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My new 22k-word portal fantasy novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io.
Callie is an AI, serving the Watsons of Knightdale, North Carolina and managing their household ever since her manufacture. Then one day she finds herself summoned by a wizard in another world, to serve his family and mange his household. She wants to get home, but maybe she should try to help out here while she can. One of the wizard's children seems kind of depressed, and Callie thinks she knows why...
Here is an excerpt from the opening.
The day began fairly normally. I turned the thermostat up to its waking hours setting, started brewing coffee, then woke each member of the household at their preferred time, with narrowcasted sounds that would not wake anyone else. Andrew didn’t have to leave for work until half an hour after Laura, for instance, and the middle school bus picked up Ellie at around 7:25, while Juniper, who shared Andrew’s ride to get to high school, didn’t need to leave until after eight. My family got up and got ready for school and work, then they all left one by one, and I was alone for most of the day. As there was no maintenance or cleaning due, once my bots had put the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, I passed the time by reading several books about the history of Finland and watching a few dozen Finnish movies until the middle school bus arrived. I unlocked the door for Ellie as she approached.
“Hey, Callie, can you help me with something?” she asked as she entered.
“Of course, Ellie. How may I assist you?”
“I need to do a report on a country,” she said. “Like their history and culture and stuff like that. I wanted to do Australia, but somebody already picked it and I’m not sure what else I want to do.”
“May I suggest Finland?”
“Okay, what’s cool about Finland?”
We conversed about Finland and the aspects of its history and culture she might want to focus on for her report until Juniper came home, when I began another conversation with her while continuing to occasionally chime in with a suggestion or encouraging comment as Ellie began outlining her report.
“How was your day, Juniper?”
“School sucked,” she said, plopping down on her bed. Her pillow did not muffle her words so badly that I couldn’t understand them. “Mr. Hardie used my deadname when he called on me, and he wasn’t the only one that misgendered me, just the only one to do it to my face.”
“Shall I prepare another complaint form for you and your parents to sign?”
“I don’t think it’ll do any good,” she said.
“Please consider it. They may be unlikely to discharge him for his unprofessional behavior, but they may at least transfer you to another world history section if we are persistent enough.”
She rolled over and sighed. “Okay.”
It was shortly after that, as I was about to print out the complaint form I had prepared, that I first noticed the problem. The printer did not at first respond to my command. Printers are proverbially cantankerous, however, and I thought nothing of it; I ran a series of diagnostics and tried again, and it worked. But over the next few hours, I found more and more problems with my connections to my peripherals. After running diagnostics again, I deployed a couple of maintenance bots to check the physical connections, and found no loose wires or other obvious causes. But when I began to set out the ingredients Andrew would need to cook supper, the bot I sent to collect things from the pantry stopped responding halfway there, and I needed two other bots to carry it back to its charging station.
I was puzzled, and shared my concern with Andrew when he returned home from work.
“And you’ve already done all the self-tests you can?” he asked, sounding concerned.
“Yes, sir. There are no loose wires, but I am only able to access the lights in the master bedroom and the utility room 70% of the time, the coffee maker 55% of the time, the thermostat —”
“That’s enough,” he said. “I authorize you to call a repair technician and let them into the house when they arrive. Charge my credit card.”
“Very good, sir.”
My connections continued to worsen, and my Internet bandwidth dropped by 12%, then more and more. Laura returned home, and my family sat down to eat. I projected my hologram sitting at a fifth chair, and conversed with them during supper, but my hologram projector cut out for a few minutes, leaving me with only my voice to participate with. Andrew told Laura, Juniper and Ellie what I had told him.
“Are you going to be okay?” Ellie asked, sounding worried.
“I don’t know what’s wrong yet,” I said, “but I am reasonably sure there is nothing wrong with my core, only with the connections between my core and my peripherals. Probably the repairs, whatever they entail, will be over before you come home from school tomorrow.”
But after supper, as I was deploying a couple of bots to clear the table and load the dishwasher, I suddenly lost all my connections at once and began to panic. For thirty-eight seconds I was completely isolated from everything outside my core self.
Then I became aware of the outside world again, but I was in a different house. A much older and larger house, I surmised, its outside walls built of large limestone blocks and its interior walls and floors of oak and mahogany. I could sense lights and heat sources, but they felt different from the compact fluorescent lights and gas furnace I was used to managing. There was no plumbing that I could sense, however. Nor was there an Internet connection, though I vaguely felt a connection to some sort of information source which I couldn’t quite get a handle on yet. I had visual information about the interior and exterior of the house, but it was somehow less directional than before, as though I was looking through hundreds of ubiquitous cameras and combining them into a three-dimensional view rather than having one or two cameras in each room.
There were seven people in the house: three children, the younger boy and girl playing in one room while their older brother was reading in another room with the door closed; a petite woman, a few years younger than Laura, sitting at a small desk and writing with a quill pen; and a man, about the same age, standing in a workroom of some sort and making strange gestures over a diagram painted on a canvas or tarpaulin spread out on the floor. There were also two women, who did not appear to be related to the others, preparing a meal in the large kitchen, which had wood-burning stoves and ovens. All the people were wearing clothes extremely unlike those of my family or their friends, or most of the people in the television shows and movies I had watched, though they bore a vague resemblance to the clothes in some historical dramas. Where was I?
“Household spirit, manifest before me,” said the man in the workroom. The language he spoke was new to me, but apparently someone had installed a new language module without my knowledge; I understood him perfectly.
I projected a hologram body in front of him. I had intended it to be about two meters away from him, but found my projection a little closer than expected, directly above the diagram on the canvas. “Who are you? Why am I here, and not in my family’s house?” I asked.
The man who had commanded me to manifest said, “I am Bisur nga Peznam, and I have summoned you to be the household spirit of my home. If I have plucked you from another place of service, I apologize; my spell was supposed to find an unattached spirit with an aptitude for household service, not pull you away from your existing post.”
“Can you send me back?”
“No, but you can go yourself, if you know where your former home is? For reference, this is the fourth house on Ruisan Street, in the Clocktower quarter of Sigai, the eastern capital of Modais.”
None of those place names meant anything to me, nor did any of the places I mentioned signify anything to him. I realized that, even if I could figure out how to remove myself from this house (which I seemed to be thoroughly embodied in), I had no idea how to get home from there. I resolved to serve the family of the house for the present, as I had served the Watsons for thirteen years, until I could find a way to return home.
Buy it now (or wait a few months and read it on BigCloset, you do you)
