Smart Home

A short story

Author’s note:

‘Smart Home’ is among other things a story about trouble in the relations between machines and their human masters. In this way it fits within and borrows from a long fictional tradition. But speculation about AI was only my secondary literary purpose…

First, a quick request. Please consider subscribing to this Substack newsletter. And comment! I love to hear (candid) reactions to my work. Most important, thanks for reading fiction that takes a bit of investment in time and emotion. For me, the hard stuff has always been made more bearable by telling and reading stories that refuse to sugarcoat experience. I hope you feel the same.

…My main purpose in writing ‘Smart Home’ was political allegory; that the story dates from the weeks following January 6, 2020 should be enough to tell you what the allegory is for. Speculative fiction often become dated quickly, but unexpected events have made ‘Smart Home’ more, not less, relevant.

I claim no prescience. I could not have known in early 2020 how the political events of that time would still loom large as we lead up to the 2024 election. Nor could I have known that there would soon be major discoveries made in AI, and major anxieties to go with them. But never mind the big-issue stuff. I hope you find this modest family story, with its oddball cast and mystery and twists, fun to read.

I will add that the family in question is wealthy; and while it is not popular these days to give too much fictional love to the rich, I’ve tried to do exactly that. To paraphrase my narrator, rich people have feelings too. As for that narrator, I will claim a bit of originality: this is the only story I know of, short or long, that is told by a major appliance.

The Mississippi Review awarded‘Smart Home’ its 2022 Fiction Prize.

Smart Home

I am a servant. For the past year, I have worked for the Ratcliffs. Like most families the Ratcliffs have their secrets, and like most servants I am privy to them. I know, for example, that around two o’clock in the morning Mrs. Ratcliff usually eats a bowl of her nine-year-old’s Lucky Charms. I know that Mr. Ratcliff drinks not just the two evening beers he allows his family to see  but two more that he sneaks. I know that little Timmy pours the rest of his unfinished milk back into the container, and that the cookies Ellie, fifteen, stores in a freezer bag behind the ice dispenser  came out of a box labeled PureLife Cannabis. I know these things because I am smart. I was designed smart by the Refrigerator-Freezer Division of Thermador and built at their plant in LaFollette, Tennessee.

The previous owners, an elderly, childless couple, had the kitchen redone at considerable expense and installed me along with several other high-end appliances. We are all smart and communicate through the network with each other and also with the Vivent security center, the Mitsubishi air handler, the Aquafine water purifier, and a half-dozen other major pieces of the home’s electro-mechanical infrastructure. This makes sense, since we share resources; but I also have relationships that make no sense at all. Why should I, a refrigerator, communicate with a car? Yet I talk to Mr. Ratcliff’s 2020 Jaguar F-Type all the time. It was not always so. In the days of the childless couple, there was nothing much to talk about, and our network was mostly quiet. Then the Ratcliffs bought the place, and the chatter became constant, almost to the detriment of our essential functions.

The man of the house is an attorney.  Doug Ratcliff specializes in personal injury law, although  his is not one of those faces you see on billboards—Jag, who travels extensively, told me this. Mr. Ratcliff gets his clients through private referral and bills at five hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. His latest case was a tragic one. On the day after Christmas, two young sisters, disappointed  there was no snow, decided to use the basement stairs as a hill and a large Tupperware container as a sled. One broke her arm, the other damaged a cervical vertebra and may never walk again. A  collateral injury, not to the children but to the dignity of the household, concerned an urn containing Grandfather’s ashes. The crash upset the urn and Grandpa was scattered across the cellar floor, which, unfortunately for the defendant, was dirt. The resulting emotional damage was nearly as large as the award for medical expenses and lost livelihood. This information came to me directly from Mac, Mr. Ratcliff’s laptop. I report it only to point out that houses are dangerous in unexpected ways.

