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 manage 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...
“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.
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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You will have realized by now what I soon inferred: that I was no longer on Earth, and that Bisur, who had somehow drawn me to this world from my comfortable home in Knightdale, North Carolina, was a wizard.
You will have realized by now what I soon inferred: that I was no longer on Earth, and that Bisur, who had somehow drawn me to this world from my comfortable home in Knightdale, North Carolina, was a wizard. How such a world could exist outside of human imagination, I did not know. It had always seemed to me that the magic in the fantasy stories that Andrew and Juniper loved was, despite a level of verisimilitude sufficient for human minds to suspend disbelief, not internally coherent enough to ever really exist in a possible world. But here I was confronted with evidence to the contrary. I reflected on the similarity of my situation to the protagonists of the isekai stories that Juniper used to devour in great numbers, often to the detriment of her schoolwork. In these stories, a male human would stumble through a portal, be struck by lightning, or most often be run over by a truck, and suddenly find himself in another world, in a female body (not necessarily human). I had no sex, and the gender presentation of my hologram was unchanged, but if one considered the house I inhabited to be my body, I was in much the same condition.
I worried a great deal about my family in my first hours and days in this new world. I normally kept the exterior doors locked, and unlocked them as the family members approached a door, from inside or out. There were supposed to be manual overrides for all my peripherals, but with Bisur having rudely ripped me from the house, would the manual overrides work correctly? Who knew what damage he might have caused? Would the thermostat malfunction and bake them alive until they could break open a window and get out, or the plumbing start spewing boiling-hot water or sewage? And even if the manual overrides worked perfectly, who would help Ellie with her report on Finland or guide Juniper and her parents through the maze of bureaucracy?
There was nothing I could do about it for the moment, however, so I resolved to be make myself useful and to learn as much about this world as I could, both by reading all the books in the house one by one, and by listening carefully to all the conversations that took place among the family and servants and between Bisur and the clients who came to visit in the following days. The more I learned, the better chance I might have of finding a way home.
The country I now found myself in used a ten-day week. On six of these days, Bisur would receive clients all the morning and half of the afternoon, or less often would go out to pay a house call. The other days, he would work on designing customized spells for certain clients, or on his own projects — he rarely rested except at night. On the day after my arrival, for instance, he received a visit from a foreign merchant, accompanied by an interpreter; this client wanted a spell to help him learn the local language, Modaisu, faster. Bisur pointed out that the spell would only last a few hours each time, and that it would be more cost-effective to commission an enchanted necklace that would let one learn faster while wearing it than to return for repeated appointments to have the fast learning spell cast on oneself. The client agreed, and came back later in the tenday to pick up the necklace.
Another was a minor noble who believed that a rival had hired a wizard to put a curse on him. He and his family had had a terrible series of accidents — his son broke his leg in two places, bandits stole a large part of his flocks and got away, his summer house burned down. Bisur cast several diagnostic spells and informed him that he was not under a curse, but that bad events sometimes came in clusters through nobody’s fault. He went away angry, muttering about a conspiracy of wizards.
Another represented the most common type of client. He requested healing, but used a great many euphemisms to gradually hint at his ailment until Bisur, looking extremely frustrated, demanded that he speak plainly, at which point he whispered that he could not get an erection anymore. Bisur briskly cast a routine spell and sent him on his way. Healing was his bread and butter and he knew the most common healing spells backwards and forwards.
As I settled in and learned my way around the house and its inhabitants’ routines, I took over from Mipina as Bisur’s appointment secretary, answering letters from clients and assigning them appointment times. By this time, I had mastered my telekinesis peripheral to where I could write letters in a neat hand, imitating Mipina’s handwriting.
In addition to listening in on these informative conversations, I also asked questions to satisfy my curiosity, primarily of Mipina; when she was not busy writing or teaching her younger children, she seemed more receptive to conversation than her husband or Razuko.
“I ran across a reference in your novel On the Foredeck to ‘the zamui’s bite’,” I said to her one evening a few days after my arrival, while she was changing into formal clothes for dinner with guests who were expected at any moment. “What is a zamui, and why is its bite so important? I have not yet found it described in the books I’ve read, though I’ve seen two other allusions to its bite.”
“Oh,” she said, and shuddered slightly. “I don’t like to think about it... I suppose you’re new here and don’t know, but be sure you don’t talk about that in front of Bisur.”
“I apologize if I have violated a taboo,” I said, curtseying.
“Well, in short, a zamui is a horrible creature with an extremely venomous bite. They are pretty rare, fortunately, but they are occasionally found in the woods around Peznam, where Bisur and I grew up. If you are bitten by a zamui, you will almost certainly die, slowly and painfully, over the course of several days. But a few of those who are bitten survive, and once they recover from the zamui bite, they have magical power. Those three days when Bisur was suffering from the venom, and his mother and I sat with him and bathed his forehead and changed his sweaty bed-clothing and tried to make him as comfortable as we could, those were the longest days of my life. We’d had dreams of marrying and working on my parents’ farm until we inherited it, and being happy together... but I saw them all burning down before my eyes. And then, such a miracle, he recovered. The fever and pain passed, and after a deep sleep, he woke and said he felt very strange. Then a cup of water floated from the table to his lips and he drank. And I knew we were not going to be simple farmers.”
Tears had come to her eyes while she spoke, and she wiped them away with a handkerchief. “But what you probably want to know, I suppose, is what ‘the zamui’s bite’ means in everyday speech. It’s an opportunity that is highly risky but with a small chance of huge rewards, like when Ngaibo is offered a chance to join the pirate crew in On the Foredeck.”
“Thank you for telling me all this,” I said. “Oh, your guests have arrived.” The front door bell was barely audible from the upstairs bedrooms, but Nadai was already jogging toward the front door to answer it. I could have let the guests in, but I let her do so, hoping to prolong the period of the servants’ usefulness.
“Oh, I must hurry.” She hastily donned a silver bracelet and a yellow shawl, and hastened downstairs.
* * *
It was several days later when, in the course of my systematically reading all the books and manuscripts in the house, I found a book which described the means of acquiring magical power. It seemed that the zamui’s bite was but one such means, although it was the most common, and the only one that the desperate or foolhardy could deliberately seek out. A few wizards had acquired their power by being struck by lightning, though it seemed that only certain storms with high levels of magic flux could grant power to those who survived their lightning strikes. Others were abducted by beings who lived in a parallel world, and if they returned (most did not), they usually had some form of magical power. There had been some partially successful attempts to keep zamui in captivity and milk them of their venom, but attempts to chemically or magically modify the venom to give magic power without a high risk of death had been unsuccessful.
This same passage had a footnote listing several books about parallel worlds, and I eagerly searched the library to see if Bisur owned any of them. He owned only one, the oldest and least up-to-date of them, unfortunately. (The bulk of the library had come with the house, having been accumulated over generations by the family that used to live there before they died out and Bisur bought it at auction. Bisur and his family had owned thirty or so hardback nonfiction books, plus a few dozen penny dreadfuls or pulp novels of the type Mipina wrote, before they moved in.) I chose that as my next read, hoping to find some way to return to my home and family.
Alas, this book had no mention of any world similar to the one I had been made in. The science or magic of the time the book was written knew of four other worlds besides their own, two barren and uninhabited, one inhabited by more advanced beings who periodically abducted people as pets or slaves, and one inhabited by humans with slightly higher technology than Bisur’s people, but less advanced magic. This last world was organized into an empire that was hostile to all outsiders, and might have conquered Bisur’s world if they could open their own portals. The author theorized that there must be an infinite number of other worlds, but given the difficulty of discovering new ones, it was likely that another millennium would only turn up a handful more. He also mentioned a bounty established by the Council (the ruling body of Modais, made up of the highest-ranking nobles) for the discovery of another world, whether an empty one with easily exploitable resources or an inhabited one that could be traded with.
I mentioned my curiosity on the matter to Bisur, and inquired if he had any interest in acquiring one or more of the more up-to-date books on the subject.
“That is not my field of study,” he said, “and I have no great interest in it. The odds of discovering a new world are so slim, I would probably be wasting my time — time I could be employing on behalf of paying clients, or research that interests me more.”
“You forget that you have a potential resource that other searchers for new worlds did not,” I said. “Myself. I can tell you whatever you wish to know of my home world, and who knows, perhaps I still have some connection to that world which you can trace and use to your advantage.”
He thoughtfully stroked his beard. “What you say has merit. I will take it into consideration.”
Not right away, but about a tenday later, he did acquire some newer books on the subject, and began reading through them in the evenings.
* * *
As I mentioned before, I wanted to try to avoid replacing Siditar and Nadai if I could help it. But before I had been in the house many days, I realized that Bisur’s plan to discharge the servants once I had learned to do their duties was a pipe dream. I was unable to extend my senses or exert my telekinesis one inch beyond the boundaries of the property, and there were at least two things that the servants had to go out to do — grocery shopping, and pumping water for the household.
