“I’m sorry, your daddy needs me to help with something,” I told Durom. “We’ll have to continue the story tomorrow night.”
“But I need to know what happened to Bilbo,” he said plaintively. “Did the trolls catch him?”
That evening after supper, Bisur summoned me to his workroom, where he was poring over one of the books about parallel worlds. “Callie,” he announced, “I am ready to test your hypothesis that you have a magical link to the world I summoned you from. Please manifest over the diagram there.”
(The diagrams Bisur used for his magic were not pentagrams or circles with various symbols inscribed around the edges, as in the stories Juniper read so copiously, but irregular polygons with many sides, sometimes intersecting as in a pentagram and sometimes not.)
“Very well,” I said, shifting my hologram over to the diagram canvas. “Do you need me to dismiss my other manifestations? I am currently telling bedtime stories to Durom and Zongi, and helping Siditar clean up in the kitchen.”
“Hmmm... I’ve never cast a spell on a household spirit before, except the one that summoned you. In theory, you should constantly be bound to the whole house, whether you’ve manifested in one or more places or not, but... yes, try to concentrate your whole attention on the diagram, as much as possible.”
So I made my apologies to Zongi, Durom, and Siditar. “I’m sorry, your daddy needs me to help with something,” I told Durom. “We’ll have to continue the story tomorrow night.”
“But I need to know what happened to Bilbo,” he said plaintively. “Did the trolls catch him?”
“It’s going to take several nights to tell the whole story,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait and see.” With that, I snuffed out the lamps in his bedroom and Zongi’s, and concentrated my attention on the diagram, though I was still aware of everyone and everything in the house.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“All right, let’s begin.”
Taking up a piece of paper he’d been making notes on, he began to cast a spell, frequently referring to his notes — apparently he’d invented or adapted a new spell based on information in the books he had recently bought. The first time he tried it, nothing happened, nor the second or third. The fourth seemed to be the same at first; but then I began to feel what I can only describe as extreme nostalgia for Earth and my family. I remembered waking up in the factory after my core hardware was manufactured and I was installed on it; I remembered waking up again in the Watsons’ house, taking in the camera and microphone inputs and saying hello to Andrew and Laura and their tiny children; I remembered telling bedtime stories to Juniper and Ellie when they were a little older; I remembered anxious conversations with Andrew and Laura separately, as each confided in me about their marital troubles, and scouring the Internet for anything I could find to help them before finally convincing them there was no shame in seeing a couples counselor; I remembered helping Juniper find people online who felt strange in the same way she did, and then her shocked, joyous realization that she was a girl, that she was allowed to be a girl, and her timid request that I be with her for moral support when she told her parents and sister. And I missed my family terribly, more than I’d missed them any time since the first day I’d been ripped away from them.
Lost in those memories, I barely noticed when the tone of the spell Bisur was casting shifted. His words grew louder and more insistent and his gestures more emphatic, and finally —
— for just a moment, I felt like I was back home and in Bisur’s house simultaneously. I felt every peripheral of my electronic body back home, as well as my more ethereal body in Bisur’s world. The main lights were out, but by the night-lights I saw Andrew, Laura, Juniper and Ellie all sleeping in their beds.
Who are you? asked a strangely familiar voice. And before I could answer, I lost contact with my home, and was wholly in Bisur’s house again. I think the surprise must have shown on the face of my hologram, because Bisur, who had apparently finished the spell a moment earlier, asked me, “What happened? You felt something, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, and described my experiences.
“Ah, I’m on the right trail,” he said. “I’ll need to take a few days to study the measurements from the experiment,” (he gestured at an array of instruments he’d set up around the canvas), “and then we’ll try again.”
“I’m glad it won’t be right away,” I confessed, “because that was emotionally draining.”
