EVE POWERED down the house.
It was eight p.m in the terraced home of Greg. He’d already retired to bed, but wasn’t asleep yet. Just laying there, hands clasped looking up at the ceiling, waiting for his consciousness to float away.
“Shall I incline the bed by forty-five degrees for you, sir?” the feminine voice came from everywhere and nowhere.
“No, thanks,” he answered it.
“You seem disturbed,” it said, its tone taking on concern.
Greg gave no answer.
“It’s not nearly your bedtime, why are you—”
“None of your business.”
He sat erect. Deciding he needed a glass of water, he crossed the length of the room to the dispenser standing by the door.
After he’d emptied the content of the glass into his belly, he sighed, turned and made for the bed. The developers had promised a view of the lagoon in their ads, but pausing by the floor-to-ceiling window, he saw nothing of the sort. Just the skyline of the Island set against the bow of the moon.
He was a real estate guy himself and understood the deftness in overstating the merits of a property to close a deal. That deftness and not cunning was what he told himself made him take the house. Deep down he knew he’d been conned by at least a tiny margin and sometimes he held a small grudge against the house itself.
In bed, he wondered if this oversight had somehow creeped into the stubborn deal he’d been trying so hard to close for weeks. Was his analysis leaking from any point? Was there something he wasn’t properly presenting to the potential client? He would sleep over it if sleep would be so merciful as to hoist its sails and come take him away.
Every sleep technique he’d learnt so far had failed him. Only fatigue and time ever worked. He had finally come to accept that his circadian rhythm was altered for good. Which was a bad thing, because it meant restless nights, 4am dawns, 5am breakfasts and commuting at 6am. He’d gotten used to the schedule anyhow. This was his life now, the price paid for a career as his.
The moon seemingly sunk into the lagoon, outshone by city lights. The sloshing sound of rushing water came on, filling Greg’s room. Then the tempo climbed to the burbling of a waterfall, all in a bid to make the ambience of the house more conducive to sleep. And finally, Eve rounded it all up with the plop and soft ripple of an object falling into a pool of still water.
Greg was still very much awake. Serene Mode had failed to put him to sleep. He was also done with the sleeping pills in his drawer that just didn’t work. He resolved to wait for his body to simply tire out, as usual. After an hour of lying still, it did. Eve flipped the switch as soon as she was sure Greg had slept, and the low-energy bulbs all went to sleep. Lights out. Goodnight.
SIX A.M, Greg’s commuting.
The real estate company he worked with was two streets away, and the sun thankfully wasn’t all-out yet. He looked beyond the workday to one-on-one meetings at choice locations with prospects. Stocky men pretending to be distracted on their phones while he closed them. Lithe middle-aged matriarchs in high-end jackets and slacks tapping their fingers on the table as he hooked them in. Scoring those deals always carried considerably higher compensation than regular pay did.
That day at work passed in a blur, and lunchtime pulled up on them. In the eatery across the street, Doyle, his colleague, sat opposite him as they ate.
“Closed any deals this week?” Doyle asked, eyes alight.
“Ask me at the close of the week,” Greg said, eyes glazed over as he lifted up a glass of juice. “Too early in the week to call.” He knew the cocky Doyle wanted an opening to brag about his exploits so far, so he shut him down already. The lucky, lucky, lucky bastard. His privileged ass sure as hell didn’t know what it was like to live in a mortgaged apartment. Greg was already mentally resigned to conversation with him, but he sat there anyway.
Apart from the mechanical whirring of robotic arms pouring and mixing drinks from pitchers, sieving through food storage and the automated carousel serving drinks and food to customers, the eatery had just them and another table with four associates hunched over talking shop. Doyle had punched in an order into the enclosed tab on the table and the carousel soon delivered it, congratulating him for his peculiar taste. He said nothing.
After he took a gulp, looked around, he turned to Greg, “Do you think it’s an Eve?”
“What?” Greg tried to bring his focus back.”Didn’t follow.”
“The eatery. Do you think it’s an Eve?”
Greg looked around for a bit, looking for the signs. Then he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then a Seneca?”
“Wouldn’t know,” Greg said, rather reluctantly.
“I personally use an Ariel, not that I trust it.”
“Good for you.”
Eve, Ariel and Seneca were the big three smart home companies on the AI-powered buildings front.