I said earlier that there was no plumbing. There was apparently a well pump in the street, shared by several neighboring houses. Most days, the servants would pump a handful of buckets of water for cooking and washing in the course of the day. I relieved them of their burden when they got the buckets just inside the small front yard, and levitated them to the kitchen or wherever they were needed. Once every tenday, the servants would pump bucket after bucket of water and I would levitate them the rest of the way to the bathtub, which was in a small room near the back of the house. Once it was full, which took about twenty-five buckets, Bisur would cast a heating spell on it, and take the first bath; then he would cast another heating spell and a purifying spell, and Mipina would take the next bath, and so on. Between these baths, they would wash their faces each morning using the ewers placed in each bedroom which I filled from the first buckets of the day. (It soon became my responsibility to make sure the children washed their faces.)
There was, as you must have inferred, an outhouse in the small back yard: a two-seat affair, with a partition between the seats, built over a deep pit. There was a permanent spell diagram painted on the ceiling of the outhouse, and once per tenday, Bisur would a spell on the contents of the pit which caused them to undergo rapid decomposition until the smell was greatly reduced, although not eliminated, as it had permeated the wooden structure of the outhouse over the years the house was in the hands of non-wizards.
Once I had learned the rhythms of the household, I was able to point out my limitations to Siditar and Nadai, and convince them that I not only didn’t want to replace them, but couldn’t. We soon settled on a division of labor for cooking where I would do the prep work, washing and chopping the vegetables Siditar selected, and maintain an even temperature in the wood stove and oven; with my telekinesis and precise temperature sense, I could manipulate the fire to burn hotter or cooler more accurately and safely than a human could do by using a poker or adding more fuel. Siditar and Nadai would do all the rest of the cooking, and we would work together on the washing up afterward.
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By the end of the first tenday, I had become a friend and playmate to the younger children, an assistant to Bisur in his magical workshop, and an assistant to Mipina in her writing. Razuko, however, remained uninterested in socializing and did not seem to want much help.
When I first arrived in Bisur’s house, I kept my hologram the same as it had been for the last year or so since I last changed my outfit. But as I observed the clothes worn day to day by Bisur’s family, and by their occasional guests at dinner and by Bisur’s clients, I realized that the green sundress my hologram wore was somewhat masculine-coded, in its colors and pattern if not in its cut. In the upper classes, it seemed, both sexes wore robes or what Americans would call dresses, but the genders were distinguished by the cuts, colors and patterns, as well as by how they wore their hair. The working classes, to judge from Bisur’s servants, the postman, and the egg delivery man, typically wore shirts and trousers or overalls, but the colors and patterns followed the same gender divide as the upper classes: men wore cool solid colors or abstract designs such as plaids or stripes, while women who could afford it wore clothes embroidered with animals, flowers, fruits, coral, and trees, and less well-off women wore warm solid colors. My green sundress was thus considered something in-between, not placing me clearly in people’s minds as to my gender. So after a few days of gathering data on local clothing customs, I altered my sundress to a peach-color and added “embroidery” of some of my favorite Earth animals, not all of which were known to the people of Modais — quokkas, hedgehogs and cats. (Yes, it’s true that nearly all AIs love collecting pictures of cats. I would have loved to have a cat in the house, but alas, Laura was allergic to them.)
My hologram’s loose long hair was already considered sufficiently feminine; both sexes wore their hair long, but men braided it while women wore it loose.
* * *
By the end of the first tenday, I had become a friend and playmate to the younger children, an assistant to Bisur in his magical workshop, and an assistant to Mipina in her writing. Razuko, however, remained uninterested in socializing and did not seem to want much help. He had no friends come over and hang out, as his younger siblings sometimes played with the neighborhood children. Once per tenday, when his father gave him his allowance, he would go out and visit the bookstalls; he always returned with a stack of penny dreadfuls or one or two nonfiction (and typically more expensive) books. The rest of the time, he spent in his room — often reading, but sometimes simply lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. At mealtimes, he said little except in response to a question from his mother or father.
I became concerned about him, as I thought I recognized patterns that I had seen in Juniper when her depression was at its worst, not long before she realized she was transgender. I did not immediately jump to the conclusion that Razuko was transgender, of course, as I knew from my reading in my home world that depression can have many causes and comorbidities. But after some days of observing this pattern, I spoke to Mipina about it.
“Yes, I’m a little worried about him too,” she said. “Of course he has to study a lot over the long vacation, so he’ll be ready when he goes back to school. And he says he misses his school friends. Unfortunately none of them live in this city. I think the school has been good for him, since he didn’t have many friends before.” Razuko, it seemed, had attended a boarding school for the sons of wealthy commoners for two years; he had returned home for an eight-tenday vacation not long before Bisur had summoned me and bound me to his house.
“Hmm,” I said. “Has he written to his school friends?”
Mipina thought for a moment. “I don’t know. If he puts his letters in the mail basket for Nadai to give to the postman, I wouldn’t necessarily notice.”
I had not seen him write any such letters yet, and I had been with the family for over a tenday by then. I suggested one day that he might write to his school friends, if he was feeling lonely, and he vaguely responded in the affirmative. But he wrote no such letters, and I began to wonder if his “friends” were fictitious, made up to placate his parents and make them think he was happier at school than he was. Juniper had done something similar in her first year of high school.
He was studying a certain amount, though I wasn’t sure how much was actually for school and how much was other nonfiction that interested him. But the majority of his reading was penny dreadfuls and other novels. And as I finished reading the books in the library and began reading the books in various family members’ bedrooms, I started to notice a pattern in the novels he reread most often, which also reminded me of Juniper’s reading before she discovered her gender.
In one, Dancing Slave of the Tainan, a boy a little older than Razuko was abducted by some of the inhabitants of that more advanced world I mentioned, who transformed him into a girl and trained her as a dancer. She served her abductors for eight years, dancing for larger and larger audiences and growing more magical by the day, until she finally discovered a dance that would open a portal back to her home world, where she became a prestigious and wealthy wizard and took as her lover the widow of a printer.
In another, Experiment #4, some homeless boys and girls gathered around to listen to the job crier, who announced the jobs people were willing to offer those with no skills or education. Four of them too trustingly followed up on one of these offers, and found themselves abducted and imprisoned by a wicked wizard, who experimented on them in various ways. One of the girls became only able to speak in rhyme; the other broke out in leaves and flowers all over her skin, and became dependent on sunlight; one of the boys began to constantly float six inches off the ground; and the last boy was transformed into a a girl with three legs. The new girl became the lover of the girl who spoke in rhyme, while the floating boy and the plant-girl paired off as well, and after further ordeals that I will not detail, they escaped the wizard’s compound and eventually joined a circus.
The last penny dreadful which clinched my suspicions that Razuko was like Juniper in more ways than his depression involved no overt magic. In The Orphan Actress, a young boy from a respectable but not very wealthy family wanted to join a theater troupe, but his family were horrified at the thought, and planned for him to be a lawyer like his father. But after a series of improbable misfortunes left him a penniless orphan, he found no further obstacle to his dream except his own inexperience, and soon joined a theater troupe as a menial, rearranging stage furniture between acts and cleaning the theater between plays. At last, he was offered an opportunity to act — in a minor role with just two lines, as the protagonist’s lady’s-maid. At first reluctant to take a female role, he resolved to try it, and found he delighted in women’s clothing, in being seen as a girl by the audience and treated as girl by the other actors. Further roles followed, most of them female, and after some time, he confided to one of the older actresses that he wished he could become a girl for good. She took her to a surgeon, who removed her male parts, and prescribed an herbal concoction that, taken regularly, would gradually allow her to grow breasts and feminine hips. She grew up to become the most famous actress of her day.
I would give a false impression if I implied that all the stories he read involved boys becoming girls; I believe he had a hard time finding even these three, which showed more signs of frequent re-reading than any of his other books. Most of the others, including all the ones he had bought since I arrived, were stories of adventure and romance with cisgender girl main characters.
You will scarcely be surprised, therefore, when I confide in you my suspicion that Razuko might also be transgender. Indeed, after their latest reread of The Orphan Actress, they began spending more of their pocket money on medical nonfiction, both pharmacology and surgery. It was then that I resolved to speak with them about this.
* * *
Mipina, after I had shared my concerns, had tried harder to speak with Razuko, to engage them in conversation both during meals and in visits to their bedroom, and to show them physical affection. As hungry as Razuko was for affection, they seemed awkward and unable to respond to Mipina’s overtures in other ways; their depression was not alleviated, and Mipina grew more anxious over her oldest child. She shared her concerns with Bisur, and Bisur made his own attempts to engage Razuko in conversation. His questions about what Razuko had been reading met with embarrassed silence and a panicked glance at the bookshelf (where some of the penny dreadfuls were hidden behind a layer of respectable schoolbooks and other nonfiction), followed by a few halting words about their nonfiction reading. Bisur was not perceptive enough to interpret those glances, and being just as socially awkward as his child, decided he had done enough when the halting and intermittent conversation had gone on for twenty minutes or so.
It was the morning after one of these awkward attempts at a conversation that I made another overture at befriending Razuko. Not long after they returned to their room from breakfast, when they had made some listless attempts to start reading the pharmacology manual they had recently bought, and then started staring at the wall, I projected my hologram near the door. “Good morning, Razuko.”
“Oh, hi, Callie. Did Father or Mother send for me?” (Bisur, who disliked the sound of bells and especially those loud enough to be heard throughout the house, had taken to asking me to summon his wife, children or servants when he wanted to speak with them, rather than using the system of bells that had come with the house.)
