On the house that listens

My house knows when I leave the room.

This is, I should say at once, by my own design. I have spent rather more years than I will publicly admit arranging small contrivances around the place — sensors at the doors, a thermostat that thinks for itself, lights that follow me down the corridor, a speaker I can address by name and which, more often than not, replies sensibly. I am not a holdout. I am, if anything, a quiet enthusiast. I find it pleasant to come home to a hallway that has already considered the question of light.

What I had not quite reckoned with, until recently, was how much all of this resembles a witness. A thermostat keeps a record. A doorbell logs every footstep on the path. A motion sensor in the hall knows, to the second, when someone passed it — and, more pointedly, when someone did not. The house keeps notes. It does not forget. It will, if asked properly, account for itself.

The traditional country house mystery had its servants. The maid who saw something through the keyhole; the gardener who noticed the wrong footprint in the bed; the cook who could swear, on the matter of the soup, that no one had passed through the kitchen between half past six and seven. The servants are mostly gone now. In their place is a small, polite assembly of devices — never asleep, never inclined to gossip, but perfectly willing, when consulted, to produce a timestamp.

It struck me, standing in my kitchen one evening while the lights came on without my asking, that I had been living inside a setting for a mystery novel for some years and had not quite noticed. The pleasures of the automated home — the small magics of a house that anticipates you — have a darker counterpart, which is the house that records you, and, more interestingly, the house that can be made to lie. Both versions are present in the same wires. Both, I now find, are demanding to be written about.

So the next thing I intend to write will involve, in some form or other, this particular kind of room. A house full of obliging little machines. The technology itself is not really the point — it never is. The point is the point it has always been: a small community, a closed circle of suspicion, and the question of who knew what, when, and how on earth they could possibly have known it. Only now, the answer might be on a server somewhere. Or it might not be there at all, which is, of course, the more interesting possibility.

I am drafting it now — which is to say, I am reorganising my notes about the lights in my own hallway, which is, I am assured, what drafting looks like at this stage. With luck and a following wind, it should be in your hands before midsummer.

— V.