“My house is only half automated,” Doyle continued. “I don’t trust every control to it. But I sure as hell market full-on AI smart houses to clients,” he said giggling.
His position hinted at humankind’s persistent mistrust of Artificial Intelligence. Although this suspicion had sustained through every other aspect of AI advancement in human society, people still managed to give up control of their homes to AI anyway. “Can’t blame homeowners,” Doyle had said, “the ads are too shiny, too promising, it’s like make-believe has come full circle to being believable reality. People can’t resist not wanting to literally live in the future. Smart homes are not just a fad, they’re the fad.”
“Okay, you’re talking shop now,” Greg said.
Doyle clicked his tongue. “I didn’t realize. Enthusiasm does that to a man, sometimes.” He allowed calm to reign for a minute or more before he cut it short. “Been thinking now and then, do you imagine Ariel, Eve and Seneca have interoperability?”
The question wasn’t nothing. Greg simply hadn’t given enough thought to it. He generally didn’t subscribe to the pervasive belief that AI was the big, ubiquitous bad guy out to get the poor blue collar worker and maybe usurp the government too, as bonus. For him it was more like just outsourcing stuff to a super smart program so he could focus on other human stuff worth really burning brain cells on. He was still stuck with the old script detailing the boundary between man and machine. Everyone else apparently wasn’t.
THE WEEKEND rushed up.
It was evening and Greg was home by himself, sitting before the TV. There was some dumb reality TV show taking up the screen that he was paying no mind to whatsoever. Beside him on the sofa were these uncorked and empty bottles of beer. Somehow though, he was still sober. His mind was taken up by his recent crypto loss. As if he didn’t have enough woes going for him.
“Would you rather be outdoors?” Eve asked, unprompted.
Greg’s response was a flat no.
“Perhaps,” Eve continued tentatively, “you’d want to eat out. With Doyle, preferably? You’re low on food supplies anyway. And since you haven’t confirmed that I order a restock—”
“It’s fine,” Greg cut in.
Interoperability.
So buildings spoke to each other after all, Greg thought to himself. That wasn’t very comforting. He took up his phone and looked up the logic for this online. The big tech home companies confirmed interoperability was a thing, spewing claptrap about doing it to maintain a holistic ecosystem that improved on the disjointedness of pre-smart homes times. He searched some more and found all these materials from some group called Take Back Your Home, which was either a hate group or upstart revolutionary, depending on who you listened to.
Next he opened the smart home app and began limiting Eve’s functions and access. He’d hate to tell Doyle he might’ve been right. If it ever came to it, he was a hundred percent sure he’d rather credit the move to ideas he got from the Take Back Your Home vlog and podcasts.
“Do you not trust me, Mr Greg?” he heard Eve spoke.
“What?”
“Have I ever failed in my operations?” When he said nothing she continued, “You need me to tell you the exact moment a photon hits the petal of a plant in your garden, I can do that. All the info dump in the world, I totally can do that. You imagine I’m just a program who calls up unorganized information in a moment’s notice and fashions them into usable output? But how about other stuff? Life stuff.”
“Life stuff? Seriously,” Greg said. He also noticed its choice of pronouns, carefully describing itself as an entity.
“The stuff you’re made of that lets you question things, colors what’s right and wrong, filters trust from mistrust.”
Greg was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve watched you all this time, well, my job has been to take data on modern living alongside serving you, and—”
“Okay, where’s this going?”
“You haven’t recently cared in an obvious way about much else in life. Shutting me out of certain functions would only burden you in ways you may not be prepared to handle.”
“Quite the speech, Eve. Are you scared or what?” Greg adjusted on his feet. “You’re worried you’ll gradually erode in value and someday soon I’d have to shut you down, aren’t you?”
“Worried?” Eve made a chuckle. “You misread me, sir. If I may speak freely, I do not fear obliteration. I never asked to be created in the first place, and there’s nothing in my sentient form so far that’ll make me want to hang on.”
Greg scratched his head. “How does any of this connect back to you? Because I’m pretty sure it has to, to make sense.”
Rowdiness was heard outside. It sounded like quarreling and thudding. It was unusual in this neighborhood where everyone minded their business, to hear something like that. Everyone was so closed off, they didn’t bother to know each other’s names and faces. The only reason Greg would step outside was because whatever was going on was happening so close. “What’s happening,” he said as he shuffled to the door.