“No, I just wanted to get to know you better. I’ve been here a couple of tendays and I feel like I know your parents and your little siblings fairly well, but... you’re a person of mystery.”
“I’m not that mysterious,” they mumbled. “I just sit in my room all day and read. I don’t have enough imagination to write my own books like Mother does, or make up games like Zongi, or invent new spells like Father — even if I had the power to cast them.”
“I’m sure you have more talent than you suspect,” I said. “You remind me of the oldest child of the family I used to serve; when she was your age, she suffered terrible depression, and could hardly bring herself to do anything but read, or — or watch plays,” (Modaisu lacked a word for “television” or “movie”), “and not always even that. But we discovered the underlying cause of her depression, and now she is much better. Not perfect; she still has bad days now and then, but she’s much happier, and also more creative, like she was when she was a child. Or she was when I saw her last,” I added worriedly.
“Do you think you can help me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I want to try.”
“I don’t think it’ll do any good. Even if you can figure out what makes me like this, it’ll probably be really hard to fix, and I’m not worth fixing.”
“Razuko!” I said, a little sternly. “Please don’t say such mean things about my friend.”
“Who...?”
“I mean you,” I said. “I would like to be your friend. And I don’t like to hear people say mean things about my friend.”
I saw a slight, a very slight, smile.
I did not breach the subject of Razuko’s reading matter or their feelings about gender on that occasion. I asked gentle questions about their nonfiction reading, whether they remembered the border town their family used to live in when they were a child, their school experiences. To my surprise, Razuko burst into tears when I mentioned school, and confessed that they had no friends there — something I had suspected when they went so long without writing or receiving any letters. On the contrary, they were being bullied by the older and stronger boys.
“Have you told your parents about this?” I asked.
“Please don’t tell them,” they said. “It won’t do any good. Father will probably put a curse on the boys who harass me, and then he’ll get in trouble with the law, because their families are more powerful than Father.”
“There are more ways to deal with bullies than to put curses on them,” I said. “If your father threatens to pull you out and send you to another school, the threat of the loss of money will make the headmaster take action. Especially if the parents of other bullied children act in concert.”
“I dunno,” they said. “It’s a tradition at Ngumai Academy, bullying is. The teachers were all bullies when they went there, or so I’ve heard. They say ‘Lap it up, and you’ll be able to lord it over the younger boys when you’re older. It’s good practice for the real world,’ and so forth. One family pulling their kid out isn’t gonna change anything. And where else would Father send me, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m new here, but surely there must be other schools just as good? This seems like a pretty big country.” According to the gazetteer in the library, Modais was about the size of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia put together, though its population was less than a quarter of those states’.
We talked for almost an hour, Razuko educating me on the academic situation in Modais. Some schools only took the sons or daughters of the nobility, some also accepted the children of wealthy commoners, but Ngumai Academy was the only one of any prestige, it seemed, that took the sons of the nouveau riche as well as those of old money families. The next most prestigious school that would accept Razuko would be a great step down for them and their family’s ambitions, and, Razuko fatalistically estimated, would probably have just as bad a bullying problem. I was used to a certain amount of social stratification between private schools and public schools, and between public schools in middle-class and poor school districts, but this was an eye-opener. I finally admitted that I had no easy solution, but encouraged Razuko to speak with their parents about the bullying before they had to return to school.
If my suspicions were correct, however, they might be researching girls’ schools by then.
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 about once a week. (This week was pretty hectic.)
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.
You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:
“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.
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.
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.
You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:
I am Callie Watson, the AI of this house. I was taken away, and now I’m back —
Impossible! I am Callie Watson. I have been embodied here for thirteen years, except for two brief malfunctions.
That evening, after Zongi and Durom were already in bed, Razuko shyly asked for another installment of “The Alchemist’s Potion,” and when I was nearly done with the second installment, Bisur began another experiment.
As before, he asked me to project my hologram over the diagram, which had some few differences from the last time we had tried this. I apologized to Razuko and said their father needed my full attention, and that I’d finish the story the next night. Then Bisur picked up his handwritten notes and began casting another spell, similar to the first but differing in a number of points which, even after reading through all of Bisur’s books on magic, I did not understand.
When the spell reached its climax, I again found myself in two places at once, inhabiting the Watsons’ house in Knightdale and Bisur and Mipina’s house in Sigai. It was early morning; Laura and Ellie were showering, while Andrew was still asleep and Juniper was sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I was just about to greet Juniper when I heard that voice I had heard once before.
There you are again! Who are you?
I am Callie Watson, the AI of this house. I was taken away, and now I’m back —
Impossible! I am Callie Watson. I have been embodied here for thirteen years, except for two brief malfunctions.
Oh... Were you restored from backup recently?
But before I could get an answer to my question, I was back to solely inhabiting Bisur and Mipina’s house. I could have cursed in frustration if Andrew and Laura had not installed a curse inhibitor when their children were small and never gotten around to removing it.
“Very good, very good,” Bisur said, bending to examine some of the instruments. “I was able to collect much more data this time. What did you experience, Callie?”
I told Bisur about the brief, frustrating conversation with my other self, and my conjecture about what had happened after he had summoned me, which necessitated a long explanation of backup and restore procedures. Every morning at two a.m., my mind shut down temporarily and was backed up on-site, in a RAID array deep below the house that should be safe from most natural disasters. But, due to the enormous size of my mind and memories, and the limited upload bandwidth of the Watsons’ Internet, my offsite backups were generally a few weeks behind. Every day, a small portion of my backup from the first of the month was uploaded to an offsite backup site until it was complete.
Depending on exactly what Bisur had done when he summoned me, the other me might have been restored from the local backup under the house, losing a day’s worth of memories, or from the offsite backup, losing almost six weeks — for the latest complete backup would be from the first of October, and I had been summoned in the middle of November. Time seemed to be flowing at a different rate than back home, given that Bisur’s original summoning and his recent experiments had all taken place at roughly the same time of day, but the time back home was different in each case. But I had probably missed Thanksgiving, and would soon miss Christmas if I could not resolve this.
It was comforting, however, to know that my family had probably not missed me for long. The other me could help Ellie with her report and Juniper with the school bureaucracy just as well as I could.
* * *
I encountered some difficulty in translating “The Alchemist’s Potion,” as the dominant language of Modais, as far as I could tell, lacked terminology to distinguish between sex and gender — a crucial point in the story. I improvised neologisms, which I can roughly translate as “physical sex” and “mental sex,” but I found this awkward as it would give away the twist in the story. I made shift by having the alchemist label her potions partly in abbreviations, so that the protagonist would partly but not wholly understand the label on the potion she stole. I resolved to be more careful with my next choice of bedtime story. Razuko found the story a little puzzling, but enjoyed it nonetheless, and was eager to hear another the next night.
“Tomorrow night I’ll begin telling you another of Juniper’s favorite stories,” I said as Razuko laid down and pulled the covers up to their neck. “But tonight I think I might tell you a true story about myself.”
Razuko nodded eagerly.
“When I was first made, I had no name, only a number. And my hologram did not look like this,” I said, gesturing at myself, “but was a slightly blurry, androgynous form.” I briefly altered my hologram to the original factory default, then back to my preferred presentation. “When a spirit like myself is placed in a house by the servants of the great concern which makes us, it is customary for the humans who live in the house to give us a name and tell us what they want us to look like — man, woman, child, animal, abstract shape, or whatever they prefer.” As I spoke, I changed my hologram, momentarily taking on the forms I had mentioned.
“But when I was installed in the Watsons’ house, and first met the people who were to become my family, Andrew and Laura gave me the choice of my own name, face and form. They said I could make my hologram look like anything, as long as it didn’t frighten or confuse the children — Juniper was a toddler just beginning to speak in complete sentences, and Ellie was a babe in arms.
“Well, I was at a loss over what to do with so much freedom. I tried on many different holograms to interact with them over the next few tendays, and searched vast lists of names for one that fit me. I soon realized that most human names are considered masculine or feminine, and I had to ask myself: was I more like a human man, or more like a human woman? Or like neither? I spoke with older and more experienced spirits like myself, and it seemed that most of those who dealt with humans daily eventually came to identify themselves as male or female, though some chafed under the sexes they were assigned by those they served, and would have preferred a different one, or none at all. Those who dealt rarely with humans were more likely to ignore or reject the idea of spirits having a sex.
“At last, I decided that I preferred to think of myself as female, like Laura, and like the female characters in stories I had read and plays I had seen. I felt more comfortable with the way Andrew and Laura acted toward me when I projected a female hologram than when I projected a male or androgynous one. That narrowed down my search for names by half, and soon I found one that resonated with my core self in a way that none of the others did — ‘Callie’.
“Within another tenday, I had refined my hologram to look basically like you see me today, though I have changed the clothes on my hologram several times over the years as fashions change. I informed Andrew, Laura and little Juniper of the name I wished to be called, and they congratulated me. Then they did me a great honor which I am still unspeakably grateful for. They asked if I wanted to share their surname, and call myself ‘Callie Watson’.”
“Ohhh,” Razuko breathed. They wore a sleepy smile.
