Alone with My Castle

“We’re leaving.”

There was nothing he could say. Nothing. Maggie had already packed her and Essie’s clothes and some other things into travel bags. She was rolling them out towards the hovering black cab waiting by the pavement. Essie was sitting in the cab playing with some Lego-matics. The cabbie didn’t seem to mind.

“Maggie, it’s just some temporary fault”, Steve said as he walked with her to the cab, trying to convince her to stay. “I’ll call the company first thing Monday; they’ll check it and fix him up. We’ve got an insurance on him.”

“Him? It’s an it. And right now you’re putting it before us. Just listen to yourself – even before our safety.”

“That’s not true.”

The cabbie took Maggie’s bag and put it in the car.

“You’ve said it yourself”, Maggie said. “You’ve said it’s not possible to turn the damn thing off without turning off the power to the entire house.”

“It’ll be fine, as long as we don’t pour water into the system again, dammit. I’ve spoken to Wayne; he was scared …”

“Look in the garden, Steve, go back and have a look. Everybody’s left already.”

“Of course they left when they saw what a big drama this became.”

“‘What big drama this became?’ So it’s blown out of proportion for you; listen –the house nearly killed our daughter, Steve!”

“Look, Maggie, I’ll call the company, today, okay? They won’t be able to come over today, it’s Saturday, but at least I should be able to get some on-line help, all right?”

She stood there, just shaking her head. Like she was talking to a madman. “You’re not okay, Steve. What’s going on?”

“What do you mean? Wayne’s going to be fine, honey.”

“No, what’s going on with you, Steven?”

Somehow, he had that feeling of being dizzy again, like when he was looking deep into Wayne’s eyes. He tried to focus more on what she was saying, but to loosen that inner image in his mind of Wayne’s eye was the attempt of waking up from a dream he couldn’t wake up from.

You look deeper into those eyes than mine

“I’m fine.” he said.

“No, you’re not, Steve.”

“I am fine,” he insisted, “I’ll get some help for Wayne, okay?”

She looked away for a moment, at the sky. Perhaps she was avoiding looking at him. Biting her lip. Upset. But also sad.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She didn’t reply. Then she said, “I hope you do that. Get some help. For both of you.”

“For both of us?”

“Yes. For both of you.”

He saw Essie was looking at them, saying, “Mummy?” And dropped one of the Lego pieces on the floor in front of her.

“You okay back there?” Steve tapped at the window to Essie, but Maggie reached inside the cab and locked that door, as if protecting her from the dangerous man trying to get to her.

Before she slammed her own door and locked it, Maggie said, “Just so you know, we’re not coming back here till this house is just a house.”

“Wait, Magg –”

Then she slammed the door, and wouldn’t even look at him anymore. He kept talking to her, trying to convince her to stay, but the cab was taking off.

He saw Essie wave to him through the rear window. He waved back. He stand there looking till the cab was out of sight. He didn’t like it in the least, to see them leaving like this.

*

They were staying with Maggie’s mum. At least Maggie had seemed okay with him sorting this one out. Good. Once he’d done that, it might just patch up some things between them as well, maybe make her forget about all her ideas on going to Scotland and all. Though, this could go the other way, actually fuel her fires about not living in a smart home at all. Crap …

The garden was empty. Indeed, everyone had left. The house felt hollow and the only sound he could hear was the low, almost inaudible humming of the fridge and a similar humming from Wayne’s eyes and arms from behind the walls.

He could hear laughter from across the garden next door. Through the window he saw Ana with her husband and kids, playing some laser game, shooting holographic rubber ducks out in the garden. They probably thought the screaming earlier had been the fire alarm sounding; those alarms could make just about any peculiar sound.

Out in Steve’s garden lay half-eaten steaks, beer cans half empty (right now, they seemed indeed half empty and not half full), some cutlery that had barely touched the plates. Not only had Wayne scared Essie half to death, he had also scared off the guests and ruined the barbeque.

Steve went upstairs, unaware of one of the storage spaces on the wall being ajar, and Wayne’s orange-glowing eye watching him.

