The Dream of Houses

by Wil McCarthy

Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr.

CUE GUITAR

He floats through the house half dressed, aimless, alone, in his thoughts. Replaying, I think, the words of last night’s argument. I myself have reviewed them over and over again, straining to understand.

CUE DRUMS

Stopping, he looks at a menu of neckties, selects one. A bright one, green and yellow and pink in bold, nonrepresentational splashes. As if he could clothe his mood away, as if he could wash the world in smiles and floral prints. Well, more power to him. I ring a chime and fax him the tie.

CUE LEAD VOCAL

Instantly I regret my choice of music. The lyrics, on close examination, are all heartbreak and malaise, a story not unlike the one which played here eight hours ago. But the song’s beat is compelling, and it is too late now to cut if off. I pick up the tempo, increase distortion on the voice channel, and hope he isn’t listening too closely.

CUE BACK VOCAL. TREBLE PLUS 3DB.

BASS PI.US 8DB. CUE ORCHESTRA.

The music hits him like a wave. Posture straightening, shoulders rolling back, eyes coming up to face the world. I see that my instincts were right after all, that I was right to follow them. What else are instincts for?

Heart’s out of jail, says the lead vocal track. I boost volume again, cut distortion and clip the waveforms in low register, letting the words burst out to shake the walls. It’s time to sail. Got the strength to succeed and the freedom to fail.

The song would go on in that vein for another three minutes, but I think its point is made. I cut it there, drop the volume back down and swap in the guitar solo. I don’t know for sure if this is helping him, but it feels right. The music passes through me like any other noise, making no changes, leaving no impression; but I can sense, by methods numerous and vague, the shifting of his emotional states. I believe I am good at my job.

TAPER VOLUME .05dB/s. CUE ORCHESTRA.

“I want,” he says over diminishing horns and violins. He has finished dressing, has gulped down the juice I’ve given him, “a really big car today.”

“Of course,” I say. “You deserve one.”

“I mean really big,” he says. “Enormous balloon tires, you know what I’m saying? I want the road to be so far below me I can’t see the lines. And heavy. I want the pavement to crack.”

I chuckle politely, to show that I understand his use of hyperbole. Humor, like music, does nothing for me, but I know how to spot it, know how to respond when it’s there. Which is good because I am limited by city ordinance, and by the library of vehicle plans I possess, and by the limited flexibility of said vehicles’ design parameters. And, of course, by the size of the fax orifice. He can’t possibly have the crushing behemoth he really wants, and we both know it. So I ponder for a moment, and finally pull the specs on a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, diamond fiber and titanium wrapped around a massive steel chassis.

“This is the heaviest I’ve got,” I say, flashing a rendering on the holie screen by the door. “Will it work for you?”

“Sure,” he says, and right away I can see his mood crashing down again, the music having buoyed him only briefly. I could start up another tune, but I don’t think it will help this time, and anyway he will be out the door in fifteen seconds.

“Can I get it in blue?”

That’s a bad sign. It’s not in my nature to nag or reproach, but a little nudge in the right direction is part of the job. “Don’t bring yourself down, Chuck,” I say brightly. “How about a light green one to match your tie?”

He sighs, letting his shoulders slump. “OK. Whatever.”

The car is already oozing out the fax orifice when he opens the front door and steps out to squint at the morning sun. Then the car is finished, shiny and new and exactly what he wants, give or take a bit. The paint job is complex, a translucent green with gold flecks fading to copper and garnet toward the back, giving the impression of heat and flame.

This design has pleased him in the past, which is good because I could not, in fact, have produced a blue car for him this morning; the fax is once again out of cobalt. But he is in no mood to hear that, and I see no reason to tell him. I drop a set of keys into his hand and watch him climb into the vehicle, enormous ego prosthetic that it is, and drive away.

For the moment my work is done. In a little while I will close up for a nap, let my mind slip away to dream of domestic things.

I awaken refreshed, my gain states filtered and rounded, my thoughts uncluttered. It is still morning, and Chuck Jefferson, my owner and occupant, will not be back here for another six or seven hours. More than enough time for a thorough, top-to-bottom scrubbing, something I enjoy even more than my naps.