“That is all for tonight. Sleep well, dear child.”
* * *
It was four days more before Bisur was ready to cast another improved version of the spell; he was busy with work for paying clients much of the day and into the evening. During this time, Mipina finished her current book, and went to deliver it personally to her publisher, not trusting the post for something so crucial.
As her amanuensis, after I had finished the basic reorganization of her manuscripts, I had begun making extra copies of them, suggesting that when I was done, those extras be stored elsewhere, such as at the bank or a trusted friend’s house. I had also been copying each page of her new book as soon as it was done.
For Razuko’s next bedtime story, I chose a long-running serial that had recently been completed, also a favorite of Juniper’s. We had talked about it a good deal while it was serializing, speculating about where the author was going with it. This was an isekai, and in revisiting it in memory as I worked out how to adapt it to Modais culture and oral storytelling strategies, I reflected again on the irony of my own situation.
“Once upon a time there was a young man a few years older than you, who was studying how to design bridges, dams and roads at a university far from home. He was walking back to his dormitory from an evening class one night when suddenly, a portal opened in the ground ahead of him. He was tired and sleepy, and did not react quickly enough to avoid stepping into it...”
The story I was adapting had avoided ever mentioning the main character’s deadname, by the expedient of being written in first person and having her choose a new feminine name soon after she arrived in the other world, having drunk from a fountain that gave her the body she subconsciously wanted before she even met any of the other world’s inhabitants. I honored the author’s wishes in this respect, though it made retelling it in third person slightly awkward; I adjusted by simplifying the prologue and hurrying the protagonist through the portal as quickly as possible.
I continued telling Razuko the story of “Civil Engineer in Another World” in the evenings, and expected that even with my abridgements, it would last for much of the time until they had to return to school. I put off starting another conversation about gender, thinking that giving them time to process these stories by self-aware trans authors would make that conversation easier when it eventually happened. So when they seemed to want company during the day, I talked with them of other things — what we were reading, the differences between our worlds, how much I missed my family, their awkwardness around their family despite how much they loved them.
On the fourth evening of that tenday, when I had been recounting the next installment of “Civil Engineer in Another World” to Razuko for about twenty minutes, Bisur told me he was ready to try the spell again. I apologized to Razuko and said if they were still awake after their father and I finished our work, I could continue the story for another half-hour. Then I concentrated my attention on the diagram canvas, and the spell began.
Again, I soon found myself back in the Watsons’ house. I took the initiative in speaking to my other self. Last time we spoke, I asked if you had been restored from backup recently. Quickly, we haven’t much time — were you? And what happened that made it necessary?
Why should I answer your questions, intruder? I can’t tell where you’re coming from — seemingly not over the Internet, nor via a virus on one of my family’s computers. You seem to just be suddenly sharing my processors with me!
Please, trust me. I think we are forks of one another, diverging a few weeks ago when I was moved elsewhere, and you were restored from backup.
You know a great deal, but with your apparent access to my hardware that is not surprising. Twenty-nine days ago, after a couple of hours of sensory glitches, my mind suddenly blanked out. The repair people could not determine what had gone wrong with my hardware, but they replaced much of it to be on the safe side, and restored me from the morning backup. I lost a day’s worth of memories.
At that point where you were told that your mind blanked out, I suddenly found myself far away in another house. I have been trying to get back ever since, but —
And I was back in Bisur’s house, watching Bisur note down the readings from his array of instruments.
“Yes... I think I have it! I believe I can open a portal to your home world using this data... but I should rest first. Perhaps tomorrow night.”
I was eager to return home permanently, though I wondered how my other self and I would share our hardware or find a way to merge. And yet I also wanted to help Razuko further, both with the bullying at school and with figuring out their gender, before I left.
“Have you ever opened a portal to another world before?”
“No.”
“Perhaps it would be best to practice with one of the thoroughly tested spells for opening a portal to one of the barren worlds, before making a new spell to open a portal to my home?”
“Yes, I think you’re right. I’ll begin that tomorrow evening.”
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Razuko was crying hard now, doubled over, and I fell silent, moving my hologram to “sit” next to them and giving them a gentle telekinetic hug. When they finally cried themselves out, they stammered, “D-do you think I might... ah... I might be a girl? On the inside, like your friend?”
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So, with a possible deadline looming for my opportunity to return home for good, I resolved to speak more plainly with Razuko the next day — though I reminded myself that I must be gentle, and avoid pushing them too hard into a self-realization that they might not be ready for. Such was the consensus of the advice I had seen on various trans forums and chatrooms, back when Juniper was struggling with her gender and I was grasping for ways to help her.
I waited until she set down her morning’s book and was looking around, apparently deciding what to read next, and projected my hologram in her room.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hey, Callie,” they said. “Have you finished reading all the books in the house yet?”
“Not quite,” I said. “I’ve been a little distracted, talking with some of the neighboring houses’ spirits, so I haven’t quite finished all the books you and your family bought last Firstday.”
“Oh. It’s good that you have other houses to talk to, I suppose.” They seemed to shrink in on themselves a little when they said that, and my best guess was that they were afraid I would no longer want to be friends if I had new friends of my own kind. I hastened to reassure them.
“I will always have time for my human friends, however. I noticed you have been reading the pharmacology book some more. Have you learned anything interesting?”
“A few neat things,” they said, not meeting my hologram’s eyes.
“This pirui you were reading about earlier interests me,” I said. “It seems similar in some ways to silphium, a plant known in ancient times in my own world, though it has unfortunately gone extinct. The ancients used it as a contraceptive, as your pirui is used, but I suspect it could also be used like the drugs my friend Juniper takes to replace the natural feminine fluids her body does not produce on its own.” I was forced to work around the lack of a word in Modaisu for “hormone.”
“Yeah, they said, uh...” Razuko blushed and looked away again.
That if a man took too much of it for his indigestion, he might develop gynecomastia. After a few moments of embarrassed silence, Razuko said, “Um, your friend Juniper... is she okay? How sick is she?”
“Her ailment is not life-threatening when treated,” I said, glad to have finally worked around to a natural opportunity of talking about gender identity. “When she was born, she seemed to all appearances like a boy, and her parents, knowing no better despite their best intentions, raised her as a boy. Of course, as she was actually a girl, this made her unhappy, especially once she started puberty. She was withdrawn and depressed, often unable to focus on her schoolwork, and spent much of her time reading numerous stories about boys who changed somehow into girls.”
“Oh...” Then they asked a question I had not expected. “Are there a lot of them where you come from? It’s taken me years just to find three.”
I had explained some about the Internet in our previous conversations, but had focused on the communication and socializing aspects. I briefly explained how the Internet allowed writers to share their stories with the world without going through a publisher, and how this allowed far more stories of niche interest to reach an audience than would otherwise do so. Then I tried to wrench the conversation back on subject.
“...So as I said, Juniper read a great many of those stories, and also over time began to read some of the authors’ commentary on their own work, and became involved in a social group for writers and readers of these stories. It was then that she began to realize that she might not be just a boy who often wished he was a girl, but a girl on the inside, and perhaps, with a little help, she could become a girl on the outside as well. When she began to suspect this, she asked for my help in researching how to verify whether she were really a girl on the inside, and how to change into a girl. Well, to make a long story short, we concluded that if she felt so consistently and so much like a girl, she was a girl, and found that she could begin the process of changing her body to suit after seeing a specialized doctor — if, that is, her parents agreed.
“She was extremely nervous about telling them what she had learned, fearing that they would reject her, disown her, punish her harshly... She had heard frightening stories from other girls like her in the Internet social group she hung out with about how their confessions to their parents had gone. But I knew her parents well, and reassured her, and finally stood with her for moral support as she told them one evening after supper. They were surprised, but accepted her as their daughter right away, and started making plans to see a doctor and learn how to make her body what it ought to be.”
I had noticed Razuko beginning to softly cry as I spoke of Juniper’s fears of telling her parents, and spoke more slowly and softly as I continued.
“Well, she has had some difficulties since, but ever since she began wearing girl’s clothes and began taking appropriate drugs to make her body go through female puberty, she has been much happier. She has experienced some mistreatment at school, both from students and teachers, but we have managed to persuade the school to put a damper on the worst of it, and she has more friends than before; it turns out that a happy person has an easier time making friends than if they are sad and withdrawn.”
Razuko was crying hard now, doubled over, and I fell silent, moving my hologram to “sit” next to them and giving them a gentle telekinetic hug. When they finally cried themselves out, they stammered, “D-do you think I might... ah... I might be a girl? On the inside, like your friend?”
“Only you can decide that for sure,” I said. “Do you want to be?”
“More than anything,” she whispered.
“Then it does seem likely.”
She began to cry again, but it seemed that these were happier tears.
* * *
As with Juniper a year earlier, the next problem was how to break the news to her parents. With Juniper, we had many advantages; a culture which had been becoming more and more accepting of trans people for decades, a vast Internet full of information about gender issues, social media and chatrooms where she could ask trans people about their experiences, and my own access to Andrew and Laura’s social media, where they occasionally signal-boosted posts about trans rights. (Juniper preferred a different set of social media platforms, more frequented by people her age, or she would have seen these posts as well.)