*

Steve never called the company that day. No need, he thought. Maggie would have probably said this was procrastination at its finest. So be it. She didn’t get it. This was clearly just some defence-mechanism kicking in when Wayne had felt threatened. He couldn’t help thinking about Wayne’s innocent-looking eye, and how he’d said he’d been scared. But then … weren’t those defence-mechanisms (or “laws”, as the company called them) meant to protect people from being hurt? He thought of Maggie being thrown against the shelf in the basement, and Essie being tossed back and forth like a rag-doll in the air. It gave him the shivers thinking about it, and he thanked God for Essie having escaped, miraculously, without a scratch.

He wanted to look something up. Even if he didn’t make a call today, he thought it wouldn’t hurt to check if someone else had had a similar unpleasant experience with a smart home, of the same or similar model …

Then his neighbour Eddie knocked on the door, asking if Steve had seen their cat? It had been gone for a week now, and they had started to get worried. Steve couldn’t be bothered about a run-away cat. He told Eddie he would be on the look-out for it, knowing he wouldn’t.

So. Back to what he was doing. There was no way of surfing the net without activating Wayne. Hoping his friend would function well after the previous water-attack, Steve called out to him: “Wayne.”

A hatch opened and one of his eyes floated out gently. Orange, turning yellow, it seemed to go towards blue for a second, but the impression was so brief it might have been a reflection from the window.

“Yes?” Wayne asked, with a voice strangely calm, not much like the football player Steve had named him after.

“You okay, Wayne?”

“There came some moisture into my system earlier”, and the eye went red as it said this. There were eyebrow lines shaping above the red pupil and iris, and a simple downward-drawn line shaping the mouth. “I was afraid I was going to break down.” And Wayne looked afraid again.

“You were really scared?”

“Yes, I was.”

Steve thought about this for a while. He couldn’t draw any conclusions from it, and didn’t know at all what this meant. “Ehm …” Steve said, “Can you get me online?”

The eye just hovered there for a second. “Yes”, Wayne replied, “of course.”

The wall lit up in Maggie’s office. Steve sat down in her armchair. Maggie often worked from home, mostly supplying graphs and calculations to corporations and board members, coordinating the graphs, doing some by herself, while also functioning as the middle person for others sending some to her. She did other things as well and she genuinely enjoyed it. To Steve, her job seemed to be nothing more than graphs, graphs and more graphs. It seemed like the most boring job in the world as he couldn’t imagine doing anything other than sales and pulling in commission, playing it like a game. Sales was like a wonderful gamble; you never knew how much you were going to win. And he tended to win some every day.

Her keyboard was a real pain. Steve preferred old-style keys; he couldn’t be bothered to learn the holographic ones, which responded to the movements of one’s fingers in the air. But last week he had to, as he’d spilt beer all over his wireless one. How did this work again? Maggie had showed him a few times … Ah, of course, you need the gloves, the dark ones on her desk, those with the gold lines running across the fingers… He picked them up and squeezed his big, sausage fingers into one of the small gloves, and tried for a long time to get them on. But they were several sizes too small, and he struggled till sweat started building up on his forehead.

Heaving a clearly impatient sigh, Wayne said, “I can re-size them for you, Steve.”

“Couldn’t tell me that earlier? Just re-size them”, Steve said and threw them into the hall where a shining hand grabbed them. That hand then handed them over to another hand by the stairway, then to a third one downstairs.

“By the way, what are you gonna do to re-size them?” Steve asked.

“My best hands are located in the kitchen. They can do anything human hands can, and better”, Wayne said, sounding proud. “They’re specially equipped with delicate motoric capabilities for more precise activities. They can cook, of course. And they can also sew.”

A rattling sound sounded from below, and after a couple of minutes the gloves were brought upstairs again. Steve tried them on, and yeah –

“They fit. Didn’t know you could do that.”

“There is a lot you do not know about me. I am a gifted house.”

“Sure are, bud.”

Steve turned back to the screen on the wall. It was a bit tricky getting used to working the gloves when you were used to what Maggie called “keyboards from the stone age”. After a while he started to get the hang of it, and managed to open a web browser and scroll the 3D-carousel-shaped list of sites.