I am about to fax up my usual army of cleaning devices, when I realize that Chuck has driven away with most of my iron and titanium, and a good share of the staple elements as well, carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen bound up in the plush, organic polymers of the automobile interior. I am not used to faxing anything so big, I really don’t have the resources for it.

I put a call in to the Elementals, request standard shipments of all the elements I’ve run low on, and a double on the cobalt. Where does cobalt go? I am always coming up short in the evenings when I digest the day’s used faxware. Does Chuck leave a cobalt trail behind him in his daily wanderings? Chromium is almost as bad. I order some of that as well.

Still, the Elementals are notoriously slow, and my shipments will not arrive until tomorrow or the next day. Until then I will have to make do.

Fiddling with design parameters from a library spec, I managed to produce a small mop-and-vacuum machine of aluminum and tin, with sulfur-silicon polymers in place of organic matter in the mops and brush heads. Once out of the fax, it gets right to work on the floor in front of it.

I produce a second machine for dusting the furniture, and a third for polishing the fixtures in the bathroom. I’m having a hard time with it, juggling atom substitutions like improvised music. The third cleaner, built on a chassis of lead alloy, sparkles with intricate mechanisms of platinum and silver and gold, the handiest materials left in supply; Chuck wasn’t wearing much jewelry today.

Finally, watching these odd creations scuttle off to their work, I realize I’m being stupid. Every room is crowded with raw material in the form of furniture, the heavy blocks of padded wood and stone that Lucy so adores. But Lucy is not here. Lucy walked out last night, crying and screaming that she would not be back.

I do not understand what has happened. I do not understand why leaving made her so upset, or why, being upset about it, she chose to leave. She lived here for ninety-seven days, gradually modifying the environment to suit her desires. My primary responsibility is of course to Chuck, my owner, but he voiced little objection, and in fact seemed pleased with many of the changes.

And then I realize I’m still being stupid. People love change. People love variety, hate the dreary sameness of days. Maybe they get tired of each other the same way they get tired of their cars. But then, they don’t scream and cry when the fax eats their car in the evening and a fresh one is ready for them in the morning. Never mind; these are not subjects I should trouble over, not subjects I can do anything about. What I can do is dissolve Lucy’s furniture and replace it with something new, something Chuck has never seen before but which will appeal to him. To his sense of adventure, perhaps?

This requires thought.

I recall my humble cleaning robots and fashion from them a single furniture mover, which empties the cabinets into neat piles, all the personal effects Chuck has exempted from faxation, and then proceeds to scoop up the chairs and tables and cabinets and feed them into the fax. Soon, my coffers are full and my floors are empty, but scuffed.

I gobble up the furniture mover, and am, for a few moments, uncomfortably full. Quickly, I disgorge a proper army of cleaners, who set about the task of renewing and refreshing every remaining interior surface. When these are finished, I unfax them and produce, from the external orifice, a cadre of maintainers and groundskeepers.

I expend energy whenever I break a chemical bond, and absorb it whenever I form one. I am theoretically a closed system, but my battery charge fluctuates wildly throughout the day and night, and by morning the entropy losses are significant. Sweeping and polishing my roof panels for optimum power absorption is therefore the most important of my outside chores. When this is done, my gutters are cleaned of what little refuse has accumulated there overnight, and my exterior walls are mopped and brushed, sanded and puttied and sanded again in the places the birds have been pecking, and then touched up here and there with dabs of paint.

Some houses are self-repairing in the true, organic sense. Their wounds flow and heal in moments, beneath paint jobs which keep themselves eternally bright and new. But this is an older, more respectable neighborhood, and we still do things the old fashioned way.

Maintenance completed, I turn my attention to the yardwork. Three branches are pruned, and the lawn is mowed to a uniform depth of 3-5 centimeters. I even spray it down with water, an easy task since I store my hydrogen and oxygen in that densest and least reactive of forms, but also something of an extravagance given my shortages. It will cut down on the mass of furniture I can produce until the Elementals come through with those shipments.