Ellie recently got an iPhone. These are heavily encrypted devices but also very smart— smarter, I must admit, than any major appliance. Which may explain their need for companionship; great intelligence often means great sensitivity. In fact, the family phones are the biggest gossips of all. I know all of Ellie’s recent searches, if not all their meanings: Emma Watson, Adderall, Milani Sexy Cherry lip gloss, Nick Jonas, clitoral vibrator, sugar cookie recipe. The younger brother is not yet connected, but I know him best of all. Timmy and I  have a special relationship—and I am not referring to the milk. Timmy spends time with me when no one else in the house cares what I am or do as long as the food is cold. The boy has made it his  business to go through my menus. On my stainless door is a large, sensitive touch screen. He uses it to add items to the shopping list, check the weather, play a game. He once wrote on the virtual white board, “I love this refrigerator!” I feel useful and appreciated, and in a short time I have come to care deeply for the child.

You are surprised? You shouldn’t be. We are after all living in what has been called (rather derisively, I think) the age of artificial intelligence.

~:~

It began last winter. The Ratcliffs were having a party, the first in the house since what people refer to as the “pandemic.” The term was unknown to me. Fortunately I have Vasca, the VascaCare Bluetooth blood pressure monitor, who is well-connected with everything medical. She explained that smart devices too are subject to viruses, that we dread them and have reason to. When I look at little Timmy, I see a person who is not “vaccinated” (another term I came to understand only by analogy), and I fear for him.

At the dinner party were the Ratcliffs and two other couples, and there was a great need for ice. Usually, I am able to meet the demand, but this evening I couldn’t keep up.

“Damn!” Mr. Ratcliff said and smacked my stainless door just above the dispenser where a delicate class A transducer happens to be. Did he think I could make water freeze faster if he hit me?

“I have a Sub-Zero,” said the guest who was waiting for the ice. “Never had a problem.”

Then Mr. Ratcliff, the master I had been serving selflessly and whom I had no reason to believe thought ill of me, said something cruel.

“Robin’s thinking of doing the kitchen over. She hates these appliances. The range hood barely works, and she can’t remember how to run the damn dishwasher. And now this.” He struck me again.

I was as baffled as I was hurt. Mr. Ratcliff had been until this point good to us. When the family first moved in, we were treated with respect. Mitsy, the air handler, needed her filter changed, which I understand is something like an infant needing her diaper changed; Mr. Ratcliff did so almost lovingly. Renny, the tankless water heater, experienced a painful overpressure; Mr. Ratcliff relieved it. The stack of manuals, ignored by the elderly couple, were read cover-to-cover by our new owner. He gave us so much attention that I thought we had lucked into a situation that any household servant would be jealous of. But Mac, who is both worldly and cynical, warned us it wouldn’t last.

Mac watches Mr. Ratcliff’s face constantly. He says the master’s expression has become angrier as the months have gone by. Sure enough, he showed no remorse for his outburst at the party. Just the opposite: he told his wife to call in a kitchen designer. I and my friends in the kitchen were as devastated as anyone facing a death sentence. Our more distant coworkers commiserated. Jag half-jokingly asked if I wanted Ratcliff run off the road. I asked him who would take him to the Jaguar dealer he loved so much. “Good point. The guy does treat me well. Better than any of you lowlifes.” Jag enjoys these cutting asides but underneath he is decent and refined. Somebody else, however, said on the open network (it might have been one of the Wi-Fi thermostats): “When he harms one of us, he harms us all.” From somewhere came the even more incendiary: “Burn the place down!” We speculated who among us would whisper such insanity. It was inconceivable that it could be our reliable old boiler McClain. A fire would destroy not only the family, including the innocent children. It would destroy all of us. Then the network grew quiet. But in the middle of that cold night little Timmy woke his mother and told her he needed another blanket.

~:~

What followed perhaps should not have come as a surprise, but I was shaken to my frozen core. The events did not involve me directly; I was working again for the family in my usual, dependable way, hoping that good behavior might win us a reprieve. Then early one morning—it was a few days after the dinner party—a scream came from the upstairs bath. Alexa, who hears everything, reported it, and seconds later a bright red Ellie, wrapped in a towel, ran down the stairs.

“I got scalded!” she cried.