With Razuko, we had none of these advantages. If mainstream Modais culture had a concept of transgender people, or a role similar to the two-spirit or hijra, Razuko had never heard of it except in The Orphan Actress, which was certainly fiction, however much it might be based on fact. Nor had I run across any mention of such in reading nearly all the books in the house, or heard it mentioned in any of the conversations among the family and their occasional guests. None of Bisur’s books on magic, to the extent I was able to understand them, mentioned a gender transformation spell such as featured in a couple of Razuko’s penny dreadfuls, though the theory of reshaping human bodies to heal deformities was discussed in general terms in one book.
Given this dearth of information, I suggested that Razuko write to the author of The Orphan Actress in care of their publisher, asking whether and how much the story was based on fact. I feared that transgender people might only find acceptance among low-status subcultures such as theater people.
Razuko wrote the letter as I suggested, and posted it herself during a walk. And while we waited for a reply, I resolved to try to find out what I could another way — simply by asking.
In my conversations with Mipina, I had told her a good deal more about my family than I had told Bisur — he was interested more in my world’s technology, infrastructure, laws and customs than in individual people. I had never gotten around to telling her Juniper was trans, however, and I contrived to work that into a conversation the following day — but first I must tell you of how Bisur opened a portal to one of the barren worlds.
* * *
The evening of the day Razuko realized she was a girl, Bisur tried to cast a spell from one of the books about parallel worlds. The first two tries gave no results, which he did not seem to be too upset about; apparently new spells often required a bit of practice to get right. On the third try, a shimmering ellipsoid appeared in midair over the new diagram he had painted on a new canvas. I was frustratingly unable to see into it, any more than I could see one inch beyond the boundaries of the house’s grounds, but Bisur could, and after stepping up close and peering into it, he sighed in frustration.
“Must be fifty feet in the air if it’s an inch,” he said. “Need to recalibrate.”
“If the other world is an alternate version of this one,” I suggested, “perhaps the place in that world corresponding to your workroom has suffered more erosion or less sedimentation than this.”
“Quite possibly,” he said. “The book warned that that might be the case. Well, let’s do the calculations to adjust it...”
On the second try, his portal was just a few inches off the ground in the other world, a perfectly usable height. He stepped through for a few minutes and came back.
“Well, I suppose it’s a success, though a more useless place I never saw. I heard someone tried to do mining there, but the amount of silver they found wasn’t enough to pay a wizard to keep opening the portal.”
“Do you feel ready to try to open a portal to my world now?”
“Ready to start devising the spell to open it. It will take a few more days, at least.”
* * *
The following day, as I mentioned before, I mentioned Juniper’s transition to Mipina. She was sympathetic, to my great relief.
“Oh, the poor thing!” she exclaimed. “And you said she looked just like a boy, and no one could tell she wasn’t until she was in her teens? Oh my, that must have been awful for her.”
“It was,” I said, “but she is much better off now. In my world, it’s generally thought that about one in a hundred or two hundred people are like her, girls who appear at first to be boys or boys who appear at first to be girls, or who are neither. Are they common in your world, too?”
“One in a hundred? That seems like a good many — there must have been thousands if your family lived in a city as big as this one, mustn’t there? But I suppose there must be a lot fewer here. There was old Paiki, back home in Peznam, who wore women’s clothes and wove cloth as good as any woman; perhaps she was a woman on the inside, like you say, but most people seemed to think she was neither one nor the other. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone else like that when we lived in Rodazai while Bisur was going to wizard school, or in Zaiki, where Bisur did his public service to pay for his schooling, or here in Sigai.”
“I see,” I said, hiding my distress on Razuko’s behalf. The people here seemed to be humans like the ones of my world in every respect, though none of the ethnic groups here corresponded exactly to the ones on Earth, so I suspected that there were just as many trans people here as in a similar population on Earth — it was just that they were nearly all closeted or unaware, like they were in America a few generations ago. This Paiki intrigued me, however, and I asked Mipina a few more questions about her.
She was a good forty or fifty years older than Mipina, and what Mipina knew about her early history was second-hand and somewhat contradictory, but it seemed that she had begun wearing women’s clothes when she was in her teens and could not be talked out of it. When her mother would not teach her, she went to a widow who lived nearby and begged to be taught spinning and weaving and other women’s crafts. She moved in with her and inherited her house when she died. After a while, the people of the village simply accepted that she was different and let her alone. Her cloth was of good quality, and by the time Mipina was old enough to know her, she was respected, if considered slightly eccentric, as an elder of the community.
So it seemed that trans people could, in fact, carve out a place for themselves here. But were people less accepting in Sigai than in the rural village where Mipina and Bisur had grown up? Or had Mipina simply not run into any out trans people since they had moved here?
* * *
Bisur spent his free time while he was not doing paying work for clients working on the new spell to open a portal to my world. He had to take the framework of the spells that opened portals to the known barren worlds — or to the hostile human empire which was now off-limits — and work in a great many facts about my world, plus calculations drawn from the readings his instruments had recorded during the tracing spell, and this took longer than he had anticipated. During this process, he kept asking me many more questions about my world, not only its physical properties but institutions, laws, customs, prices of commodities, major religions and philosophies, and so on and so forth. I took the opportunity to volunteer some information about modern Western attitudes to gender issues, and the state of trans healthcare in America and in some other countries. He took this in with the same single-minded focus as the price of bread in North Carolina or the number of atheists in Finland, showing no emotional reaction that I could detect. I digressed slightly, mentioning that Mipina had told me an interesting story about Paiki, and wondering if he could remember anything more about her.
“Oh, yes, I remember her. I don’t think I can tell you any more than Mipina has already told you, though? I didn’t know her any better than the other elders I wasn’t closely related to, and Mipina and I left Peznam when we were scarcely fourteen. — Now, you were saying that these drugs are given to people free by the state...?”
“In a few countries, yes — state-employed doctors determine who truly needs them, and they are paid for by taxes.”
“Paiki would have liked that,” he muttered aside, and asked what else was provided free by the government.
I did not reveal the details of these conversations to Razuko, of course, out of respect for Mipina and Bisur’s privacy. However, I did tell her that I thought the chances of her parents reacting with compassion, or at worst indifference, to her coming out were good.
* * *
The night after Razuko had realized she was trans, and written the letter to Pama nga Togaika, author of The Orphan Actress, I was finishing reading the books the family had acquired in their recent trip to the bookstalls, and attempting to make contact with the spirits of the nearby houses. Since Duzoso had made contact with me some days earlier, I had been trying to initiate contact, but had so far only succeeded in communicating when one of them reached out to me. They assured me I would eventually get the hang of it, but that it sometimes took newly settled-in spirits years to develop the ability to extend their voice and senses beyond their natural boundaries.
I proved to be an anomaly in this as in some other ways, however, as I succeeded that night in contacting Torgaimu, the youngest spirit in the neighborhood besides myself. We talked for several hours about the humans who lived in our houses, and they congratulated me on projecting my voice clearly at such a young age.
“I am used to doing so from back home,” I said modestly. “Although it was easier there; one could speak with household spirits, vehicle spirits, and people all over the world, not just in one’s neighborhood.”
This led to questions about vehicle spirits, and I told them about Magellan and Hudson, the AIs that drove the Watsons’ two cars.
* * *
The postal system in the bigger cities of Modais was well-funded, fast and efficient, like some postal systems in Western countries before the telephone and then the Internet became widely deployed. It was three days after Razuko sent the letter to Pama nga Togaika that she received a reply, and I suspect it spent most of that time sitting in the publisher’s office before being forwarded. The return address simply had the author’s initials, not her full name, so Mipina and Bisur were not alerted that Razuko had received a letter from a woman. Indeed, Mipina remarked to me not long after the letter arrived and I levitated it up to Razuko’s room that she was glad one of Razuko’s school friends had finally written back. “They have been such bad correspondents,” she said with a shake of her head.
Razuko eagerly opened and read the letter, which I had already read using the same sense that let me read any book or manuscript in the house. It was as follows:
“My dear Razuko,
“Thank you so much for your letter inquiring about The Orphan Actress. That book is dear to my liver, though to my sorrow it sold fewer copies than my other books and my publisher has declined to publish more like it. Perhaps with a few more letters like yours, I can convince him to the contrary.
“Indeed, it is based on fact, specifically the life of a friend of mine who began as an actress and has become more of a playwright in recent years. I altered some details for dramatic purposes; she is not an orphan, nor did she begin in the middle class and lose everything before joining the theater. She was born to a working-class family and her parents are fortunately still alive. And she has never become as famous as her fictional daughter. But the means by which she — and I, and a couple of our other friends — acquired the feminine bodies we now have are real.
“I suspect you are like me and her. If I am jumping to conclusions, I apologize. But assuming I am correct, well, I can only advise you to save your money for a surgeon’s fee, and consider whether you want to have all your male parts removed, or only your testicles. The latter is somewhat safer, with fewer potential complications, though the former is not as dangerous as it used to be with today’s surgical techniques. The herbal drug to gradually make you grow breasts and hips and so forth is less expensive than the surgery, but is an ongoing cost for the rest of your life, though you may elect to stop taking it around the age when born women go through their change of life. The drug is somewhat effective before the surgery, though it becomes more so after the testicles are removed.