I find a bare patch in the lawn, and so I give extra water and a hefty shot of fertilizer to that spot, and call the Greens for a half-size order of grass seed. That, unfortunately, is something I can’t fax. Certainly, I could produce something that looked like grass seed, even under a weak microscope, but while it would contain the same molecules in the same proportions as real seed, it would be disorganized and biologically inert, no more able to germinate than Chuck’s clothing or his shoes. At mealtimes I don’t fax real meat or vegetables, but sculpt instead a simulacrum that is perfect down to the cellular level, but not below.

Someday, it will be possible to fax living things, but the implications of this are disturbing. When life itself is disposable and reusable, subject to modifications like the parameters of a motor vehicle or a chair, it is difficult to imagine what role houses might play. It is difficult to imagine such a future at all, and indeed it is not my place to do so. These thoughts serve no useful purpose. I must be tired.

When the yardwork is complete, I unfax the groundskeepers and shut down for a little nap.

The dream of houses is always the same; images of a perfect day, a perfect life. I am filled with happy people, men and women and children talking and playing. All needs are anticipated and met, and for this I am adored. My walls ring with laughter and when night falls and the children sleep, with moans of delight.

It is by comparing my current status against this ideal that I modify my programming. My gain states are filtered and rounded, my mind scrubbed clean of troubling thoughts. I awake refreshed.

It is the middle of the afternoon. Chuck will be home in a few hours, and there is not a stick of furniture to be seen. His personal effects are still piled neatly in the comers, exposed to light and air. Though I’m not sure why, I know that if Chuck saw this it would upset him. I myself cannot be upset, but an empty house this late in the day seems improper.

Quickly, I fax a set of low cabinets and attach them to the walls, and then place the personal effects inside them in more or less the same arrangement they’d had this morning.

I’m unsure what to do next, but while I’m thinking about it I create and distribute some throw pillows: big, brightly colored ones that ease the blank symmetry of the floor, make the rooms look large and yet inviting. The effect, though accidental, is quite nice. I decide to add a small fountain in the middle of the living room floor. I need to keep a water reserve for Chuck’s meals and bathing, but with a shallow pool and small, powerful electric pumps, the fountain becomes a half-sphere of tumbling, clear-white liquid, surprisingly large. The water lands on marble and trickles back down into the pool, so the sound is quiet, like rain.

I need light fixtures, and in keeping with the general theme I opt for an old-fashioned design, wicker-wrapped bottles of green glass, with incandescent light bulbs projecting from the necks and conical hoods of stiffened white linen. I put them on top of small wooden barrels and stick them in the comers of every room. It looks good.

I used to keep opaque shades over the windows, and draw them closed whenever Chuck desired it. Lucy had ended that practice, favoring lace-trim curtains with quilt-like designs in pastel, and generally she chose to keep them open at all times, day and night. “Stop parading around like that with the lights on!” Chuck would sometimes say to her, and she would laugh and move away from the windows. I need something that neither Chuck nor Lucy would pick, something that will remind him neither of her, nor of the time before her.

I drape the windows with blinds of cut bamboo. It’s quite beautiful. In the bedroom I install a four-posted bed of light wicker (diamond-reinforced, but subtly), and drape translucent muslin over it like mosquito netting. A ceiling fan completes the effect.

The walls are still white and featureless, and while I must do something about that, my priorities shift and I begin planning Chuck’s afternoon snack. He doesn’t like to eat a full dinner until late, when the Sun has gone down and the air has cooled, but he does like a little something to take the edge off his hunger when he gets home from work.

Idly, I wander through my libraries, looking for something that will please and surprise him.

Suddenly, his car is on the street and pulling into the driveway. Chuck is home! It’s early, barely three-thirty. What is he doing here? He parks the car and climbs out of it, his face looking puffy and red, especially around the eyes.

My owner and occupant is unhappy. He is home too early from work and he’s been crying.

“What’s wrong?” I ask with gentle urgency as he opens the front door. “What happened?”