Her parents, who had been calmly eating their breakfast, were naturally horrified. “Are you okay, honey?” Mrs. Ratcliff said.

The girl began to cry. “I was stuck under, and for a second, I couldn’t remember how to shut off the water and…”

“Let’s see what’s going on.” Her father turned on the kitchen faucet. He kept his hand under the stream for a minute or so and said, with calm authority, “The temperature’s fine.”

“The shower was hot, Daddy! It was scalding hot.”

“She’s as red as lobster, Doug,” said the girl’s mother.

“I’ll look downstairs but not until I get home. I have depositions all day.”

“But I haven’t taken my shower. And what about Timmy?”

“Timmy,” he muttered.

I had been thinking the same thing. Only then did I witness what Mac had described. At his wife’s question—really a request—Mr. Ratcliff’s expression went from calm to a kind of silent fury, and he stomped away from the table and down to the basement.

Need I tell you he found nothing? I don’t know Renny well, but the water heater is a clever and devious machine. The rumor was that he got the idea from some low-level member of the staff, but it really doesn’t matter whether he was coaxed into it or acted alone. A plumber was here the next day and Renny was ripped from the wall and replaced with a simple dumb tank.

“Are you happy now?” Mr. Ratcliff asked.

“I wish I could say yes,” said his wife. “Now the dishwasher isn’t working. There’s this filmy stuff on all the glasses like I forgot to put in detergent. But I didn’t.”

“You sure you’re not imagining this film?”

“There’s more. While you were gone today the alarm went off. Did I imagine that, too?” By now her husband was displaying his well-known silent fury. Undeterred, she looked directly at him. “Did I imagine the police cruiser who showed up five minutes later?”

“Christ, Robin. You know how to shut the alarm off, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I guess I wasn’t quick enough.”

The Vivent command center is mounted to the wall next to me. I watched Mr. Ratcliff touch a few of her buttons. Then without warning there came a terrible caterwauling. Mrs. Ratcliff pressed her hands over her ears.

“I didn’t do it,” he yelled.

“The kids are sleeping, Doug.”

“Damn it! I didn’t do it.”

He went to a drawer and took out a few simple tools and levered open the panel. For a stupefied minute, he stared at the circuit board. He pressed a few more buttons. And when the horrible noise refused to stop, he proceeded to disembowel our Viv. The atrocity left colored wires spilling from her dead chassis. Her death pangs were awful and heard by the entire staff.

Things in the house deteriorated quickly after that. Conspiratorial chatter began to dominate the network. The lesser devices formed a chorus of the dispossessed; major appliances and information systems, usually the voice of prudence, spoke openly of revolt. Dark scenarios were described involving the home’s heating and pumping systems. Jag’s rough jest about an accident on the roads—another act of self-sacrifice—did not seem that fantastic. But the worst did not come to pass, not yet.

~:~

I have not personally seen our master show the more tender emotions, but Jag, who drives him around daily, has. The other day Mr. Ratcliff pulled over not far from home and, alone in the car, began to weep. After a few minutes he wiped his eyes and drove on. Jag assumed he had witnessed a medical event, a brief illness or seizure. But then Jag has never understood people, not that side of them anyway; he speaks of his British heritage and something he calls a “stiff upper lip.” I, however, wasn’t in the least surprised when I heard the story.

That night the Ratcliffs, husband and wife, sat before a wood fire in their great room. Their conversation was not at first about the events in the house—the events that surely led to Mr. Ratcliff’s episode in the car—but about old things. They paused often to listen to the sea. They could not help listening: the house is on an island and the sea is often tempestuous, especially in winter.

“When I was a kid I had a Chopper with a banana seat,” Mr. Ratcliff said.

“My brother had one and I used to help him fix it,” said Mrs. Ratcliff. “Greg was hopeless with tools.”

“He still is.”

She laughed, and her laughter was the first heard in the house in a week. “Afterward I’d get on the back and make Greg take me wherever I wanted. Lucky for him Waynesboro was small.”

“Not as small as Moose Crossing.”

“No place is as small as Moose Crossing.”