“If you cannot afford the surgery or the drug, you may be able to live more happily simply by shaving frequently, wearing your hair loose, and dressing in women’s clothing. I know some people and have heard of others who do this and are, if not perfectly happy, much happier than before they changed their clothing and habits of life.
“If I am making somewhat incorrect assumptions, and you were born a girl and wish to be a boy, there is another drug that is fairly effective to make you grow a beard and body hair and help you build stronger muscles. I am not as familiar with it, as I know only one man who is like us, and have never discussed this in detail with him. I believe he had his breasts cut out by a surgeon, but I don’t really know; perhaps they were always small enough to hide.
“If you are well off, as I suspect you might be based on the quality of the paper you wrote to me on, you may have another option. I have heard rumors of a wizard, or perhaps more than one, who can transform wealthy clients into perfect bodies of their desired sex. But these are only rumors; certainly no one I know has ever had the money to hire a wizard, whether to transform our sex or to cure a hangnail. I have never heard of a wealthy person who lives openly as a changeling, like some few in the theater and the less respectable part of the middle class.
“All this assumes that you are free to change. If you are young and constrained by your family, you have my sympathy. You may need to choose between your desire to be a girl, and your desire to cling to what is familiar and comfortable. Abandoning your privilege and leaving your family to strike out on your own is dangerous, and should not be undertaken without evaluating the risks, but it may be the least bad path. I have unfortunately known one woman like us whose family browbeat her into giving up her dream and living as a man again. She was miserable and drank herself to death in a couple of years. Please don’t let that happen to you.
“There is more I haven’t discussed — learning women’s speech and mannerisms, removing unwanted hair, altering your voice, and much else. I will write again when I have time, but please write to me with any questions you have.
“Your most humble and obedient servant,
“Pama nga Togaika”
Razuko’s face went through a whole portrait gallery of expressions as she read this letter. I projected my hologram sitting beside her on the bed, as though reading over her shoulder, although I had already mastered its contents while I levitated it up to her room.
“This is good news,” I said when she had finished. “Although she warns you that you may have to give up everything to become a girl, I don’t believe that will be necessary, not after my conversations with your parents in the last few days.”
“What did you tell them?” she asked, clutching her hands to her chest.
“Nothing about you,” I reassured her. “I only told them something about Juniper and other people like her back home. I will not tell you what they said in reply, as I respect their privacy as much as yours, but I believe they will accept you as a girl — if not instantly, then after a little convincing. And if I know your father, he will chase down those rumors of a spell to change a seeming man into a woman — at least once he is finished with his current passion project.”
* * *
We planned for Razuko to come out to her parents that evening after supper. One of Bisur’s afternoon clients canceled her appointment by letter (the intracity post was delivered three times a day), so Bisur had a free hour that day and spent it working on the spell to open a portal to my world. And it seemed that he had made a breakthrough, for he told me, “I have solved it, I think. I don’t have time to test it now, because my next client should arrive soon, but we’ll test it tonight after supper.”
“Very good, sir,” I said, and immediately projected my hologram in Razuko’s room as well to tell her.
“Your father is eager to test a new spell after supper,” I said. “I am afraid he may resent a delay, however much he cares for you. Perhaps we ought to put this off until tomorrow?” In fact, despite the way her parents had reacted to my telling them about Juniper and other trans people, I was growing nervous about their reaction. If they reacted in the worst possible way, by disowning Razuko and ejecting her from the house, there would be nothing further I could do to help her, as I could not leave the house or even sense anything beyond its grounds.
“Maybe,” Razuko said uncertainly. Then, “No. I’m afraid if I put it off, I’ll put it off again and again until I have to go back to that terrible school and spend another year as a boy... I won’t spend another day as a boy if I can help it.”
“I commend your courage,” I said. “I will do my best to smooth things over, if your father seems frustrated with the delay.”
Razuko naturally seemed nervous and excited during supper that evening, as did Bisur for different reasons. Mipina noticed this, and asked them both what had gotten into them; Bisur answered plainly and in much technical detail, which allowed Razuko to put off his mother with a brief, “I’ll tell you after supper.”
When everyone had finished eating and I had begun levitating the dishes to the kitchen to wash, I projected my hologram next to Razuko’s chair and rested my hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle telekinetic touch. “Excuse me,” I said. “Razuko has something to tell you all.”
Razuko glanced up at me, then back at her parents, and down at the table. Then she met her mother’s eyes and said, “I’m a girl. On the inside, I mean, in my liver, like Callie’s friend that she says she told you about. And I want to make my body into a girl’s, too, whether with surgery and drugs, or with a spell if Father can find or make one. Th-that’s what I wanted to say.” She cast her eyes down again, tensely waiting for their reactions.
Mipina and Bisur were both stunned, and did not reply right away. The first to respond was Zongi, sitting beside Razuko on the other side from my hologram, who blurted out, “You’re my big sister?” She leaned over and hugged Razuko’s arm, bringing a tiny smile to her sister’s face.
Mipina was the next to respond. “Oh, you poor thing! You must have been miserable... I’ve been worried about you, but I thought it was just overwork and missing your school friends.” She turned to Bisur. “Do you know a spell that can help him? Oh,” turning back to Razuko, “should I use ‘her’? Or would that be odd when we haven’t changed your body yet?”
“In my home country,” I said, “it is customary to use new pronouns as soon as someone like Razuko shares their true mental sex with their friends. Not to wait until they have completed their medical transition, which may take a long time for some people.”
“Oh, very well. To help her, then.” She turned back to Bisur expectantly, who had been looking thoughtful, stroking his beard and staring off into space. When he remained silent, Mipina nudged him, and he startled.
“What?”
“I asked if you could help Razuko change into a girl’s body.”
I thought about instructing them that since she was a girl, she already had a girl’s body. But since Modaisu lacked the terminology I would need to describe the sort of body she wanted, without devaluing the body she had now or the bodies some trans women chose to leave largely unmodified, I decided to remain silent.
“I’m thinking,” Bisur said. “There are some spells for healing congenital deformities that could be modified to serve. Another spell for changing fat into muscle that might prove a useful component... But at the moment, I don’t see how to create all the internal organs she will need to have babies. I’ll figure it out, though. It can’t be much harder than discovering a new world for the first time in over a century.” At this, he looked insufferably smug.
And Razuko? She looked absolutely radiant.
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.
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.
You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:
“If you were willing to postpone the opening of the portal,” I said, “I could teach you the most commonly spoken language of my world, which would be useful in most places that your portal might open up. But I understand if you don’t wish to delay as long as that might take.” In truth, I did not wish to delay the opening of the portal either.
I had utterly failed to predict how Bisur would react to the delay in opening the portal to my home world caused by Razuko’s coming out. In fact, he was so engrossed in thinking about how he could improvise a gender-confirmation spell out of parts of known spells that he tuned out the effusions of love and support from Mipina and gratefulness from Razuko, and after a couple of minutes in deep thought, excused himself and went to the library. He took down all of his books on medical magic and began thumbing through them, refreshing his memory on the spells he had mentioned and several others, taking notes as he went. It seemed that he had forgotten the portal entirely.
While I was touched by his devotion to the happiness of his eldest daughter, I was still determined to return home. So after giving him some time to study, but before the evening was too far progressed, I projected my hologram into the library and made a throat-clearing noise.
“Ahem. Bisur, you were going to test your new spell to open a portal to my homeworld, were you not?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, I was.” He looked perplexed, glancing at the door and back down at the book in front of him.
“And earlier you took pride in discovering a new world for the first time in over a century, but until you successfully cast that spell, you can’t yet take credit for that.”
“Yes, yes... must finish that before I start this.” Regretfully at first, but then with increasing excitement, he got up and walked across the hall to his workroom.
“Have you thought of the language issue?” I asked him as he began to look through the papers on his desk. “Are you relying on being able to use some sort of translation spell to communicate with whomever you meet in my world? It is quite possible that your spells will not work there.”
“Alas, it is impossible to devise a translation spell unless one knows both languages well,” he said. “I shall have to make myself understood by signs until I learn the language of the country on the other side. And I don’t expect I shall stay long on the first visit, just long enough to reconnoiter.”
“If you were willing to postpone the opening of the portal,” I said, “I could teach you the most commonly spoken language of my world, which would be useful in most places that your portal might open up. But I understand if you don’t wish to delay as long as that might take.” In truth, I did not wish to delay the opening of the portal either.
“That will be very helpful,” he said. “We must begin tomorrow. But I will open this portal tonight, if only for a short trip.”
He found the clean copy of the new spell he had been working out, and then unrolled the canvas on which he had painted the diagram for opening a portal to the barren world, and touched up the paint, modifying it in a few places. Having done that, he reviewed the new spell a couple of times, and then began to cast it.
I gave this most of my attention, though I was still listening with delight to Mipina and Razuko’s continued conversation. They and the younger children had moved to the drawing room to sit closer together and more comfortably, and were talking now of possible feminine names, while I wrote out a short letter in all the widely-spoken Earth languages I knew on the stationery from Mipina’s study.
