“Eight-oh-three PM,” replied the room.
That meant he’d slept for two hours. Midnight was still four hours away. “Why’s it so cold in here?”
“Central heating is offline,” replied the house.
“Off line?” How was that possible? “When will it be back?”
“That’s unknown. Utilities do not respond to my enquiry.”
“I don’t understand. Explain.”
“There are failures in many outside systems. No explanation is currently available.”
At first, Ben was confused; things just didn’t fail anymore. What about the dynamic redundancies and self-healing routines? But then he remembered that the homeowner’s association to which he belonged contracted out most domicile functions to management agencies, and who knew where they were located? They might be on the Moon for all he knew, and with all those trillions of sims in Simopolis sucking up capacity… It’s begun, he thought, the idiocy of our leaders. “At least turn on the lights,” he said, half expecting even this to fail. But the lights came on, and he went to his bedroom for a sweater. He heard a great amount of commotion through the wall in the apartment next door. It must be one hell of a party, he thought, to exceed the wall’s buffering capacity. Or maybe the wall buffers are offline too?
The main door chimed. He went to the foyer and asked the door who was there. The door projected the outer hallway. There were three men waiting there, young, rough-looking, ill-dressed. Two of them appeared to be clones, jerries.
“How can I help you?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” one of the jerries said, not looking directly at the door. “We’re here to fix your houseputer.”
“I didn’t call you, and my houseputer isn’t sick,” he said. “It’s the net that’s out.” Then he noticed they carried sledgehammers and screwdrivers, hardly computer tools, and a wild thought crossed his mind. “What are you doing, going around unplugging things?”
The jerry looked confused. “Unplugging, sir?”
“Turning things off?”
“Oh, no sir! Routine maintenance, that’s all.” The men hid their tools behind their backs.
They must think I’m stupid, Ben thought. While he watched, more men and women passed in the hall and hailed the door at the suite opposite his. It wasn’t the glut of sim traffic choking the system, he realized — the system itself was being pulled apart. But why? “Is this going on everywhere?” he said. “This routine maintenance?”
“Oh, yessir. Everywhere. All over town. All over the world, ’sfar as we can tell.”
A coup? By service people? By common clones? It made no sense. Unless, he reasoned, you considered that the lowest creature on the totem pole of life is a clone, and the only thing lower than a clone is a sim. And why would clones agree to accept sims as equals? Manumission Day, indeed. Uppity Day was more like it. “Door,” he commanded, “open.”
“Security protocol rules this an unwanted intrusion,” said the house. “The door must remain locked.”
“I order you to open the door. I overrule your protocol.”
But the door remained stubbornly shut. “Your identity cannot be confirmed with Domicile Central,” said the house. “You lack authority over protocol-level commands.” The door abruptly quit projecting the outside hall.
Ben stood close to the door and shouted through it to the people outside. “My door won’t obey me.”
He could hear a muffled, “Stand back!” and immediately fierce blows rained down upon the door. Ben knew it would do no good. He had spent a lot of money for a secure entryway. Short of explosives, there was nothing they could do to break in.
“Stop!” Ben cried. “The door is armed.” But they couldn’t hear him. If he didn’t disable the houseputer himself, someone was going to get hurt. But how? He didn’t even know exactly where it was installed. He circumambulated the living room looking for clues. It might not even actually be located in the apartment, nor within the block itself. He went to the laundry room where the utilidor — plumbing and cabling — entered his apartment. He broke the seal to the service panel. Inside was a blank screen. “Show me the electronic floor plan of this suite,” he said.
The house said, “I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations. Please close the keptel panel and await further instructions.”
“What instructions? Whose instructions?”
There was the slightest pause before the house replied, “All contact with outside services has been interrupted. Please await further instructions.”
His condo’s houseputer, denied contact with Domicile Central, had fallen back to its most basic programming. “You are degraded,” he told it. “Shut yourself down for repair.”
“I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations.”
The outside battering continued, but not against his door. Ben followed the noise to the bedroom. The whole wall vibrated like a drumhead. “Careful, careful,” he cried as the first sledgehammers breached the wall above his bed. “You’ll ruin my Harger.” As quick as he could, he yanked the precious oil painting from the wall, moments before panels and studs collapsed on his bed in a shower of gypsum dust and isomere ribbons. The men and women on the other side hooted approval and rushed through the gap. Ben stood there hugging the painting to his chest and looking into his neighbor’s media room as the invaders climbed over his bed and surrounded him. They were mostly jerries and lulus, but plenty of free-range people too.
“We came to fix your houseputer!” said a jerry, maybe the same jerry as from the hallway.
Ben glanced into his neighbor’s media room and saw his neighbor, Mr. Murkowski, lying in a puddle of blood. At first Ben was shocked, but then he thought that it served him right. He’d never liked the man, nor his politics. He was boorish, and he kept cats. “Oh, yeah?” Ben said to the crowd. “What kept you?”
The intruders cheered again, and Ben led them in a charge to the laundry room. But they surged past him to the kitchen, where they opened all his cabinets and pulled their contents to the floor. Finally they found what they were looking for: a small panel Ben had seen a thousand times but had never given a thought. He’d taken it for the fuse box or circuit breaker, though now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any household fuses for a century or more. A young woman, a lulu, opened it and removed a container no thicker than her thumb.
“Give it to me,” Ben said.
“Relax, old man,” said the lulu. “We’ll deal with it.” She carried it to the sink and forced open the lid.
“No, wait!” said Ben, and he tried to shove his way through the crowd. They restrained him roughly, but he persisted. “That’s mine! I want to destroy it!”
“Let him go,” said a jerry.
They allowed him through, and the woman handed him the container. He peered into it. Gram for gram, electroneural paste was the most precious, most engineered, most highly regulated commodity under Sol. This dollop was enough to run his house, media, computing needs, communications, archives, autodoc, and everything else. Without it, was civilized life still possible?
Ben took a dinner knife from the sink, stuck it into the container, and stirred. The paste made a sucking sound and had the consistency of marmalade. The kitchen lights flickered and went out. “Spill it,” ordered the woman. Ben scraped the sides of the container and spilled it into the sink. The goo dazzled in the darkness as its trillions of ruptured nanosynapses fired spasmodically. It was beautiful, really, until the woman set fire to it. The smoke was greasy and smelled of pork.