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Synopsis

Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career - he's created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William.

No one knows about William. Henry's agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.

When Lily's coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house - the smartest of smart homes - Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it ;in.

Excerpt

1

Every morning felt like Henry's first. Perhaps it came from working with code so much, the detailed sequence of inconsequential numbers that resulted in something coming to life, something that had never existed before. Perhaps it was because his aversion to leaving the house had grown so severe that he'd long given up trying, so he was left with only one wonder within his reach. Lily. The woman sitting in the chair next to his bed, smiling in the lovely, vaguely haunted way he sometimes sees as a side effect of overwhelming love, and other times as merely pity.

"That was a bad one," she says.

"Was I snoring?"

"You were nightmaring. You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear."

"Did you?"

Her glasses are round and too large for her face in a way Henry finds heartbreaking. She pushes them up hard against her brow. "What was the dream about?"

"It was the same one," he says. "More or less."

"Tell me."

"Why? Dreams are stupid. Don't we have other things-"

"Dreams tell us who we are," his wife says, and pulls the chair an inch closer, taps at her chin with doctorly interest. "Don't you think we could all use some help with that?"

He hears the "all" as meaning himself. He could use some help with knowing who he is. It's a very Lily thing to say: superficially supportive, curious, passively superior. His desire for her to stay here with him is so great he forgives her for making him feel like an anecdote, something she might later share with friends for their amusement. Or worse, their sympathy.

"It's our house. This house," Henry says. "I'm moving through the halls like I'm not in control of my limbs. Just drifting, you know?"

"Sure."

"And I'm going up the stairs to the second floor. That's when I start to get scared."

"Are you scared of-"

"Not it. Not exactly."

"So it's-"

"A sense. Like I know something bad is coming but I can't prevent it."

"And you can't wake up."

"I can't do anything except go where I have to go."

"The attic."

"The stairs to the attic, yeah. That's where I stop. Looking up at the door. Except it's different from the real door. This one is covered in chains and padlocks, top to bottom. Like whoever put them there didn't think there was enough of them so kept adding more and more."

There's no way to predict what will catch Lily's interest, and what will cause her to wander off and leave him to what she calls his "pet projects." Henry often feels like there's an undiscovered vein of conversation that might keep her with him longer, maybe even bring her back for good, if he could only stumble on the right topic or theme. He's made the mistake in the past of thinking she wants him to be more entertaining. But after trying to mimic the charm of the leading men in the movies she likes, he saw how she found him the least engaging when he was working the hardest at it. It makes him want to ask what she found most attractive about him before they were married-whatever quality he still possesses that he could try to magnify-but he worries she'll say she's forgotten.

"Then what?" she says.

"I hear a voice behind the door."

"Its voice."

"Yeah."

"But you couldn't hear what it was saying."

"When I've had the dream before I couldn't. But this time I could."

She sits straighter. "What was it?"

"It was quoting something. Lines from a book. A poem or novel. Maybe the Bible? Something it had memorized. It wasn't kidding around about it either."

"What do you mean?"

"The words weren't its own, but they were the truth of its being. Like another voice speaking through it."

"What did the voice say?"

"'I am the spirit of perpetual negation. For all things that exist deserve to perish.'"

"You remembered that?"

"I guess it was memorable."

"Shit." She shivers. A stagy gesture that builds into a genuine shudder. "Perpetual negation. Kinda grim, Henry."

"I wasn't appreciating the meaning of it as it happened. Only that, whatever it was, it meant it."

"At least that woke you up."

"No, that's not what did it."

"What did?"

The locks won't hold. That's what Henry recalls feeling, but he doesn't say it, because he doesn't want to frighten Lily. Every chain and padlock in the world would make no difference. Because what terrified him wasn't the thing on the other side of the wood, but the new thing that had joined it. A presence that will not be contained.

"A whisper," Henry says instead. "But when I got closer I heard it wasn't a whisper. It was a hand. Fingers stroking the inside of the door. And then-boom!-something smashed against it. Hard enough to split the wood. That's what woke me up."

Lily shudders again. "Well, you're here now."

"Where else would I be?"

"Good one," she says, and nods with a mixture of humor and sadness that he thinks of as her trademark, though sometimes wonders if he's reading it wrong. If maybe he always has. "Good one."

2

Things are bad between them, but not too bad. This is the estimation he's held to for so long it's become a truism, comforting as believing there's a heaven awaiting us after death. But sometimes, like now, he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment-the same made by millions of husbands right before the end. He doesn't normally wish he had friends, but when this thought comes to him, he does. It might be helpful to know a man of his age and experience who could tell him whether his troubles were benign or terminal.

But Lily's here now. There may be no magical words to keep her here, but showing his concern for her certainly couldn't hurt. As soon as he speaks, he sees how he may be wrong about this too.

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm pregnant, Henry, not ill."

"Of course. Of course not. I just know how it can make women uncomfortable sometimes. The process. Understandably."

"The process?" She laughs-briefly, resignedly-but not without some trace of warmth. He's useless, but he's trying. This is how he interprets it. Lately, it's been as good as it gets for him.

"When are we going to-"

"Don't."

"-talk about things?"

He raises himself up against the bed's headboard. His hand reaches out to her round stomach to feel the life inside her, but she pulls away. A flinch. Is that what he saw? Not a drawing back, the preference to not be touched, but a reflex of the body. It was as if she moved from him with revulsion, rather than anger or coldness or hurt.

"Not today," she says. "Soon."

"It's lonely waking up in this room alone."

"I know."

"How much longer do I-"

"Not today." She steps away so suddenly her glasses slide back down to the tip of her nose.