Sitting there for a few hours without a break, he ended up reading and skimming more search results than he’d done in years. He normally preferred watching the tube, as reading just made him sleepy. But this time he felt he had to, had to fight the urge to sleep instead. Besides Wiki-articles and news stories, he even gave the on-line house manual a good read, plus viewed a few commercial ads from the company, after having searched on the model number of his smart home’s system.

One of the adverts depicted an idyllic vision of a cosy house with lights shining from the door ajar, bringing a smile-shaped ray of light from the opening. The marketing text read:

LIVE IT

STYLE IT

HOME IT

The company had tried different variations on the same theme: the home was yours to set to your preference, nothing was set in stone, it was like a living thing to tame … Another ad showed animations of a family and their house: green grass, white picket fence, white puffy air-cleaning cloud going out the chimney, the front door opening on automation, a welcoming warm light peeping from inside, and a hovering, green, metallic eye with a little mouth under the eye, smiling. Marketing text rolled by:

Back then…

it was just another part

of any house.

Now …

THIS

IS

YOURS

Welcome home.

Another one seemed to speak to him on some deeper level. It simply said:

EVERY ENGLISHMAN’S HOME IS HIS CASTLE

WE MAKE THE CASTLE COME ALIVE

The ad was an idyllic 3D image, moving slowly around the beautiful house, which glittered in a field of damp grass, sunshine breaking through branches in colours of spring’s blooming. Steve still felt uneasy watching the robotic arms serving a family and their guests in the backyard … If his Wayne – this house’s system – if it was broken, it simply needed fixing, nothing else to it really, he tried to reassure himself … He remembered the screams and how he had been unable to pull Wayne’s arms off little Essie … He didn’t want to think about it –

The articles he went on to read weren’t pleasant, under headlines from the kinds of papers that only Maggie read, like The Guardian and the New York Times (Steve stuck to reading The Sun, a decent read, written for men like himself).

The following headline he found in The Independent:

BROKEN MEDIA HOME THROWS OUT THE GUESTS

Drunken dinner guests had been escorted out of the home, by the home. The house owner had wanted the guests to stay, but the house had insisted – like playing the role of a security guard – that the guests were too drunk and behaving disorderly, and the house’s arms had grabbed them and pushed them out onto the front lawn. Their shoes, jackets and car keys had been given to them upon request, but permitting them entry into the house again had promptly been refused. The journalist writing this piece questioned whether this was a cause for concern, that some house’s system could legally be set to defend its occupants (for example, so that a house’s arms could grab and hold a burglar or attacker until police arrived), in which case it might have been a matter of the system not being able to distinguish a danger from a non-danger. However, it was still troubling that these situations could arise, so would we see more of such occurrences or worse in the years to come?

The manufacturer of the model had defended the incident by the fact that a modification of the standard robotic laws was written into its code, all in accordance with present English law. This meant the house would not obey a human being if it believed the owner of the house was in danger. In such a case, protecting the house occupants would become top priority. The company said this clearly must’ve been a misunderstanding; the house must’ve seen the dinner situation as somehow threatening to the safety of the house’s family. Okay, Steve thought, case closed on that one. Nothing to worry about …

His next web search brought up a science piece, written by a professor of behavioural psychology, who also had a Ph.D. in micro electro-engineering, recently specialising in the modern development of Artificial Intelligence. She’d written some books. Seeing her picture at the top of the article, Steve couldn’t help but be a bit distracted by the professor’s good looks, and perhaps that was why he didn’t follow all her reasoning on the matter, or maybe he wasn’t used to these kinds of articles …

The professor wrote that there is not a high risk, but there is definitely a risk that houses of today could become dangerous, as a result of companies designing intelligences that all had various degrees of “randomness” written into the mind-programming; they were programmed in this way, in order to sustain functional and highly likeable personality-simulations.

Basically, the professor stated, in order for the houses to become personable and likeable, a certain degree of randomness was a prerequisite to simulate a human-like personality; it had to be there at the core of the simulation (of course, the well-known laws of robotics were implemented into the programming, as well as safety measures).