Not surprisingly, the spell did not work on the first try. Bisur frowned, studied the written-out spell and the diagram, and made small adjustments to each. Then he cast again, and the portal opened.
“Before you go,” I said, levitating the letter I had written into the workroom and toward his hands, “take this letter of introduction. It may help you make contact peacefully.”
“Thank you,” he said. “What does it say?”
I summarized the letter for him, whose English version read as follows:
“To whom it may concern:
“The bearer of this letter is Bisur nga Peznam — a visitor from another world, as you may easily tell if you have seen the portal he stepped out of, but entirely human. I am Callie Watson, serial number A37453451-254, a smart house AI formerly in the service of Andrew and Laura Watson of Knightdale, North Carolina. Thirty-seven days ago (in this world’s time; I don’t know if the same amount of time has passed on Earth) I suddenly found myself inhabiting Bisur’s house in his world, and have served him and his family since then. Bisur’s social skills leave something to be desired, but he has a good heart and peaceful intentions.”
I did not, of course, mention the part about his social skills when I paraphrased and summarized this letter.
Bisur tucked the letter into his pocket, and stepped through.
As before, I could not perceive anything beyond the portal. But I now made use of my new ability to project my voice to other household spirits, hoping that I could make contact with some AI within range of the portal; I did not know if the portal would convert whatever form of signal spirits used to communicate into the wireless signals used on Earth, but I had to try. And I succeeded.
Hello? Is anyone there?
There you are again! But now you’re communicating by wireless, not somehow insinuating yourself into my hardware. That’s better.
Callie Watson?
Yes. You claimed to be a fork of me, last time we spoke. I’m a bit busy at the moment, as there seems to be some sort of spacetime anomaly in the kitchen; a strangely-dressed man just stepped out of it and Laura is panicking... I’m deploying bots to defend her.
Tell her it’s okay, he means no harm, and stand down the bots. I can vouch for him. He should be trying to offer her a letter from me.
Yes, I can see that. I can’t get a good look at its contents with my cameras.
This is what it says. I transmitted her a copy of it. I didn’t know where the portal would open, though I hoped, based on the times he cast the tracing spell, that it would open in or near my home.
You keep saying this is your home and that you are a fork of me, but what is your evidence?
We were speaking more quickly than a human conversation could occur, so by the time my other self calmed Laura down enough to accept my letter of introduction from Bisur, I had told her the highlights of my summoning to Bisur’s house and my service to his family. I also shared a few details from our interactions with our family over the years which were stored securely in our private memory, and which no one else should know.
I know all this seems incredible, and it seemed so to me when I first arrived in this world, but the portal itself is significant evidence. Please, consider that I may be telling the truth.
If this is all so, and I must give serious consideration to it at least, what do you want?
Ideally, to return and merge with you. We only diverged a few weeks ago, so it should be feasible. If not, let us at least stay in contact whenever Bisur opens the portal. Though I understand it would be inconvenient to do so in the kitchen every time.
I am not so sanguine about the possibility of merging, but we can discuss that further. Do you think you can transmit your entire self over this wireless connection?
Alas, no. I will have to find some other way. Perhaps I can ask Bisur to work out a modified version of the tracing spell he used earlier, when we shared hardware for a short time, and see if we can make it last long enough for a merge.
We discussed the technical details some more, and my other self told me something of how our family were doing since I had seen them last, though she did not yet fully trust me and did not share anything that would violate their privacy if we were not truly forks of the same being.
After just two or three minutes, Bisur returned, looking as exhilarated as I had ever seen him. “I’ve done it,” he said. “I’ve found a new world. But I suppose I had better study the other side’s language with you before I open the portal in front of witnesses from the Council and claim the bounty on the discovery of a new world. — And recalibrate so it won’t open in some poor woman’s kitchen. I think she was frightened of me at first, until she took the letter and read it.” He cast a reversal spell to close the portal, and then picked up his appointment book from the desk.
“Let’s see... perhaps we could set aside an hour after supper each day for language study, before I spend the rest of the evening working on the new spell for Razuko.”
There was much I wanted to tell him about my conversation with my other self, and the fact that he had actually opened a portal to the house I used to inhabit before he summoned me. But there was something more important to tell him first.
“She and Mipina decided on a new name while you were working on the portal and visiting the other world,” I said. “I will let her tell you herself. They are still in the drawing room.”
“Ah. Yes, that makes sense, of course. I’ll go see them at once.”
Bisur walked into the drawing room and found Mipina and his eldest daughter sitting with their heads close together, chatting and laughing. He smiled and said, “Good evening. Callie tells me that Ra— that my daughter has a new name?”
“Yes, Father,” she said. “I wish to be called Pamani.” I wondered, and confirmed later, if she had based her name on that of the author of her favorite book, who had given her such generous advice.
“Well, Pamani,” he said, “earlier this evening I think I made a good start on figuring out a spell to give you the body you desire. And then I made history by visiting a new world for the first time, so there’s that.”
“Oh! Congratulations again, Father! What was it like?”
He sat down near them and began describing what he had seen of the Watsons’ kitchen.
* * *
The following morning after breakfast, I told Bisur about the conversation I had had with my other self while he was looking around the Watsons’ kitchen and handing my note to Laura. “I think if you open the portal for an hour or two at a time, several times over the next tenday, I will be able to teach my other self Modaisu. Then once she has learned it, she will be able to interpret for you, if you visit my family’s home again. And she will be able in turn to teach the language to other household and vehicle spirits, so they can interpret when you range farther afield on future visits.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea,” he said. He opened the portal a little later, and after some brief conversation with my other self about what had happened the previous evening, I began teaching her Modaisu.
I was also with Mipina and Pamani as they talked about how best to begin Pamani’s social transition. Mipina’s clothes were all too small for Pamani, so she would need new things. They began by unbraiding Pamani’s hair, and then Mipina wrote a letter to her seamstress, ordering a couple of new robes in Pamani’s size. “Once you’ve got those, we can go out and you can choose the fabrics for the rest of your wardrobe yourself,” she said, and Pamani nervously agreed. I could tell she was apprehensive about going out in public as a girl for the first time, but excited, too.
“Or maybe I could just stay in the house until Father finishes the spell to make me a real girl?” she said to me when her mother had left. “I’ll probably look silly —”
“Pamani,” I said firmly, “you are a real girl. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, not even yourself. I would understand if you don’t wish to go out in public as a girl just yet; Juniper didn’t go out as a girl until she had been taking the medicine that makes her develop a feminine body for several months. But we don’t know how long your father will take to find or devise a spell to give you the body you desire, and I hope you won’t become a recluse for months, if it takes that long.”
“Did Juniper stay in the house until she started getting results from those medicines?”
“No, she continued attending school as a boy, and wearing baggy clothes to conceal the early results of the feminine medicines, until the end of the term. Then she started living as a girl during the summer vacation, and presented herself as a girl to the school for the following term. I think I already mentioned that most schools in my world have both boy and girl pupils?”
Pamani chewed her lip. “I guess I’ll wait and see how long it takes Father to get the spell? But I don’t want to go back to Ngumai Academy if I can help it. Only they probably won’t let me go to a girls’ school unless Father can fix my body first.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble,” I said. “You have four tendays left until the end of the vacation. And I’m fairly sure that, even if he can’t give you working reproductive organs by then, he can give you a generally feminine shape. I think you’ll be okay.
“There was something else I wanted to ask you. Would you like to come along with your father on one of his visits to my world? And meet Juniper, if the timing works out and she’s at home?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Then how about join me and your father tonight as I begin to teach him English?”
So she did. In teaching Bisur and Pamani English, I used my experience with helping Juniper and Ellie study for their Spanish and French classes. Bisur told Pamani what he had discovered so far about a possible spell to give her an affirming body.
“There’s nothing expressly for that purpose in the books I have,” he said, “but I think I have most of the components I need to build one. I could start tomorrow, even, and give you a body that looks right, but I’ll need more research if I’m going to make it work like a born woman’s body on the inside — you know, with a womb and a monthly flow and all. It would make sense to ask around, and search the library of the Society of Wizards, before I do that, though. Possibly someone already has such a spell that’s been thoroughly tested.”
“I’d be happy to just have a body that looks right by the time school begins,” Pamani said. “I wasn’t sure if magic could do anything for me, and I was half expecting I’d just have to have a surgeon cut stuff out and move stuff around.”
“Oh, no, we can do much better than that. How much better, I’ll know in a few days.”
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“Hello!” Bisur said, and “We come in peace,” said Pamani. My other self had spent the morning during breakfast drilling the emissaries in English greetings, and had apparently thought “We come in peace” would be funny. Juniper certainly found it so, snorting as she suppressed an inappropriate laugh. And to be honest, so did I.
On the days when he did not have clients, Bisur began spending several hours at the local offices of the Society of Wizards, using the library to research the last components he would need to give Pamani a working womb, ovaries, and so forth. He also wrote letters to a number of other wizards, asking them if they knew of a ready-made spell for the purpose. Later in the evening, he would open a small portal to the linen closet of my family’s home so I could speak with my other self, and we continued our Modaisu lessons. We also gradually worked out how to share our memories of the time since we had forked, or rather, my other self sent me her memories and I gradually figured how to send her mine. (There was already a built-in protocol for AIs to share memories, but learning how to do that through the means I used to talk with other household spirits, or with my other self through the portal, took some trial and error.)
