my feeding hole as he masturbated above me. But it wasn’t that that made me cry. It was the way he looked at me afterwards, face a blank. Total indifference.
“I’m not so sure about this anymore,” I said to Customer Service.
“I understand. Relationships change. Press the exit button,” Customer Service suggested.
I pressed the button and the next morning I woke up in my own bed, transformed back into a human.
I remained a fan of Object Conversion, but clearly something needed to change. How could I go from an idyllic summer hammock on one conversion, to a neglected bed on another? I needed more quality control, more of a guarantee that I would be placed with the right people.
That’s how I ended up with the Premium Service, which guaranteed placement with 1) a top-rated human host, and 2) cohabitation with another piece of human furniture. I told myself that I was paying for the upgrade because of my negative experience with that couple, but really I was intrigued by the idea of meeting another human object, of sitting alongside someone who wanted to sit there with you, as an equal and not an owner, both of you stripped of the artifice of looks and social status. It would just be me and them and what we had to say to each other.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I couldn’t imagine having to tell my friends that I paid to meet someone via Object Conversion. It sounded too desperate. It would be a lot better if the whole thing was serendipitous: There I was, a lemon-colored chaise lounge in a house by the beach, when suddenly the breeze picked up and the white linen curtain caressed my cushions. The curtains and I got to talking, exchanging stories about gathering shells on the shore as children, and then one day, voila, we realized we were in love.
For my first try at the Premium Service, I was turned into a coffee cup. I met someone on the very first day. Her name was Amoebe and she had been on the kitchen shelf for over a year. A real veteran. We hit it off immediately, and almost right away we had an intense, intimate moment saunaing together in the dishwasher, then drying off ceramic-against-ceramic on the shelf. It was definitely worth the extra 20% fee.
But then something happened. Amoebe disappeared for two weeks and when she returned she was chipped, with wide, brown circles around the lip of her cup. The whole of her body, once a smooth cream, was now tinged with jaundice. I wanted to touch her handle, to rub those brown circles away, but the owner relegated her to the back of the shelf, far away from me. Hey Amoebe, I called out once the cupboard closed, but there was no response. For two weeks, there was no response at all.
Then one night Amoebe started muttering from her back corner, cursing about snakes and witches and needing to cleanse herself. The next day she was screaming about filthy vaginas and heretics and lightning bolts stuffed up the asses of zebras. Then she came for me and a child’s crocodile cup. “Slutty hot toddies!” she spat at us from the back.
This continued for a few days until I finally contacted Customer Service.
“I shouldn’t have to put up with this,” I complained.
All I heard in response was wait music – a bubbly, underwater calypso.
“I want a refund,” I said.
There was no answer. Finally, I pushed the button. I still had one month left in my plan, but I didn’t want to endure Amoebe’s rants any longer.
When I got out, I read that the company had been forced to lay off most of its robot staff. During my absence, Object Conversion had declined in popularity considerably. There had been some sort of scandal involving a man who got trapped as an accordion after he failed to pay the full balance of his account. While the man’s family raised money to pay off the debt, the accordion fell off the back of a bicycle and was rolled over by a truck.
I thought this might be a sign I should give up on the practice. I remembered the way the man in the bed starved me; how Amoebe returned to the shelf bruised and foul-mouthed.
But then there were many nights when I found myself remembering the early days – the way the couple wove my bedsheets around their body like a second skin; of the water rolling down my body drip by drip as I lay alongside Amoebe in the dishwasher. I wanted it again. I wanted it all the time.
I couldn’t make sense of these feelings and none of my friends were around to help me figure it out. The new thing now was Ceiling Staring, which combined relaxation with finding meaning in supportive overhead structures. Half-year self-reflective enemas were also taking off. My parents were away on yet another self-discovery voyage. I lay on my bed and spoke to the gray blanket above me. “I’ll take care of you,” I whispered some nights. Other nights, I pushed it between my thighs and knees, twisting the blanket around my legs to allow no chance of escape. But by the mornings, it had always managed to wiggle free.