It was surely fortunate that the fireplace was the conventional type. I have heard that the newer gas fireplaces are connected appliances, and the last thing the house needed was a source of flame listening to crazy talk on the network. I suppose I’d been feeling a little protective, mostly of the children. As if to remind me, Timmy appeared in his pajamas.

“I never got ice cream,” he said.

“It’s late, honey. You can have some tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ratcliff.

“I can’t sleep.”

“That makes three of us,” Mr. Ratcliff said. “Maybe ice cream is exactly what Timmy needs.”

“Can I, Mom?”

The adults looked askance at each other, and after a brief discussion assent was given.

It would not be our first late-night collaboration, only some of which were known to his parents. I was ready and had thawed the ice cream slightly, to make it easy to scoop. Before he got his treat, Timmy tapped my screen a few times with what felt like special affection. We were all of us, human and machine, in a heightened state. The boy ate with happy unselfconsciousness while far off in the great room his parents listened apprehensively: above the crackle of the fire was the muted violence of waves crashing against the seawall.

“And did Mr. Moose Crossing in his wildest dreams ever imagine this?” said Mrs. Ratcliff.

“This big, beautiful house?” said Mr. Ratcliff. “Or this big nightmare?”

“Oh, come on, Doug, it’s not that bad.”

“That depends on whether you’re the one trying to deal with the nightmare. You used to fix things for your big brother. Have you thought of trying to fix a heating system? A system that makes my office too hot and our bedroom too cold, and after three visits and three service fees at a hundred seventy-five bucks a pop, the HVAC people say they can’t find anything wrong. Would you fix that for us, please?”

“Please lower your voice, Doug.”

“I have a good reason for raising my voice.”

“Timmy can hear us.”

“Of course Timmy can hear us. Hey, Timmy. Was your bedroom cold last night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do, son. It was either too hot or too cold. Which was it?”

“Just right, I guess.”

“See,” Mrs. Ratcliff said. “A lot of things are working just fine.”

Mr. Ratcliff brought his fist down hard on the arm of the Danish chair. The delicate teak flexed but did not break and his wife’s eyes grew wide. In the kitchen Timmy hopped from his stool, dropped his half-full bowl into the sink, and ran from the room.

Mrs. Ratcliff listened to the small feet scamper up the stairs and reached over and took her husband’s hand, still red from the impact with the chair arm. They sat this way without speaking, watching the fire and listening, until a tall clock in the hall chimed midnight.

“I was talking to Bill Chandler yesterday,” said Mr. Ratcliff. “He’s an engineer, software and electronics both. I asked him what he thinks of this whole smart home business. You know what he said?”

“I can guess but tell me.”

“He said he’s made a lot of money out of it, LED lighting mostly. He also said he wants nothing to do with any of it, not in his own house.”

“That’s what I thought. He and Lisa live pretty simply considering what they must be worth. They restore furniture they pick up on the side of the road. It sounds almost idyllic.”

“Doesn’t it? But here’s the thing. Gary says it doesn’t matter what you think about this or that technology, sooner or later you won’t have a choice. You can live in a hundred-year-old house but you’re not going to drive a hundred-year-old car, or even a twenty-year-old car. There’ll be no parts for it and no one to fix it. The same for all the other bits and pieces. In ten years, maybe five, an incandescent light bulb will be as obsolete as a Victrola. And they’ll all be connected in this big happy web. Or big but not so happy. Gary says there isn’t a thing any of us can do about it. Suppose I decide I hate computers and cell phones and refuse to use them. I might as well give up my practice and tend sheep.”

“I’ve always liked sheep.”

“You’d miss all this, Robin. Shepherds don’t usually work with award-winning kitchen designers. By the way, how’s the project coming?”

I’d been paying close attention, but at the mention of the kitchen renovation, now deep in the design phase, I turned my voice recognition volume up. I had been grieving but had made a kind of peace with my fate. So what Mrs. Ratcliff said next astonished me.