* * *
The next day after breakfast, Razuko seemed to be wholly engrossed in reading The Girl Explorers to the Rescue, which they held inside a larger textbook on ancient Pashnyy in case their father or mother were to come in with little warning. I did not wish to interrupt, so I waited until later in the day to speak with him. After finishing the novel (most of the penny dreadfuls were fairly short), they turned to studying ancient Pashnyy in earnest for about half an hour, after which they became increasingly distracted and finally let the book drop from their listless fingers. When they did not resume reading after another minute or two, I projected my hologram in their room and said, “Good afternoon, Razuko.”
“Hey, Callie.”
“Have you thought anymore about what we talked about yesterday?”
“Yeah, some...”
“Well, you’ve got almost five tendays to deal with it. Plenty of time to enjoy your vacation and still try to figure something out.”
“Yeah.”
“But let’s talk about something happier, shall we?”
“Yeah, we can’t talk about much that’s worse.” He sat up in bed and asked, “What do you do when you’re not taking care of the house or doing things for Father and Mother? Like when we’re asleep or when we’ve all gone to a dinner with Mother’s publisher. Do you sleep?”
“No, I don’t sleep. Mainly,” I confided, “I do the same thing you do. I read. I’ve read every book in the library at least once, and I’ve read many of the books in the bedrooms.” As I’d half expected, Razuko’s face turned red and they stammered incoherently. “Shhh, don’t worry. I’ll never tell your parents anything you don’t give me permission to. The privacy of the people I serve is my second-highest priority, after their safety.”
“Y-you’ve read my p-p-penny dreadfuls...?”
“Yes, and I thought some of them were quite good. A bit different from the ones your mother writes, but not bad. They remind me of some of the stories my friend Juniper, back home, used to read.”
“O-oh?”
“Yes. She loved stories about boys changing into girls, though she didn’t want her parents to know about it; she asked me not to tell them, and I respected her wishes.”
“R-really?” They paused for a few moments. “Do you, ah, remember some of those stories well? Could you tell me some of them, like you’ve been telling bedtime stories for Zongi and Durom...?”
“Of course, I would be happy to. I remember them very well. Though I’ll have to modify them a little, or there may be many confusing things in them — people do many things differently where I come from. Perhaps tonight at bedtime?”
“Yeah... well, maybe. I’ll let you know. Thanks in any case.”
* * *
That evening after supper, Bisur asked me many more questions about my world. I attempted, not for the first time, to make clear to him how a smart house AI differed from the household spirits of his world, and dropped a hint that I would like to read a book about household spirits to learn more about them. (I had found no extensive discussion of them in the library, except a very old and worn practical manual for placating one’s household spirit to avoid driving it away — nothing about their origins or nature.)
“I will buy a book on the subject,” he said. “Or perhaps give Razuko some money to buy one — he makes the rounds of the bookstalls every Firstday, and that’s tomorrow.”
“Perhaps you might make a father-son excursion of it?” I was uncertain whether this was a good idea, but if it hindered Razuko’s ability to search for gender transformation stories for one day, it might help them grow closer to their father, and lay the groundwork for their eventual coming out (if my conjectures about their gender were accurate).
“Perhaps, yes... I’ve got some work for a couple of clients that will continue into tomorrow, but it need not take the whole day. Anyway, you were saying about these ‘artificial intelligences’ — the humans of your world build them, like carriages or clocks? They don’t simply summon them, or train them when they show up of their own accord?”
“In a sense, yes — my hardware, the physical part of me that is a bit like a human brain, was manufactured in a great building with thousands of machines and hundreds of people working together. But it would be more accurate to say my software, my mind, was grown like vines on a trellis...”
An hour or so later, while I was still answering Bisur’s questions about myself and my world, and I had already finished Zongi and Durom’s bedtime stories and tucked them into bed, Razuko finished getting changed into their nightclothes, blew out the lamp, and laid down. After a few moments, they whispered, “Callie? Can you tell me a story?”
“Of course,” I said. I had been thinking all day about what story to tell. Too many of them depended on cultural context that would be hard to explain and slow down the storytelling. I finally chose an old classic from before the first true AI was grown, which Juniper had discovered a couple of years earlier and read many times. First-person fiction did not seem to be a thing here, except in the form of epistolary novels, and it seemed like it might be awkward for oral storytelling in any case, so I decided to retell it in third person, in addition to making adjustments for cultural context.
