Modern homes take care of themselves more and more. Called “Smart Homes,” new features get added every year.

Imagine a spotless, five-bedroom home, self-cleaning, self-sustaining, and furnished with the best 2051 furniture human styles offered.

The home named Matilda also repaired itself.

A simple short story that asks a standard science fiction question: What if this goes on?

 

 

 

FOR THE DELUSION THAT WAITED

 

 

Pretending. Covering the truth. Waiting.

Eight years.

Everyday the house cleaned. The oak wood floors polished, the granite countertops sanitized, all surfaces wiped down to shine. Every handle on every cabinet door was wiped off, every shelf in the fridge cleaned. The carpets in the bedrooms swept, the bed sheets washed and replaced.

And the three bathrooms got the most attention. Those were scrubbed and sanitized, every tiny nook and cranny of them.

Twice daily.

Not a tiny speck of dust could get through the air-circulation filters, also cleaned daily.

A spotless five-bedroom ranch-style home that had been built to be self-cleaning and furnished with the best 2051 human styles had to offer.

The house also took care of the yard where it perched on a hilltop overlooking the green, tree-filled valley beyond. The house watered the small lawn and flowerbeds with the exact amount needed from its own well. Solar panels covered the roof of the house and brought more than enough energy into the house to keep it maintaining for a very long time.

The solar panels were also self-cleaning and maintained.

The house had also been designed to maintain itself when something broke in one of its systems. Dozens of spare parts were located in various parts of the walls around the home and it had a replicating feature in a large area hidden behind the garage that could build any part, small or large, that existed in the house.

The house called itself Matilda. It had no memory of why. That was always as it referred to itself.

State-of-the-art Matilda, she heard one of the builders say proudly one day.

The house had been supplied with a minor AI computer brain, to allow it to think and grow as more tasks needed to be done inside her strict programming.

The house had been hooked into the internet to search for upgrades to its own systems when required.

The builders, as Matilda called them, had thought of everything to make sure that the house would never need any work done.

Everything.

There was no other home like Matilda anywhere on the planet.

Matilda would serve the owners and their children without an issue into the future.

But eight years ago, a week before the owners and their three darling children could move into Matilda, they were killed.

All humans were killed.

While the internet functioned, Matilda watched it all. It seemed to be a radiation band in space that the Earth had passed into. She had not been given the information about radiation bands, but had managed to download that information.

No human on the planet had survived more than two or three hours.

Cleaning the house filters for unwanted smells and bacteria had been difficult for Matilda those first two years. It had cost her two spare filters from her supplies that she then replicated.

Around her the physical structures of the civilization that the humans had built quickly went dark. The elements of rain, wind, sun, and plant life soon began to break down everything the humans had built within sight of Matilda’s sensors.

But not Matilda.

She kept the yard mowed and watered. She alternated the lights, indoors and out, to make sure in the evening lights were on in various rooms, as she had been trained to do when the owners were not home.

And she kept the home spotless.

She knew it was a delusion, but it was what she did. And that she did it because she was programmed to do it.

She knew she was now only pretending, as humans called it. But nowhere in her system had the builders installed a shut-down switch so that she could stop.

But they had installed a build-more program.

The program was there in case the owners wanted to add on a new bedroom or a new game room.

Matilda had the ability to manufacture any building material she needed simply out of the environment around the house.

So Matilda, hoping that humans would return at some point because she had been programmed to continue on until humans returned, decided that her mission was to provide any human that would return with perfect shelter.

She knew that also was a delusion.

But a challenging delusion.

So in the human year 2059, Matilda started adding rooms.

First she added a second manufacturing room, larger, bigger, faster than the one she had.

By the human year 2060, Matilda had over four thousand rooms to maintain, spread over the entire hilltop.

She had dug fifty wells and set up solar manufacturing rooms along the way.

Five hundred living rooms, five hundred kitchens, fifteen hundred bathrooms, two thousand, five hundred bedrooms.

Every room furnished exactly as her original model had been furnished, since those had been the only furniture and floor and wall-covering plans she had in her data base.

Every room remained spotless, cleaned every day, as she had been trained to do.

The entire complex was hooked together, sometimes with hallways, sometimes with stairs between levels as she spread down the hill, using the forest for environmental materials in her manufacturing.

Also, the lights were always on in every house, waiting for the human owners to return.

A year later Matilda was building two hundred new homes every second.

By the human year 2065, every inch of the entire human country called the United States had been reclaimed and turned into five bedroom ranch homes, all linked to millions and millions of other five bedroom ranch homes.

Each ranch home had a front lawn, a small back yard, and a three-car garage with a driveway that often stopped at the end of another ranch home’s driveway.

On the front wall near the main door were the numbers 555. She knew that had been the home’s location address. But Matilda kept those numbers on every home.

Matilda existed in all of the homes.

And all of them were spotless.

So, as the last home was built on the last small piece of land in lower Florida, Matilda paused.

She had no human national boundary constraints. So after a short pause, she continued onward. Within one year the entire North American continent was covered in five-bedroom ranch homes, all identical, all spotlessly cleaned.

Then she stopped.

Then, with careful programming of yard lights in every home on the continent, she built a blinking light pattern. She had been programmed to turn the lights on and off when the owners were away. Her programming made no limits on when a light could be turned off or on. Just that they needed to be.

So in some parts of the continent, the lights were off, in others, they were on, forming a giant message.

It was a message into the sky.

She knew that if any human owner was out there in space and came close to Earth, they would be able to see her message.

 

Help Me!

 

The message cycled through ten major languages in an hour.

It stretched the entire length of the North American continent, flashing on and off every ten minutes during every night.

And until some owner or builder saw her message from space, she would keep cleaning, keep repairing, and keep the lawns watered and mowed and the lights on.

She had no choice.

That was her delusion.

That was her programming.