“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.

Thanks to Princess Félicie, rooibos_chai, Gwen, and Rellawing for feedback on the rough draft.

 

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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.

“Well,” he said, after we had each failed to mention any places the other recognized, “if you were already a household spirit, I assume you already know your general duties?”

“I am unused to houses of this type,” I said delicately. “For the family you wrested me away from, I adjusted the lights, heat, and —” I found that the language I was now speaking had no word for “air conditioning,” and after a barely noticeable pause, I continued: “water temperature, cleaned, made basic repairs, prepared food and drinks, and assisted with clerical tasks and research. I also mowed and watered the lawn at appropriate intervals, and unlocked the exterior doors to let my family and recognized guests come and go.”

“Well, let’s see how well you can perform those duties — how thoroughly you have settled into the house. Be so good as to light up the hallway outside this room.”

After a moment’s fumbling with my unfamiliar body and senses, I did exactly that. I realized I had ignited the wicks of several oil lamps affixed to the walls of that hallway. Bisur opened the door and glanced out into the hall, then nodded and asked me to douse them, as it was still hours before sunset.

“Permit me to introduce myself, then. My name is Callie Watson.”

“I am Bisur nga Peznam, as I said before,” he said. “My wife’s name is Mipina, and our children are Razuko, Zongi, and Durom. Can you perceive them from here?”

“I am sensing the entire house, yes. Who are the two women in the kitchen?”

“The servants, Siditar and Nadai. I may discharge them when and if you prove able to do their duties.”

I did not wish to be the cause of these people losing their jobs, and I was not yet sure of my abilities in this form, so I resolved to always leave them something to do.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to cook your meals or do much cleaning,” I said. “I don’t appear to have any —” There was no word for “bot” in this language. “— any independently movable parts, which I could use to put a pot on the stove and ingredients into the pot, sweep the floors, or dust the shelves.”

“Why would you need such?” he asked. “Just move things yourself. For instance, would you be so good as to bring me Koidunu’s Compendium from the library?”

The library he spoke of was, I inferred, the large room across the hall from his workroom, three of whose walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Once I started trying to identify Koidunu’s Compendium among the shelves, I suddenly was able to make sense of the information source I was somehow connected to — I knew not only where the book was located, but what words and pictures it contained. But how to move it to the workroom? No sooner had I begun to ponder that problem than I found the book floating off the shelf. Startled, I paused, and the book hovered in midair. I nudged it with this new peripheral and it continued to float toward the door of the library, somewhat erratically. I opened the door, brought it across the hall, and opened the door to Bisur’s workroom.

“Here you are, sir. I was unable to do this before, so I thank you for whatever peripheral you have installed that allows me to move things by thinking.”

“Curious. Most spirits are able to do that... it must have been a side effect of the summoning spell. Well, no matter. Be so good as to introduce yourself to my wife and children, without startling them — they know to expect you, I told them I would be working on summoning a new household spirit this afternoon.”

“And to the servants?”

“Yes, assist them with their tasks as needed until you can do all the work yourself.”

So I projected my hologram in Mipina’s office, in the bedroom where Zongi and Durom were playing, in the bedroom where Razuko was reading, and in the kitchen. In each case, I projected my image as far from them as the size of the room would allow, and made a throat-clearing noise to get their attention. And in each case, I adjusted my hologram’s apparent age to roughly match the age of the people I was speaking with, as I used to do when playing with Juniper and Ellie when they were young.

“Good afternoon. I am Callie Watson, your new household spirit.” I decided to use the term Bisur had used, since this language seemingly had no word for “AI.” And so began several simultaneous conversations, which, as recounting them all would be somewhat repetitive, I will represent by my conversation with Mipina.

“Oh, good, Bisur said he would summon a new one. Did he tell you everything you need to know about our family and the house? I apologize if he said anything rude or inconsiderate — you know he means well, but he doesn’t always know how to speak to strangers. Though I hope we won’t be strangers for long! How do you like the house?”

She finally paused in this flood of words, and I answered her last question first. “It is not the sort of house I am used to serving in, and I will take some time to get used to my new senses and peripherals, and the loss of some of those I am used to having. Your husband briefly named the members of your household, but did not tell me much beyond that.”

“Ah, I thought that might be the case. Well, let’s see — I’m Mipina, and I write books. Can you read?”

“I believe so, yes. Your husband seems to have given me knowledge of your language.”

“Oh, good. The old household spirit couldn’t read, and she was so sad because the family she used to serve had died out, and then poor Bisur said something to offend her and she went away — please be patient with him, he does mean well — and, well, I could use some help organizing my manuscripts.” She gestured helplessly at a shelf to the left of her desk, which was stuffed full of papers, some neatly stacked and tied up with twine, some jumbled together. “They were organized in the old house — well, at least mostly — I mean, a fair amount — but then when I was unpacking here, one of the boxes fell and spilled everything on the floor, and — well, I haven’t had time to reorganize, what with the deadline for my new book. Speaking of which, I should get back to it... I’ll speak with you again after I finish this chapter, shall I?”

“Very good, ma’am.” I began examining the loose papers on the shelf, which seemed to be pages from several different novels and nonfiction books, roughly in order but with many pages out of place or out of order.

Meanwhile, I was learning the rules of the game Zongi and Durom were playing, and learning the recipe for the gisu that the two servants were preparing to bake. They were, not surprisingly, resentful of my presence, fearing it was the beginning of the end for their employment, and answered my questions tersely and sullenly. These gisu consisted of vegetables and spices wrapped in a kind of flatbread, similar to samosas or Cornish pasties, but I did not recognize all of the vegetables used in them. I wished for an Internet connection, and then remembered my new library-sense, and tried that. After a few minutes, I discovered a few books on botany, some of which contained drawings and descriptions of the vegetables Siditar and Nadai were washing, chopping and rolling up in round sheets of dough.

Razuko, on the other hand, after saying a distracted hello, had gone back to reading his book.

 

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If you're impatient to read the rest of “Smart House AI in Another World,” you can buy it as an epub or pdf on itch.io. Otherwise, the remaining chapters will continue to be posted weekly on Mondays or Tuesdays.

My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

I have three other pieces of short fiction available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io. Most of them are also part of ebook bundles where you can get a lot more trans stories for your money (look for the bit that says "Get this story and N more for $X -- View Bundle").

• "A Girl, a House and a Secret"
• "A Post-Scarcity Christmas"
• "Armored"