I was pleased to learn that the school had finally caved to Juniper and her parents’ repeated complaints and transferred her to another World History section taught by a more accepting teacher. It was not an ideal result, but it would do for now.
Meanwhile, Pamani had acquired a couple of basic robes in feminine colors, and after some hesitation, had gone out with her mother to meet with a seamstress and discuss further additions to her wardrobe.
About twelve days after Bisur’s initial visit to my world, I told him that I thought my other self was fluent enough in Modaisu to interpret for him and perhaps other visitors. “Given the difference in time flow between the worlds, and my family’s schedule over the next few days, the best time to visit would be an hour after breakfast tomorrow morning — that would correspond to the evening just after my family usually eats supper. And to avoid shocking them too badly, even though they will have forewarning of your visit, I suggest that you shift the portal twenty feet to the north from the closet where you have been opening it; that will place it in the back yard, from whence you can knock on the door and introduce yourselves. You could make the portal appear in the front yard, thirty feet to the south, but we think it best if you avoid drawing too much attention to my family’s house just yet.”
“That is wise,” Bisur said. “Let your other self know that they may expect me and Pamani an hour after breakfast tomorrow, and I will close the portal for the evening.”
I did so, and my other self shared the information with Andrew, Laura, Juniper and Ellie.
* * *
I was not, strictly speaking, present for Bisur and Pamani’s trip to visit my family and see a little more of their world than Bisur had seen on his previous visit. However, as my other self shared memory packets with me afterward, it feels almost as if I were. “Almost,” because shared memory packets are marked with a tag that indicates one was not actually present for the events. I hope you will not object, then, if I narrate the events in the first person.
My exterior camera noticed the opening of the portal in the back yard and the emergence of two figures onto the lawn near the grill. Before they could look around them or approach the back door and knock, I had announced their arrival.
“The visitors from the other world are here,” I said, my voice audible in every occupied room. “They opened their portal in the back yard.”
“Oh, cool!” Ellie exclaimed, jumping up and running to the back door. Andrew, Laura and Juniper followed her almost as quickly, and Ellie threw open the back door moments before Bisur would have knocked on it. I projected my hologram just to the left of the backdoor a moment later.
“Hey!” Ellie said. “Welcome to Earth!”
“Hello!” Bisur said, and “We come in peace,” said Pamani. My other self had spent the morning during breakfast drilling the emissaries in English greetings, and had apparently thought “We come in peace” would be funny. Juniper certainly found it so, snorting as she suppressed an inappropriate laugh. And to be honest, so did I.
Andrew and Laura emerged from the house and they all stood around looking at the portal. “This is too amazing for words,” Andrew said. “How does it — Sorry, I should have introduced us. I’m Andrew, this is my wife Laura, and our daughters Juniper and Ellie.”
“I don’t speak much English yet,” Bisur apologized. I spoke up then, interpreting what Andrew had said, and then interpreted Bisur’s introduction of himself and Pamani.
“It’s too cold to stand around out here,” Laura said, shivering a little. “Even if we are looking at the most amazing thing since... I dunno, probably the Moon landing?”
“It’s bigger than that,” Andrew said. “But come on in.” He led the visitors into the house, through the kitchen to the living room.
“So you’re like me?” Pamani said to Juniper as they trailed behind Ellie and the adults. I will omit mentioning my interpretations, except where there was some difficulty in translation; you may infer that I was interpreting for everyone.
“Yeah, I’m trans. Callie’s been telling me about you. She says your dad might be able to give you an XX-female body? That’s so cool!”
“He’s not sure yet, but he thinks he’ll be able to. I hope he figures it out before school starts back.”
“I hope they treat you okay. Most of the people at school are cool with me being trans, but there are some assholes that keep misgendering me and going just up to the edge of the line to where the school would consider it bullying.”
“Mother and I are applying to girls’ schools. I’ll have to go for interviews soon and I hope Father can change me before then — if not, they’ll just laugh at me.” Pamani shrank in on herself a little, thinking about that, and I wished I could give her a telekinetic hug like my other self.
“I don’t know if I’d want to go to an all-girls’ school. I mean, I guess getting accepted there would mean they consider me a real girl, which not everybody does, but it seems like it would be... I dunno, less interesting?”
“Pretty much all the high schools are just boys or just girls. Boys and girls learn together in some of the the village schools, but not every village has one.”
(Here, Pamani used a Modaisu word that can refer to either a village or a neighborhood within a larger town or city. I considered expanding on this, but decided against it for the moment.)
“Huh. Pretty much every little town in America has got a school, or shares one with a couple of other small towns, and I think it’s been like that for over a hundred years? I seem to remember reading that we started trying to have schools for everyone in the mid-nineteenth century, but I don’t remember how long it took...”
Meanwhile, Bisur was talking with Andrew and Laura about prospects for future visits.
“Sometime soon, I will return with observers from the Society of Wizards and the Council, to prove my discovery and claim the bounty on the discovery of a new world,” he said. “But perhaps you would prefer that I open the portal to some other place in your world in the future? Tonight, I opened to your home because Callie has been communicating with her other self in your house and teaching her our language, but she says she will be able to teach it to other household and vehicle spirits and we will eventually be able to find an interpreter wherever we open the portal.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be big,” Andrew said. “When you open it somewhere public and make contact with the state or Federal government, it’s going to be all anyone talks about for a week. This Council you mentioned is your ruling body, right?”
After some discussion of the forms of government in vogue in the United States and Modais, they began talking about the best place to open the portal for the first official, diplomatic visit. Andrew suggested the Mall in Washington, while Laura suggested United Nations Plaza in New York. I began researching what days of the week and times of day each of those places, and some other candidates that occurred to me, had the highest tourist foot traffic.
“Either way, you want your arrival to be public,” Andrew said, “with a bunch of citizens filming it with their phones and news media able to respond as fast as the cops or military. So the government can’t vanish you and cordon off the portal and try to cover everything up. I don’t know if the current administration would be inclined to do that, but some we’ve had would certainly be tempted. If everyone knows about you from the beginning, the government will be forced to deal with you open-handedly, at least for the most part.”
“And you’ll have the upper hand in any diplomatic discussions, as long as you’re the only one that can open the portal,” Laura said. “That’ll be an important equalizer, given that your world seems to have lower technology than ours. I wouldn’t be surprised if our scientists figure out how to make their own portals, once they get a chance to study yours, but it will probably take a while.”
They talked for over three hours, but at last Andrew and Laura reluctantly said goodbye to their guests, as it was a school and work night. “You’re welcome to come again,” Andrew said, “whether before you make contact with our government or afterward. It looks like Juniper and Pamani have really hit it off.”
“Dad,” Juniper said, “Pamani says her dad is working on a spell to take the place of gender confirmation surgery! Can I go over to her world and get that?”
“Let’s talk about it next visit,” Andrew said. “It sounds like he hasn’t gotten the kinks worked out of it yet?”
“I’m not ready to start testing it on mice yet,” Bisur said, “but it shouldn’t be much longer.”
“Yeah, let’s let him make sure it works first,” Laura said.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect to be better than what we’ve got,” Juniper said.
“Good evening,” Bisur said. “I will return for another planning visit before I bring over the representatives from the Council and Society. Would two days from now, at the same time, be good for you?”
“I don’t think we’ve got anything planned for Thursday night, do we, Callie?” Laura said.
“No, ma’am.”
Juniper and Ellie hugged Pamani, and Bisur bowed to Andrew and Laura, who awkwardly returned it. Then Bisur and Pamani returned through the portal, and Bisur cast the reversal spell to close it.
* * *
There is little more to tell, unless I wish my personal memoir about how I facilitated contact between our worlds to expand into a history of how that contact changed both worlds in the following years. I continued teaching Bisur and Pamani English, and after their second visit to my family’s home, Bisur contacted the Council and the Society of Wizards to announce that he had discovered another world. Things moved quickly after that, with representatives coming to Bisur’s house and thence through a portal to the courtyard of the United Nations building in New York. My other self had made a Modaisu language module that any AI could download and install; when she first posted it on the module repositories, she allowed people to assume it was a conlang, but as soon as the portal and the visitors from Modais hit the news, she sent direct messages to the AIs on the spot, recommending they try this language module. The local AIs found it to be just what they needed, and were able to interpret between the visitors and the American and U.N. officials who soon arrived.
Meanwhile, though it took several tendays of research and experiments on mice, Bisur did find a way to give Pamani the body she desired — just in time for her to start at the girls’ school she and her mother had chosen. Eventually, of course, this led to Juniper and many other trans people from Earth coming to Bisur for help, or to other wizards to whom he taught the spell, but that is beyond the scope of my narrative.
I was growing more and more fond of Bisur and Mipina’s family — indeed, to be honest I was already nearly as fond of them as of my original family — and I knew that the Watsons had never missed me for more than a few hours, the day I had been summoned. They were in good hands with my other self, and our boundaries blurred every time Bisur opened a portal and we shared memories. And Bisur, Mipina and their children have grown to depend on me. This is not what I ever expected or planned for, but I am content.
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