Henry was a fool when it came to marriage, and he worked to understand it with the flailing desperation of a drowning man fumbling with a life jacket. But he knew enough to know when to let a point go unpursued. Sometimes you had to wait for whatever bruise that ached between the two of you to darken first before fading, even if, looking back on it, you could never recall the blow that caused it in the first place.

Lily goes to the window at the far end of the room. "Curtain open," she says.

The heavy blackout curtains part on their own. The morning light first slashes, then expands through the space between the halves. It leaves Henry blinking where he still lies in the bed, in part from the brightness, in part to shield himself from the stark vacancy of the room. A single chair with wooden spindles along its back (their knobs poking and painful to sit against). A rug too small for the space, leaving the corners cold and exposed. The double bed of a size that can comfortably accommodate only one. The tidy vacancy of a spare bedroom.

"Window open," Lily says.

The heavy glass pane rises automatically. This time instead of light it's air that licks and curls against her skin. She breathes it in: the cool mineral scent of autumn that she thinks of as a cave turned inside out.

The sun pours down the street and splashes against the elms and cedar shake walls of her neighbors' houses, staining everything with orange and rust. It's the part of town where the rich once lived, the factory owners and physicians and distillers. After a few decades of neglect, a new set of professionals-start-up financiers and tech work-from-homers and consultants of niche expertise-had come to apply tasteful renovations and hang swinging love seats on the wraparound porches.

You could make fun of it as a nostalgic amusement park. Lily sometimes did, and in those precise terms. But it was also unquestionably lovely, the properties wide and deep, each façade an architectural defense of America, or the idea of it. It wasn't a gated community, but it made its values and exclusions clear nonetheless. The fantasy of the Upstate College Town, long thought to be extinct, but here returned to life on the handful of blocks on either side of them.

Even the morning's sounds were delightful. Birdsong and the babble of kids making their way to school on the sidewalk, the delivery drones dodging through the branches over their heads, buzzing like honeybees. Lily looks down at the parents herding their children or carrying them on their shoulders and guesses which of them she will seek out as friends once she joins their ranks.

It takes her a second to understand why the children themselves are dressed the way they are. Dwarfish superheroes and goalie-masked killers and green-faced, daycare-bound witches. The decorations on her neighbors' houses had been there the past couple weeks, but she'd grown used to them and forgotten why they were brought out in the first place. On almost every lawn there's a papier-mâché graveyard, every other tree home to a web of rope and a spider made of stuffed garbage bags. There are no such things on Lily and Henry's property. They have never decorated their house for this or any holiday.

"Halloween," she says.

"What?"

She speaks louder without turning around. "It's Halloween morning."

"Should we get candy?"

"Have we ever handed out candy?"

He thinks on this as if there's a riddle buried in it. "No," he says. "But we could start."

"We don't have a jack-o'-lantern by the door, no lights or decorations. Nobody is coming up our walk anyway."

"A trip to the store. That's all it would take."

Now she looks at him. A moment that stretches into a meaningful appreciation, her shoulders inching lower, yielding. "It's a nice idea. And it's sweet of you to suggest it. But I think we both know you're not going to the store, Henry. And even if you did-if you could-do you really see yourself opening the door to strangers?"

"You're right," he says, shaking his head. "I don't think I could manage it."

"Not without me having to call 911."

He snorts. It's his signal to her that concedes how their lives are shaped the way they are because of his deficiencies and his alone.

She crosses her arms over her chest and looks outside again, a pose he decides to read as contentment. He was wrong to pressure her to talk. Pregnancy brought on a chemical storm in the body, he'd read all about it. Which meant Lily was navigating herself through rolling waves invisible to him. It wasn't his place to demand her attention. And he had taken so much time for his work, for his creation, he's obliged to be patient now.

"There's lots in the fridge," he says. "I'll make us omelets."

She frowns. "You don't remember, do you?"

"Apparently not."

"We're having people over for brunch. Paige and Davis."

"I forgot. Your old co-workers."

"I thought it would be good for you to talk with people other than me for a change."

"It is," he says. "Good."

"I'm trying to help you."

"I know. But I have to do this on my own."

Once more she cocks her head at him in unexpected interest. "Do what?"

"Get rid of whatever's got me spooked up here." He taps the side of his skull. "And I think I can now."

"Why?"

"Because I know the cause of it. The more I've worked on my project, the worse the phobia got. So I'm going to pull back, and by the time the baby comes-"

"You don't need to-"

"-I'll be able to go outside."

She sucks her lips into her mouth and lets them pop wetly out. "What would you do if you could?"

"Push her in the stroller. Take her to the playground."

"Her?"

"I guess I've imagined it's a girl-not that it matters. I just don't want to be sick anymore. For her. Or him."

She sees his earnestness in this, and it softens her. The arms over her chest uncross, the hands rising-briefly reaching for him-before drifting back to her sides. "How are you going to do it?"

"Remember this moment. How I feel right now."

"An illness like yours-it's not just a matter of motivation, you know. It's not just feelings."

"You're right. It's a matter of will. Putting my mind to the things it should've been focused on for a long time."

"You have been focused," she offers. "You've been so involved in your project."

"Too involved. I'm sorry for that, too."

He has to do something. Right now. An opening has appeared, he's sure of it. This is the occasion for an emotional display, a spontaneous gift, a pleading. The kind of gesture he's always felt the most hopeless at. But the idea of Lily leaving with these questions clinging to them both has to be blunted in some way.

"I love you, Lily."

Her lips tighten into thin lines. It could be the beginning of a smile. The question of whether it's that or her readying to say an unkind thing is left unanswered when the little man in the top hat wheels into the room.

Copyright © 2024 by Mason Coile

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