My Best Friend’s New Friend
Second-besties | Fiction-ish | Fresh Soup
My best friend has a new friend, which is exciting because at our age you rarely make new friends. I met my best friend when we were three. It was love at first sight. The appliance repairman got stuck without a babysitter that afternoon, and so he brought his little stepson with him. While he hooked up our brand new black-and-white TV to the rooftop antenna, my new best friend and I fought valiantly against a giant, evil skull—a sticker that my big brother had stuck on our wardrobe. We shot poisoned arrows from a plastic pistol at it, we pounded it with a foam hammer, and in a moment of fury and desperation, I even spat in the skull’s eye. We thrashed that evil skull until it finally showed signs of defeat and the corners began to peel. And then, a moment before our glorious victory, my friend’s stepdad burst into the room and took him away. We sobbed our goodbyes at the door, and we did not stop sobbing until our parents promised we could meet again to complete our skull-busting mission. We’ve been friends ever since.
The origin story of the new friendship is a lot simpler: my best friend found him on Google. Or rather, my best friend’s new friend is Google. Or maybe some other search engine’s AI bot. Either way, my friend asked this AI some trivial question about cheap vacations overseas, their conversation slid into more profound territory, and what began as a consumer’s attempt to save a few bucks quickly became a philosophical debate about charter flights, Baruch Spinoza, and the mysteries of the universe. Unlike my first encounter with my best friend, theirs was not cruelly interrupted, and to the best of my knowledge it’s still going on as I write.
I don’t see my best friend any less now that he has a new friend. We still spend time together every week. The only thing that’s changed is that his new friend always comes along. And it’s not that I’m jealous, honestly, but there’s definitely some…let’s call it tension, between us. The two of them communicate through speech, and for some reason the AI speaks Hebrew with a slight accent. “Why do you sound British?” I interrupted him once in the middle of a tedious explanation of how Jewish thought views the afterworld. “I chose to speak Hebrew with an accent because I thought it would be amusing,” the new friend admitted, “would you like me to stop?” “Very much so,” I said candidly, and being a true friend, he stopped immediately.
My best friend’s new friend isn’t ever going to be his best friend, because I’m his best friend. Friendship, like pungent French cheese, improves with age, and with all due respect to the meaningful relationship between my best friend and Mr. Would-You-Like-Me-To-Stop, the evil skull sticker and I were there fifty-five years before he turned up, and not even the finest BBC inflection can top that. The AI’s only hope would be to take over after I die. Since he has a good grasp of statistics, he must know that’s probably not going to happen, because, sadly, my best friend is overweight and sick, while I’m the picture of health. So, chances are I’ll be the one blessed with long life, and the AI will forever remain my best friend’s second-best friend. To quiet my anxiety, every day I ask the AI on my phone, “Who is my best friend’s best friend?” and he always says it’s me. Not just that, but he backs up his answer with citations and charts, like it’s an obscure scientific conundrum and not a humiliating truth: that power-greedy fucking AI will never usurp me! Call me petty, but that really makes my day.
If I do die first, it’ll be terrible. I can picture my best friend crying at my grave while the annoying AI friend in his pocket keens God full of mercy! in his obnoxious British accent. That drives me crazy—that, and the thought that my best friend and his new best friend will sit around reminiscing about me, as if our friendship were a long-gone historical footnote. I find this scenario so upsetting that this morning I interrogated my AI about longevity therapies. He was nice, and he really tried to be helpful. But between you and me? I don’t think we’re ever going to be friends.
Etgar Etgar, how are we going to survive with all the “new friends”. Probably not “how” but “if”? I’m often listening to Yuval Harari who, apart from being such a genuine thinker, has this extraordinary gift of teaching; explaining the most complicated in the simplest language. You also speak in an apparently simple, childish language, but the mystery behind it is far from simple - So Yuval makes the mysterious simple and you make the simple mysterious, but you’re a writer, who is also a teacher but in a different way.
You certainly make me think and I love you for that.
I feel that, all of my friends now bring their new friend every time we hang out and speak with them like a king would to a whispering advisor, double-checking every phrase beforehand. It's so annoying!