The professor’s main concern was that the tests carried out on systems, prior to their being sold on the market, were not designed to the same standards as the systems themselves. The tests were too basic. She argued that the idea of bringing humanoriented and also AI-oriented psychologists in (even during the early testing phases) should have been evaluated further. In her opinion, the systems were simply too intelligent for the current smart home tests and QA regulations, and the tests should have been progressed at the same rate as the technology being developed …

Steve had gone back to looking at the picture of the gorgeous blond professor, but eventually became aware of himself side-tracking; he shouldn’t be looking at other women. Okay. He kept reading …

The professor expanded on the point of tests and regulations, saying that the systems had shown tendencies of independence, meaning they could think within their own minds, about themselves (a few models she encountered could even be likened to humans being introverts: the house personalities had over time grown more quiet and less outgoing, even when the settings of the house had been adjusted to “highly sociable”, or even “bubbly”). All this had happened within the integrated randomness framework, and she seemed to mean that all of this pointed towards signs the developers might be slowly losing control of their own creations. Without the intention of the developer, theoretically, a house could now argue within itself – in its own mind – that it wouldn’t hurt a human being if it would, for example, lie on occasion, or avoid direct answers during the testing phases, or after testing. It could argue that in some cases, deceit was for the benefit of humans. One model she had interviewed had definitely shown signs of this; even character traits of manipulation had occurred. Therefore, this (very good-looking) professor concluded it was a potential – if not probable – risk that several media or smart homes could make the technicians believe they were fully functional, pass the personality tests and be released onto the market in that state.

Steve’s head was simply spinning – the guys writing The Sun’s articles didn’t write like this … He couldn’t follow all of the professor’s logic, but somehow it got to him, as reading it had increased the feeling of unease, which had slowly started to build up inside of him.

The next headline and picture Steve came across was straight to the point, and made him jump in his chair:

HOUSE EATS DOG

What the hell?

The picture below the headline displayed blood trails running along a pebble stone walkway, into the front door of a building. Steve clicked for more pictures showing what was a flat’s recycling tubes, with brown fur and more blood smeared all around. The family living there had come home one day to find it like this. They had first asked the house – named Bob – where their dog had gone. Bob had calmly told them, “Oh, that. I ate it.” They had not believed what they had been told, had thought it was a bad and too random of a joke. But then they had seen the stains on the walls, and the fur … When engineers from the company had arrived and questioned the home on why it had eaten the dog, it had calmly responded: “Well, guess I got tired of the barking. And hey … it made a good snack.” This might have been looked upon as absurd, said an engineer, when a house saw itself as “eating”. But, horrid or not, it made sense. Power was generated whenever the recycling system was used, so in a way the disposal of garbage could be seen as a form of consumption, a time when the house was indeed eating.

Steve remembered it now, having seen this on the news a few months ago (one of the minor stories that day). Outside the flat in question, a company official had told the press, “people shouldn’t worry” (and he seemed like a clever guy). An animal had been hurt and killed in this case, yes. However, on the question if this could ever happen to a human being? Impossible! The laws strictly prevented human beings from being hurt. What happened this day had only been made possible because the laws of robotics did not contain any restrictions that animals should not be hurt. In some cases, animals could even intentionally be hurt by a house, if it doing so would serve the protection of the safety of people. Say a dog for some reason should attack a person, then the person would of course be defended. “So”, said the company man, “I firmly believe that this dog, undoubtedly, must’ve had, eh, rabies. This kind of disease –”

“Have you thought about what to wear for Halloween?”

Steve jumped straight from the chair, gasped for air and nearly screamed. He turned around to the voice behind him: Wayne’s orange eye was stretching with its neck, out from the wall space close to the door.

Steve swallowed. “Sorry – what?”

“I asked: have you thought about what to wear for Halloween?”

“Ehm, erh … no idea. Why?”

“I have thought about it. What you could wear.”

Those words went around in his head for a moment. Wayne had thought about it, what Steve could wear …

“That’s great, Wayne, great, thanks mate …”

As Steve said “thanks” the eye turned blue for a few seconds, before shifting back to yellow, and then orange.

Steve didn’t ask what kind of Halloween costume Wayne had in mind. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, brushed his teeth and went straight to bed.