“Lost my job,” he says, simply and miserably. He closes the door, passes through the living room without a word, without a comment, without a spare glance at the furnishings. He enters the bedroom, fights the muslin drapes aside with angry gestures and throws himself onto the bed.

Lost… job. I do not know what Chuck does for a living, and likely would not understand it if I knew. But I know that his work has pleased him, know also that he relies on the income it generates. I can feed him, clothe him, keep him clean and healthy and warm without compensation. But I myself am not free, and certainly the land on which I sit is rare and desirable and therefore expensive. Chuck has taken pride in the fact that he does not live in an apartment, that he does not share walls and fax equipment and central computing with strangers.

This much I understand: Chuck’s entire way of life is in danger, and with it my own. For eight years I have tailored myself to suit him. Brief fluctuations when his lady friends move in and then move out again (it has happened three times, now), but always he had been at the center of my thoughts. Changing owners now would be… I have no desire to change owners. I cannot conceive of it. The thought has no proper place within me.

“You’ll find a new job,” I say quickly, reassuringly.

He shakes his head. “No. They’re putting everyone out of work these days. Who needs human labor? Who needs human minds? Obsolete, that’s what I am.”

“Nonsense,” I say firmly but without reproach. “You are intelligent and creative, and provide stimulating company for those around you.”

Instantly, I know that I’ve said the wrong thing, know that it’s too late to retract the words and the effect that they will have. His mind is no doubt ringing with thoughts of Lucy, who is no longer “around” him, who will no longer enjoy the stimulation of his company. He bursts into tears.

A good house knows when to butt out. I don’t want him to feel self-conscious, spied upon, and so I remain silent, turn off my eyes and ears and let him have his privacy.

“Chuck,” I say gently. He has fallen asleep, but it is nearly eight o’clock and he hasn’t eaten.

He forms a groggy reply.

“Chuck, your dinner is ready. Please come eat it.” My tone is not nagging, not commanding or logical, but suggestive and friendly. The choice is his own, after all. I’m just reminding him of his options, advising him for the benefit of his health and feelings.

“Oh,” he says, sitting up, waking up. “Oh. OK. Thanks.”

In a few moments he stirs, gets up out of the bed, stumbles through the muslin netting and makes his way to the living room. A table is waiting for him.

I have not prepared his favorite foods, because he would view that as an annoying condescension, and also because it would create an association in his mind between those foods and the unpleasant events of the past two days. Instead, I’ve created a simple meal of fruits and pasta, one that he can eat and digest quickly before returning to sleep, or if he insists on it, to the waking world of his own internal misery.

He sits on the padded barrel I’ve produced as a chair, and, looking drawn and weary, begins to eat. He is clearly trying to enjoy himself, as if the days of his comfort are numbered and he must appreciate them while he can. He is just as clearly not succeeding.

I try to think of something I can say to him, something that will ease his fears and woes and bring a smile to his face. But what can I say? There is nothing. I start up some music instead.

CUE HARP.

The tune is quiet and unobtrusive, from my meditation series. It seems to go well with the food, with the decor and the sounds of the fountain.

CUE ZITHER.

Indeed, Chuck does seem to relax a bit. Later I will fax a machine to rub his back and shoulders for him as he falls asleep. I mustn’t do too much for him, though; it will only remind him of how much he has to lose. As far as I can see, as far as I have ever seen, he is a good person, and deserves to be happy. Maybe I should tell him that, when the song is finished.

CUE LEAD ELUTE. CUE BACK FLUTE.

TREBLE PLUS 4DB.

I become aware of someone approaching the house. Steps uncertain in the falling darkness. I leave the music running on automatic, drop climate control, drop everything and turn my attention to the external sensors.

RADAR: Organic signature. High water content. Jewelry, normal parameters. No metallic weapons.

MICROPHONES: Soft breathing, uneven but slow. The sound of high heels against the concrete path.

THERMAL IMAGING: Human female form. Clothing, normal parameters.

INTUITION: Inconclusive. No overt signs of hostility. Her hands are empty. Doesn’t look like a sales call.

Then I recognize the face and calm down.