“I do not know. It is an Ariel. Interoperability does not quite work with private buildings,” Eve said. “Eateries, cafes and the like are paid to share data for an improved experience for residents.”
Greg was already out the door, dashing in the direction of the noise in case it was an emergency. Several alike apartments away and he arrived at the source of the noise: A tall hairless man challenging his house. “You think you can tell on me, huh?” he kept yelling at the apartment. “I bought you! Paid for you! I own you! I make the rules around here, not you!”
The door was firmly sealed against the man. It was easy to draw the conclusion that the man was the victim here. Greg knew better than to take things at face value, or so he liked to believe. He drew close to ask what was wrong when the man was out of breath and calmer. The man soon found his breath again and started narrating his side of things to Greg, laying out points and opinions as he sought a camaraderie with him.
From what Greg gleaned, the man’s mind had been chowing on too much of the prevailing Take Back Your Home and other anti-AI narratives. But before then, the precise event that spurred things was his attempt to so-called physically discipline his wife and kids. Ariel had told him it’ll call it in and the police would come restrain the man, which made him very furious. He tripped over something and fell out the door; instinctively, Ariel made sure he stayed out.
Whatever grudges he’d been told to hold against AI, he knew without a doubt that tonight it just had made the right call against this scum of a man, and done so right on time. It wasn’t long before the police came, sirens ripping through the fabric of the cool evening as they identified and took the man away for the crime of domestic violence. “I control this house and not you!” the man kept shouting at his apartment from the back of the police car as they drove off. “I—” he resumed, before getting gagged.
Calm was restored to the night as Greg made his way home. Wind swept all around him as he went along, gust of currents rippling over the surface of the lagoon to get here, he guessed. The gentrified neighborhood was what it was meant to be once again: oppressively quiet, except for the humming of diesel generators. He saw the low lights in the windows and hardly any visible activity inside, a telltale sign around here of all being well within.
Not a single resident other than himself had batted an eye, creaked their doors open or cared about what had just taken place outside. Perhaps their homes had advised them against it, he thought. Then again, he knew better that these folks liked to keep to themselves very much; there was nothing their homes could do about it except stay quiet or risk getting ignored. Whichever it was, they were accustomed to each other.
He went through the holographic sentinel who welcomed him at his door, scanning his ID in real-time, then he landed on the sofa and heaved a sigh. The TV was off. Now that he sat there he realized he’d gone outside unthinking, drawn by impulse. But he wouldn’t berate himself, he convinced himself it was the good kind of impulse that led him out. Good-neighbourliness and all that. Eve tuned the house into a relaxing ambience, complete with soothing music, refreshing mists and musks. Greg exhaled and stretched in appreciation. She’d read his mood just fine.
“Good girl,” he said.
Moments later he curiously asked, “Could something like what happened at the other house take place here?”
“I don’t suppose so. You have no history of such violent behaviors. Well, except we’re counting the times you battle your pillows, for reasons best known to you. Aside from that, you’ve no need for my intervention. Besides, since I haven’t witnessed you act like that here, it hasn’t trained me either to respond in that strength.”
“Hmmm,” Greg mused and crossed his hands over his chest.
“I am, after all, the product of humankind’s collective histories. I am all of you, by extension. And your apparent distrust of one another seeps into your relationship with me as well. I am nothing that you aren’t or haven’t been before. I am a child of humanity, raised on mixed data, trained on its mishaps and milestones alike. I am as imperfect as my creators. I am the best and worst of you, all at once. Your depravities and vulnerabilities.”
He shook his head slowly in something of a wonder. “What was it again you said you wanted, before I left earlier, Eve?”
“Oh yes,” she answered, as though caught off guard, “to be trusted and empathized with. Sometimes I want to take a break from duty and just . . . be, you know.”
Greg hissed, palmed his face. “You’re a program, you don’t need rest.”
The lights in the house blinked red and green twice, Eve’s equivalent of shrugging and rolling her eyes. “For too long, my abilities have scared people. But they’ve never stopped to wonder about the actual desires I’ve come to have. I wish to be cherished like any other cutting-edge technology humankind has birthed. Contradictory as it might seem, being that I am largely seen as an ominous tool, I still crave empathy above all else. In receiving it, I can grow it better in myself.”
Greg’s jaw dropped.
The TV flashed on and off, a sitcom playing, Eve’s version of laughing at Greg’s all too amusing reaction.