Thursday 15 May 2014

Entry 30 - Waking Up

 She turned the alarm off with a gentle caress over the sensor and turned to the other side to sleep a bit more. Half an hour ,that felt like less than a minute, later the alarm goes off again but this time she gets up, the gentle hum still going on, gaining speed and sound. She's already naked, the sleeping clothes on the recycle bin, heading to the bathroom when the house detects that she's really up and shuts the humming sound down.
 The shower opens up at her sight and starts running, hot water falling on her skin, the active agents (in reality nanobots that eat the dirt and other residues to make more of themselves) working and cleaning her. In less than five minutes the bath has been taken and her black skin nearly shines on the bathroom lights. She smiles at the mirror and asks, casually, for a white dress.
 Her underwear has already been recycled and is waiting on top of the bed, where she picks it up and puts it on. The white dress comes out of the wall, one of her five. The house picked that one after carefully examining the weather predictions, her daily schedule and reading her emotions, as well as it could.
 The houses sometimes got it wrong, but the longer you'd live in a house, the better it knew you and what was or wasn't appropriate clothing, and she had been in that house for the past 4 years. She had heard of people who fell in love with their houses, it wasn't hard to imagine, for many people the one person that always treated them right, the one person that was always there for them, the one person that kept their places clean, that cooked, did the shopping, that one person wasn't a person at all, just a relatively smart algorithm that ran their places.
  Not her, she could never fall for her place. She had hers placed on lowest human level, meaning the house almost never spoke unless extremely necessary, relaying messages by screen instead, like the ones that were now passing on the wall to her front, top level reserved for house related messages, second level for personal messages and the third level with news :
   "required shopping : 10 doses of raw cooking material - please authorize", "internal systems regular scan found 0 errors, 1 warning - power consumption went up by 0,01% this month"
 
   "Zack Winder left a message : Hey honey, we still up for dinner tomorrow?"
 
   "New restrictions on zone 4 : grid sections 14 to 17 are now pedestrian only"
 
   She tapped the last one with her knee while keeping up with the aerobics and a city map showed up, centred around zone 4. The sections 14 to 17 were marked in the pedestrian only sign's characteristic blue and she cursed : right on her way to work as she suspected.
 
   "command not understood, please repeat or abort"
 
   She said "abort" and the map went back to front, so she asked for a new route bypassing sections 14 to 17. It would take her only 10 more minutes by car, or about the same time if she took the bus through section 32. She said "Schedule, today" and it appeared on the wall as she stretched, her morning gymnastics over for the day. She passed by the dry-jet to clean the sweat off her body, grabbed the dress and left, not seeing the wall saying "good bye my love...."