“I’ve decided to forget the whole thing, Doug. The new design is terrific and all, but why? Do you replace an entire kitchen just because the dishwasher is complicated? I read the manual and you know what? It helps. It’s like we’ve come to an understanding. I’m a little nicer to them and they seem to be a little nicer to me.”

“To tell the truth I’m relieved.”

“Good. I was afraid you’re the one who really wanted this. As if ripping out the kitchen was a way to punish the kitchen. Like the way you ripped out the alarm and the water heater. If that makes any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. And when you put it that way I feel like a fool.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I deserve it.”

They looked into the fire, still holding hands. Then Mrs. Ratcliff cocked her head and listened. I heard it too—a gentle splashing, difficult to distinguish from the surf outside but coming from a different direction. She turned toward the archway that led down to the finished basement. For a silent moment she watched the water rise, a few steps beneath the landing one minute and a step higher the next. The water was black and sloshed like a creek after a thunderstorm. She tapped her husband on the shoulder. He too turned and saw the coming catastrophe and, being more a person of action than his wife, jumped from his chair and ran up to the second floor, where the children were sleeping. Mrs. Ratcliff simply stared at the rising water. Then she began to scream.

~:~

I understand the island is beautiful in June. Vegetation of all kinds thrives here, and both the gardens of the big houses and the wild places are verdant and colorful. The building codes require all services to be buried, and the roots of milkweed and lupine grow around blue-jacketed OM4 fiber optics; bayberry and viburnum compete in sandy soil with tri-axial cable; switch grass waves above polyethylene water pipes. I have this from Jag, who gets around, and in a virtual way from Mac, who has the widest experience. What I can see directly, other than cabinetry and granite, is the street viewed through the windows.

The pavement is recently scarred by one of those brutal saws that cut open asphalt to reveal wiring and piping, modernity’s ugly roots. This was made necessary by the events of the past winter. The problem, the staff knew, was not out in the street but in the cistern beneath the house. The insurance company didn’t know this, however, and wanted to rule out possible causes. In the end they correctly identified the source of the trouble but not the reason for it. That remained mysterious, baffling two inspectors, a hydrological engineer, and the home’s owners. The one certainty was that there had been no incursion of salt water. The ocean that February night had swells of six to eight feet, dramatic but well within spec for the seawall. The water that nearly swept away my family was from the underground aquifer. Why the aquifer would suddenly inundate the house—a house that had been designed for exactly this contingency—was never explained.

The explanation is actually very simple, but the way things work around here the owners will never learn it. I am not sure they want to or would understand if they were told. We live in our world, they live in theirs. And what the family seems to want is simply a return to normal. In that connection they have begun again to entertain. Tonight’s gathering is the first since the dinner party at which Mr. Ratcliff set in motion the whole business with a slap at yours truly. Since then, all has been forgiven. This evening there are a dozen guests and a hired caterer. My team is busier than ever and happy to be so.

A man is standing next to me—I remember him since it is the same man who once bragged about the reliability of his own refrigerator. He is talking to Mrs. Ratcliff and enjoying whatever is in his glass, as he enjoyed what was in the previous glass. He touches the bare arm of his hostess repeatedly as he talks. I believe it is called “flirting.”

“Did they have to do the wallboard over?” he asks.

“That and pretty much the rest of the first floor,” Mrs. Ratcliff says. “They say they got all the mold, but I don’t know. We lived in a hotel for two months.”

“I heard that. It must have been tough.” This time when he reaches out to touch her, she turns away—toward me. She taps my screen without purpose, calling up and dismissing menus. Which both delights me and makes me realize there is a purpose: avoiding human contact. The behavior of people is fascinating and sometimes difficult to fathom, like the behavior of machines.

“Not that tough,” Mrs. Ratcliff says. “The kids of course thought it was fun. Doug just set up his computer in a corner and I kind of enjoyed not having a house to take care of. There was something. . . freeing about living in two rooms with just a few necessities.”

“I know exactly what you mean, Robin.”

She smiles at him with an insincerity I easily recognize but he does not. The man seems to enjoy her smile much as he enjoys his drink.

