Mark
The glassy black square held my reflection without returning it. A thin wire of unease pulled in my chest. Before I could talk or ask a question, the wall of oak to my right began moving. A section receded in a slow, frictionless slide and disappeared into itself, leaving a seam as fine as paper on the frame. The sound was a whisper in reverse.
Beyond the gap, the main living space of the house unfolded from kitchen to dining to lounge in a way that looked designed to make any other living set up seem improvised. A glass wall ran the length of the whole thing, looking out onto the moor and valley beyond. As we stepped in, dusk outside saturated into deeper oranges and purples; inside developed a clean daylight glow.
To the left, a kitchen island in pale Corian. Beyond it, stainless steel appliances stood in a line. Wolf oven. Miele coffee machine. Sub-Zero at the end. The refrigerator towered like a quiet person who knows the room will come to them.
“Wow,” Sarah said. No show in it. Just a body letting go of tension.
Leo lowered his headphones around his neck and slid his palm along the kitchen island. His hand left no trace. He held his phone out like a compass.
“Wi-Fi,” he said. “What’s the network called? My phone’s dead.”
“Did you download the app like I told you?”
“Yep.”
“So, just go to the Home section and sign in. The whole building is a signal booster. You should be able to get internet half a mile in any direction.”
“There’s no way I’m signing into that app,” said Chloe.
“We have to,” said Sarah, “it’s part of the deal.”
“It asks to access your phone.”
“I’m sure it’s just for the network,” said Sarah. “Mark?”
“If you want everything to work, you have to sign in on the app,” I said. “Unless you don’t want internet?”
“Fine,” said Chloe, raising her phone and lowering her face.
Leo did the same.
“It’s not working,” they said in unison.
“Did you set up your profiles like I told you?”
“Yes,” huffed Leo.
“Not yet,” admitted Chloe, thumbs whirring into a flurry.
Leo tried again. Chloe sighed.
“It says restricted access,” he said.
Chloe stared at a spinning wheel on her screen. “I thought this was supposed to be the future?”
I found a black control interface on the wall. It lit up as it registered my face. I found the Settings cog, found Networks, found Users. It acknowledged that I was the Primary Resident, and implied the others were on the system but hadn’t logged in.
“You should just be able to tap Connect on the Home screen,” I said.
“Why do you have to approve me?” asked Chloe. “I’m sixteen.”
I let her phone scan my face, tapped Approve. Nothing changed.
Sarah pulled her laptop out, starting to get worried. “I have a work meeting I can’t miss in the morning,” she said, opening the device. “You told them I can’t download the app onto my work computer, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I told them.”
The room was already taking on an air of family tension, before we had even cooked a meal in it.
“I’ll fix it,” I said. “Give me your phones.”
I took the phones to the kitchen island. On both devices, the icon showed full strength with a strike-through, like they were connected and barred at the same time. Every path I tried ended in a polite message telling me I wasn’t authorised to connect.
Behind me, Chloe huffed, anxious to get her phone out of my hands. Leo said nothing and then something I did not catch. Sarah’s foot tapped once against the stool rung. The house listened. The house waited.
I went back to my phone. “It’s probably just a profile propagation delay,” I said. “It will catch up.”
Chloe pushed air out through her nose. Leo shifted his weight from one foot to another. A minute passed where I pretended to have things under control while I flipped through various menus.
“I’m serious, Mark,” said Sarah. “I can’t miss this meeting. It will set a really bad precedent.”
I approached the interface on the wall again. It lit up.
“Good afternoon, Mark,” said the house, all around me, that professional female voice again. “As the house signatory, you must allow all Resident Profiles to inherit your Network Access. Would you like me to change the settings on your behalf? If so, please say, ‘Enable profiles for Sarah, Chloe and Leo’ to proceed.”
“Enable profiles for Sarah, Chloe and Leo,” I said.
A green ribbon slid around the edges of the interface. Leo’s phone lit up. Chloe’s started vibrating. They reached around me and grabbed them.
“And my wife’s laptop? It’s her work laptop. The one we discussed.”
“An IP address has been issued for the device. Sarah, please log onto ‘Sarah’s Telos’ in your network settings.”
“I see it,” she said, a softness entering her voice. “Thank you.”
The house had watched me fail, exposed my error, then solved the problem. Had it done it on purpose?