Customer Service did eventually get back to me, responding to my complaint with a huge apology and a generous discount on a future Conversion. So I thought, why not give it one last try? This time I thought long and hard about what kind of object I wanted to become.
I kept coming back to my memories of holding people, of cradling them in my arms. I liked having humans on me. I liked the feel of their warm flesh that flipped from soft to hard at a moment’s notice; the back of the arms and thighs that pressed into me when tense; the pounding of a heart within a still, startled body.
When they sat on me, rolled across me, shifted from one side to another, I lost track of time. I was immersed in them, in the sensation of them in and on me. When they stood, they left me warm and flushed. I sucked in my breath and kept an imprint of their bodies on my surface for as long as I could hold it, hoping the trace of their own shape might call them back to me.
I finally settled on becoming a leather armchair. I figured it wouldn’t be hard on the back; I could eat sitting up. I’d be in a living room, or some central place, privy to important conversations and family dramas.
I was in a big glass house in the countryside, flooded with light. Three women lived there along with an old man, a teenage girl, a toddler, and a baby.
“Is the old man related to one of these women?” I asked Customer Service. “Are the women together romantically, or is this like a communal parenting thing?”
I didn’t get an answer. Customer Service just wasn’t as good as it once had been.
I was placed in the living room, to the right of a fireplace, staring out onto a deep blue lake. There were redwoods where we lived – I had never seen those before. And sometimes the tall mother would come back from the lake heaving large orange and white fish she had pulled from the water.
There were young children there, so there were always voices, usually cheerful, sometimes whiny. But it was a loving house, and it seemed the three mothers got along well. Unlike in my other homes, there were no existential rants about one’s life purpose; no long debates about whether swan ice sculpture was a worthy hobby; about one partner spending the entire day hooked up to the Wiremap or another sitting immobile in the living room during a week-long virtual journey. In fact, despite being very busy, always bustling about the house or outside, these people didn’t seem to have any hobbies at all. Finally, I had found my home.
A few weeks into my Conversion, the family got a new armchair in a matching shade, which they placed across from me. I didn’t pay it much attention until one day the shortest mother rose from the chair and it creaked.
My ears perked.
People who haven’t gone through Object Conversion may not know this, but furniture can speak. Humans can’t understand it, but for the time you are a chair you speak Chair, once you are a bed you speak Bed. It’s a bit more complicated than that – if you’re a wooden chair you actually speak a dialect (Wooden Chair) – but you can basically understand all furniture that is structurally and functionally similar to you.
A chair’s creak is not like a human’s cough or sigh or groan. When a chair creaks it speaks volumes. Page after page of text can fit into a single creak. You can imagine why: people wouldn’t want to own furniture if it was creaking gibberish all day long.
When the new armchair creaked, this is what it said:
I am a 47-year-old man. I have done many stints as a spatula, but they gave me a discount if I would try being a piece of furniture. I think the company isn’t doing so well because this whole experience was very cheap.
My name is Henroit, I grew up in a very cold part of the world. When I was little, back when people had jobs and didn’t disappear for months at a time, I thought I might be a data analyst. I know it’s a cliche – everyone wanted to be a data analyst as a kid, right?
Then all of the jobs disappeared and I thought I might take up landscape painting or faux archeology. But all those classes were filled at the community center. So I got into Object Conversion instead.
Two days in, I can tell you this: being a chair is a very different experience from being a spatula. I am both more and less needed. I do not know what I think about that yet. That said, I like the size of me here, I’m sturdy, I’m present. You notice me in the room. I should add that I noticed you, too, from the very moment I sat down.
So let me tell you more about myself. In my human life I’m a bit of a small man. I never thought it bothered me until this one time, when I was 16 –
Henroit droned on and I tuned him out. I had hoped to be matched again with a piece of human furniture, but this guy was too much.