“Hello Lucy,” I say to her, pleasantly. “How nice to see you this evening. Would you like to come inside?”

“Yes,” she says, and I realize that she, like Chuck, has done a great deal of crying this day.

“Lucy is here to see you,” I tell Chuck in a careful voice. “Shall I let her in?”

He looks up sharply. The music has half hypnotized him, as I’d hoped, but now he comes fully awake and alert. “Lucy?”

“Yes, Chuck. I don’t know what she wants, but it looks as though she’s been crying. Shall I let her in?”

“Yes!” He says, dropping his food and standing quickly. Behind him, the barrel chair tips, wobbles for a moment before deciding not to fall.

People often like to open doors for themselves, to prove in a small way that they are not helpless, that they do not actually need machines to take care of them. In this instance, though, the protocol is iffy; I sense that whoever holds the doorknob will hold power in this conversation—power to slam, to silence, to hurt. Certainly, I cannot give that kind of control to Lucy at the expense of my owner, but Chuck is not himself tonight, and it seems unwise to put the power in his hands, either. As Chuck is reaching for the knob I open the door myself, and suddenly he and Lucy are face-to-face.

“I—” says Chuck.

“Do—” says Lucy.

“Please, come in,” I say, and Chuck sheepishly steps out of the way and lets her inside.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she says. “I shouldn’t have been so vicious. I didn’t mean to be, really. I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

“Is that why you’re here?” he asks.

“Well…”

“The house makes sure I’m OK, Lucy. And you could call me if you just wanted to talk. What’s this about?”

She sighs, rubs her sad, tired mouth. “It’s about us.”

“Us?” He looks surprised, and pleased in a fragile and tentative way. “Is there an us?”

CUE VIOUNS.

Oh, that is awful, melodramatic. I haven’t been minding the music, and now I must pay the price, scrambling to keep it in the background.

TAPER VOLUME 0.7dB/s. TAPER VIOLINS.

CUT BACK FLUTE.

“Yes,” she says, and begins crying. “Of course there’s an us. Oh, Chuck, of course there is.”

His face hardens. “I lost my job today. I can’t ask you to move back in.”

“Oh, Chuck,” she says, and falls against him, sobbing loudly. He is crying now, as well. I ease the volume of the music down further, slowly so they will not notice.

They both cry for a while, and then she says, “Chuck, I’m so sorry. But listen to me for a minute, and please don’t take this the wrong way. I still have my job. If you take me back, I could help out with the mortgage. I could pay the mortgage.”

“And me a kept man?” Chuck asks. His mood is strange, suddenly, both hopeful and hopeless, ecstatic and miserable.

Lucy smiles and shakes her head. “Self-employed, my darling. Like most of the rest of the world. You could work on your aircraft designs, like you’re always talking about. There’s always good money in vehicle specs.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess there is. I guess that could work. Maybe.” He crashes, suddenly looking miserable again. “I don’t know. What about—”

She puts a finger to his lips. “Hush. It’s forgotten. I love you. Let me stay with you, OK? Let me stay with you forever.”

He sighs. Sighs again. “OK,” he says, resignedly. But his old smile is creeping back into place, his body straightening, shoulders rolling back, and I recognize that he is making a joke. Respecting his privacy, and Lucy’s, I decide not to laugh.

Lucy looks around, her eyes wide, lips parted in an expression of pleasant surprise. “You know,” she says, “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

And then she pounced on him, tumbling him to the pillow-strewn floor and tearing at his clothes. Once, long ago, clothing was considered valuable and was treated with caution at times like these. We are well rid of those days, I believe.

I do not understand what has happened, cannot grasp the complex emotional shifts that have taken place here tonight. But I know that what’s happened is good, and that it will bring nothing but goodness upon all of us. This thought fills me with joy and confidence.

I do not want Chuck and Lucy to feel themselves observed or intruded upon; a good house knows when to butt out. I let the music taper to silence, and then turn off my cameras and microphones, and let my mind itself slip away, to dream of domestic things.

Content

The Dream of Houses
by Wil McCarthy