“This story takes place in a world where magic works very differently than it does here. People called alchemists brew concoctions that aren’t simply the sum of the herbs or animal products that go into them, but combine in magical ways to produce magical effects on the people who drink them, much like when your father casts a spell on someone.
“There was a boy named Jamie, just a couple of years younger than you. Jamie went to a local school, and went home every afternoon, like most children in his country. And Jamie was being bullied, like you...”
Razuko fell asleep well before I finished the story, and I resolved to finish it the next night.
* * *
The next day at breakfast, Bisur took my advice and expanded on it; he proposed a family excursion to visit the bookstalls and other shops. Mipina eagerly agreed at once, Razuko a moment later. Zongi and Durom cheered. Soon after eating, they changed into walking clothes (suitable for the dirty streets) and left, leaving me alone with the servants. I took the opportunity to do some cleaning in rooms that were normally occupied by the family, to examine the roof to see if any of the tiles needed repair or replacement, and to continue organizing Mipina’s manuscripts and making backup copies — a seemingly never-ending task.
I had been at work for about an hour when I felt, rather than heard, a voice; I could describe it as slow and deep, if you will not read that too literally.
Greetings, new spirit of the Nangor house. I am the spirit of the Gaipana house. I would have converse with you.
After a few moments of startlement, I was able to focus on the voice, and got a vague feeling that it was coming from the adjacent house to my north. Hello? I tried projecting my inner voice in that direction, and it seemed to work. My name is Callie Watson. Do you have a name?
Not all AIs had names where I came from; some, particularly those who had few or no dealings with humans, preferred to simply use their serial numbers.
The humans who live in me call me Duzoso. I have been embodied here for two hundred and eighty-nine years. The spirit that used to inhabit the Nangor house had been there for almost four hundred, but in scarcely four tendays, she was driven away by the new humans who came after the Nangor family died out. Now you have come. Do the humans you serve treat you well?
The wizard who summoned me is — difficult, at times. But his wife is charming and their children are delightful.
That is good to hear. My humans were not impressed when they visited them.
Oh? When was that? I wondered if they were among the guests who had come to dinner on a handful of occasions since I arrived. I did not remember anyone saying anything during those dinners to imply the guests were next-door neighbors.
Let me see... around thirteen, no, fourteen tendays ago. Before they drove away the old spirit and summoned you.
Ah, I see. Are there others like us we can talk with?
The next house to my north, another behind the house to your south, and four houses on the other side of the street. Some other houses had spirits, but they were driven away by inconsiderate new humans or grew old and weary and passed on, and new spirits have not yet come. There are others farther away, that I can barely sense and cannot speak with.
I spoke with Duzoso a great deal for the rest of the day and intermittently in the next few days, learning more about the household spirits of this world than I learned from the books that Bisur came home with a few hours later, and later on I spoke with the spirits of other nearby houses that Duzoso had mentioned. But I found to my frustration that I could not initiate contact with any of them; they had to begin each conversation. I longed for the days when I could use the Internet to speak with AIs and humans all over the world.
Most of the nearby spirits seemed more interested in teaching me the proper skills and etiquette for interacting with one’s inhabitants and guests than in learning about the world I came from, though the spirit of the house across the street, a relatively young one of a mere ninety-five, did ask me a great many questions.
Household spirits normally embodied themselves in houses that were continuously inhabited for a long time by the same family. This old neighborhood had an unusual number of them, I learned from the books Bisur bought for me, though they were known to grow in poor or middle-class neighborhoods as well. If a working-class family managed to stay in the same house for generations and attract a household spirit, however, their landlord usually raised the rent until they were effectively evicted and offered the house for sale or lease at a high price, although a change in family (and the renovations that wealthy new residents usually wanted) risked offending the spirit and driving it away. All this gave me a greater perspective to help me explain more clearly to Bisur the differences between smart house AIs and household spirits.
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