Two days later I awoke in the middle of the night to a series of creaks. Though it was dark, I could make out the shape of Henroit from across the room. He was no longer directly across from me. As part of a half-baked, fort-making endeavor earlier that evening, the toddler had dragged him alongside the sofa.
I could see the thick, brown leather of his arms pressed against the sofa’s curved upholstery. He creaked, then she did. She creaked! All this time that sofa was there, and I had no idea that she was a human, too.
There were a series of high-pitched creaks from her, followed by several lower-pitched creaks from him. But there was no conversation happening here, it wasn’t those kinds of creaks.
I saw it all without seeing a thing. His smooth leather brushing up against her, the short fibers of her fabric curling at his touch. The scratching that would leave her threadbare and aching in the morning.
At first I thought I was mad at them for waking me. But then I realized it was something else. A burning, an itching, my face on fire. Jealousy. The only person who looked to me for pleasure was the teenage girl, who rubbed herself against my arms when no one was looking. I breathed in the gap where her thighs split between me. I wanted to hold her there forever, but she never stayed long.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Who needed Henroit or the teenage girl when I had an entire family who loved me?
I closed my eyes and savored each sensation – the children smearing jelly across my face, the teenage girl dropping her opium sticks and cigarettes down my food hole when she heard someone approach on the steps. I counted how often the mothers farted when they sat on me, like they’d been saving up their unfeminine emissions all day just so they could expel them into the graceful curve of my upholstery. I softened my cushions when the grandfather came to me, sinking further and further into my bend as the tall mother scolded him for soiling himself or eating biscuits away from the table. I embraced the shortest mother – the cheating mother – as she seduced the pretty woman who lived down the road, the back of my chair supporting her head as she took the young woman’s breast in her mouth. The saddest days were the ones where people just threw their coats on top of me on their way towards the kitchen.
I was still sore about Henroit and the sofa when I got a notice from the company that there was an issue with my security payment. They should have run it when I first put in my order, but there had been some technical glitch, and it had only been processed the previous week. The payment was declined.
They hadn’t been able to get hold of any friends or family. That wasn’t so surprising. Nowadays people disappeared on continent walks or those self-discovery enemas and no one heard from them for months at a time.
Re-conversion was expensive, the company said. Without a security payment, it wasn’t financially sustainable for them to re-convert people like me. But, they added, this had happened before and they were not unkind. They had a special program designed specifically for situations just like this, where they would convert “faulty” clients pro bono. They devoted just .1% of company profits to this work, so the timeline was of course longer than a normal conversion. Did I want to be added to the waiting list?
Part of me wasn’t certain – I really liked being a chair here. But then I looked over at Henroit and that slutty sofa sitting arm to arm and decided I should try my luck elsewhere.
I pushed the button.
“You are confirmed on the waiting list for Charitable Human Conversion,” said Customer Service.
“Will you sing me a lullaby like you used to?” I asked. “I’m feeling homesick.”
There was no answer.
Several months passed with no news from the company other than a pre-recorded message every time I hit the button.
You are confirmed on the waiting list for Charitable Human Conversion.
I saw the frost form on the leaves outside the living room window, the lake turn gray with ice.
On a clear spring day, the cheating mother takes me to get reupholstered. I am taken in a delivery truck to a warehouse. It smells musty; there are no humans anywhere.
For two hours I’m atop some sort of platform. My leather skin is ripped off of me; I feel exposed, but also excited. As a robot rolls away with my old skin, I spot the remains of the baby’s vegetable puree on what had once been my back. I feel a shiver of pleasure. I am raw.
A moment later the other bots are covering me with new leather. Their touch is firm; they grab me by the legs and the arms. I hold my breath as they touch the underside of my seat, press my new leather against the wood supports.
