Wil McCarthy: The Dream of Houses

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.