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.”
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.
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