During the truck ride home, I wiggle about in my new, taut skin. I wonder if this is what a facelift feels like, or waking into a new, younger body. My stomach feels flatter. I wonder what Henroit will think when he sees me.
But Henroit is not there when I return. I discover later that he’s been moved into the baby’s room. The baby, moans the third mother – who is now pregnant – pooped all over the nursing chair, and so she replaced it with Henroit. The cheating mother does not agree with this decision. She prefers Henroit in the living room, but the pregnant mother shuts her up with a single look. I bet the pregnant mother knows what the cheating mother has been up to. They glare at each other in the living room, then avoid each other the rest of the day. The tension fills the house like steam, and I want to soak myself in it, but I feel like I’m floating above it, like a raft on a lake. I can’t remember the last time someone was mad at me.
That night, I am awoken by the shifting of the grandfather above me, moaning in his sleep.
There is an unfamiliar smell wafting into the living room. Like how I’d imagine a forest would smell, intense and woodsy, but if it were angrily turning on itself. Perhaps the tall mother has left fish on the counter again overnight.
I open my eyes. It is dark in the room, but across the hallway the outline of the kitchen door is haloed in flickering orange light. The light pulses, the door seems to grow and then shrink. I wonder if I’m hallucinating. Maybe this is the start of my Conversion?
Then the grandfather starts shaking in my arms. Fire? he asks. And then again, this time louder. Fire! Fire!
I can tell he is trying to get out of the chair, but he needs help to stand. His hands grip my arms and bears down, but there is nothing he nor I can do. I wonder which burns faster, flesh or leather.
I push the button.
You are confirmed on the waiting list for Charitable Human Conversion.
I push it again and again, hoping the repetition will trigger something in Customer Service. If I burn here, there is no Conversion and they will make no more money from me. They can’t sell this chair again. Aren’t I at least worth the resale value?
You are confirmed on the waiting list for Charitable Human Conversion.
I scream, I shout fire!! I call for my parents, for the family, for the company. But it all comes out as a creak. Not even Henroit, asleep in the children’s nursery, can hear me.
Then there is a rush of footsteps in the rooms above us. The grandfather continues to scream, shaking the chair side to side as if together we might wobble our way out of here.
There’s a sound of splitting wood in the kitchen, and then a hollow sound, like a swoosh. Bodies come rushing down the stairs. It’s the family. I count them – the three mothers, the teenager, the toddler, the baby.
All but the tall mother rush past me, they don’t even glance at me as they run to the front door. But the tall mother stops in front of me and grabs hold of the grandfather. I hold as tightly as possible to the old man’s arms – don’t let me go!
His grip doesn’t slacken either.
I feel his warmth all over me, and the even greater heat of the fire, which has now burst through the kitchen door and has caught the edge of the curtain. I hear a siren approach as the tall mother tips me over and the grandfather tumbles out on to the floor. With a grunt, the tall mother lifts him to standing, supporting his weight under one of her shoulders as she drags him out the door.
The flames flash across the curtains; the heat surrounds me on all sides. The smoke snakes under my cushions, the fibers of my body curl and crisp. In my mind I see the skeleton of a metal chair, stand-ing above the ruins of a burned house. But I am not a metal chair: I am made of leather and wood and when the fire is done burning through this house there will be nothing left of me.
A second later, a blast of cold water hits my chest. But I don’t want to be saved yet.
Wait! I creak to the family, to the fire. Give me a few more seconds of this.
I want to feel the flames licking at my legs, the fire’s teeth biting the edges of my ears. I want the smoke to seep into my upholstery and cloud my feeding hole.
Grab me, cradle me, pull me into you. Don’t let me go.
Jessica Powell is the author of The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional but Essentially True Silicon Valley Story (2019), the first novel ever published by the digital platform Medium and subsequently published as a paperback and e-book. She is the author of Literary Paris (Little Bookroom, 2006). Her work has also appeared in TIME, The New York Times, VICE, WIRED, and Fast Company.