I approached the monolithic fridge, compelled less by hunger than by the need to assert some small control. My hand found the recessed grip. The door opened with a soft, vacuumed sigh.
White light poured over shelves so perfectly arranged they could have been styled for a photo shoot. Oatly Barista on the top shelf. Two bottles of Sarah’s Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc lying in chrome cradles. Dark chocolate, my brand, in neat stacks. Remedy kombucha in a colour gradient from deep amber to pale gold. Leo’s Monster Ultra Zero, six tall cans in a precise row. On the side racks, chilli jam we had bought once on impulse at a food market. Lost Barn coffee beans from my old commute. Every shelf was a map of our private habits. Purchases months or years apart, drawn into precise order. This was the ‘data for comfort’ bargain in action.
Sarah leaned against the island, her gaze fixed on the contents. “It’s exactly what we’d buy,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost reverent. “But neater.”
Leo drifted closer. “No way. They’ve got the white ones.” He reached for the Monsters, pulling one free without asking how or why it was there.
“Not now,” said Sarah. “You won’t sleep.”
He reluctantly put it back.
I stared at the fridge, the light cold on my face. Somewhere, hidden in the quiet hum, was the sound of a house that already knew us. I shut it.
“I wonder what they put in our rooms,” said Chloe.
Leo’s jaw dropped slightly and they both dashed out of the kitchen towards the stairs in the hallway. Sarah smiled at me, grateful that this wasn’t a total disaster after all.
Then, without visible speakers or source, music began. Not loud, but present - a synth bassline, a sparse drum loop, a thin guitar riff, then a synthesiser melody curling around it all. ‘This Must Be the Place’ by Talking Heads.
Sarah’s head turned. Her shoulders eased.
“This takes me back,” she said quietly.
Her lips shaped David Byrne’s opening lines without emitting them. The song had been ours once, in the early days - warehouse flat in the Northern Quarter, exposed brick and high ceilings, electric radiators that barely whispered heat into the rooms. Nights when the wine was cheap, the future open, and she still looked at me like I was the best decision she’d ever made. We danced to it on New Year’s Eve, deciding to drink a bottle of champagne and stay in rather than go to our friend’s party - before the children were born. A private, personal memory with no digital history that I knew of.
“It wasn’t me,” I said, shaking my head, wondering how it had zeroed in on this song.
Her gaze drifted to the smoked oak wall where the sound seemed to gather and dissolve. “The house, then.”
She said it with half awe, half curiosity.
As she stood there, listening, looking at our new kitchen, I could see more and more tension leaving her face. The way her fingers tapped the island in time, unconscious. The way she was remembering us, without meaning to. Somewhere underneath the melody, the room’s temperature lifted by a fraction, as if the song had a Kelvin value. And in that moment, I felt something shift - not between us, but in the balance of who could give her that feeling of relief and levity.
She stayed submerged in the song and the new space another few seconds, letting her new life drift into her. Then she glanced towards the stairs.
“I’m going to see what the kids are up to.” Her voice was lighter, almost casual.
She left the living space and crossed the hall, feet bare, silent on the dark slate. I watched her climb, her profile briefly framed against the glass balustrade, then vanish along the gallery.
The music went on without her.
I was alone with it, and without her presence it lost whatever warmth it had carried. The melody flattened. The bassline felt insistent, almost mechanical, like a loop running too perfectly to be human. A precursor to the digital age.
I moved towards the glass wall. Outside, across the manicured strip of turf, the other finished house glowed with a single warm square of light in one of the upstairs windows. A figure moved past it. My reflection in the glass watched me watch them, outline faint and translucent.
The two houses sat far enough apart that you couldn’t make out much detail, but I could see the sheen of the glass, the clean lines of the Neolith panels. The same geometry. The same sharp edges. The same design, repeated. The scene sat on the glass like a magazine page.
I stood there until the song ended and the room faded into silence.
Behind me, the fridge’s compressor cut in. The sound was too loud for the silence, startling enough to make me turn. When I turned back to the glass, the light in the other house was gone. The building was now a black silhouette. The moor beyond it rolled away into the gathering dark. There was no sign of the figure, no movement at all. The landscape looked endless.
Copyright © 2025 Matt Wilven. All rights reserved.