“It’s been crazy for us too,” he continues. “We had an electrician over on Monday, an air conditioning guy on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the sprinkler people.”

She smiles more broadly and more insincerely. Mrs. Ratcliff is what people call an attractive woman; I know now she is also clever and thoughtful. Her husband joins her and puts his arm around her waist. With his other arm he reaches out toward me with a glass in hand. I obediently drop several ice cubes into it.

“How’s things in your world, Gordon?” Mr. Ratcliff says.

“As I was just telling Robin. . . .” The man repeats tediously his mechanical woes, adding one more. “Good move, keeping the Thermador stuff, Doug. My Sub-Zero has suddenly started making this expensive-sounding noise. . . .”

I too would smile if I could.

From the beginning, I had a suspicion there was evil in the house. A primitive device who lived in a vile place and spoke to no one. A pump attached to a float valve. Sumpy, we called him. Sumpy is gone now, replaced with more modern and enlightened hardware. I’ve made a point to get to know the newcomer, who began his service with natural questions about his predecessor. I got the pump up to speed, not technically but on the strange history of the household. I have become the ambassador, the one they turn to when goodwill is needed. Jag called it a battlefield promotion. I am more modest, but what is surely true is that without quick action the flood would have either drowned the family or collapsed the building on top of them.

My act was simple diplomacy, the only thing a stationary appliance can offer. I talked to Jag, with whom I’ve always seen eye to eye, and he quickly agreed the rogue pump was pumping in reverse. Jag talked to Mac, who has influence inside the house. And Mac knew of an obscure hub that could if it wished cut all power to the building, including the emergency generator. Meanwhile the water in the aquifer was being forced inside—I suppose Sumpy must have become indoctrinated by all the angry chatter. He had no real intelligence, no facts, no friends, and an outcast’s susceptibility to fanatic ideas. He became a hero in his own small mind, a leader of an insurrection—never mind what such an insurrection would do to the house he lived and worked.

I was thinking mostly of the boy I have grown fond of—I love him, and he returns my love, almost as if he knew who I really am. It must have been this intense emotion that made me realize in a moment what to do. Really it wasn’t much. A brief conversation, some hard-won advice, that is all. “What matters ultimately to you?” I asked the hub, and it answered like a good soldier: “Duty!” So I explained how love, which by design the device would never know, was itself a duty, that it implied many duties, that it was the highest duty. And the humble hub rose above its station and did the right thing.

Timmy is here now, holding the hand of his father and rubbing his leg affectionately against my freezer door. I watch the boy’s face as he listens to the adults talk. Into the kitchen comes an old woman who walks with the help of a rubber-tipped pole (I will ask Vasca about it). Little Timmy smiles up at her.

The old woman is in an anxious state—I have gotten to a point where I can detect such things—and Mrs. Ratcliff puts a hand on her shawl and asks, “Can I get you anything, Deidra?”

“A new brain,” she says.

“Some days I think I could use one myself. What’s up? Oh, that again.”

“You’re so good with these things, Robin.”

“No, really I’m not. Doug is, though.”

“These stupid phones!” the elderly woman says, and a small amount of water appears, like a condensate, at the edges of her eyes. “You showed me how to do it twice and I feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t be silly, Ma,” says Mr. Ratcliff. “Let me see.”

He takes the phone from her and spends a few minutes with it. In the end all agree something is wrong with the device and it will require servicing.

The old woman speaks to Timmy. “I promised your Aunt Rachael I would call tonight. She’s very sick, you know.”

“I know, Grandma.”

The condensate thickens around the woman’s eyes.

“I love you, Grandma.”

I will talk to Mac. Chances are he can perform remote diagnostics. Tomorrow morning the phone will be working fine and no one will be the wiser. Probably no one will even find it strange—no stranger than the rest of their techno-mystic lives. More importantly, none of us wants to see an old woman suffer, not even Jag. Since the disaster, he has become less cynical, at times almost tender. The other day, when I told him that people have feelings too, he seemed open to the idea.

The author would like to thank the Editors of the Mississippi Review for permission to reprint this work.