The bot-hand jerked back to avoid spilling coffee on me. A pity. A liability claim and I could have been home free. That was one of the problems we had to deal with in the antique trade. The failsafes on the old stuff were less intricate, and because the programming language had been so cumbersome before the new wave, the old hardware often had tons of mem-space. That was all very well, except for the machines built around changeover-still with old memory specs. All that space seemed to fill with random errors that could accidentally throw up some bizarre bits of code. We had been sued for a toaster that decided it wanted to dance the polka with its owner only a month ago. It put a whole new meaning to a hot date. Well, the nu-home had changed the meaning of “kitchen appliance,” or even “kitchen” for that matter, forever. Old machines just hadn’t been built to cope with a world where your home was your appliances. And your furniture. And your entertainment. Where the walls themselves could change to become… anything.
This kitchen, however, was perfectly integrated into the nu-home circuitry. A piece of the counter changed conformity to create a bowl that another robot-hand could flip out from a conformation fold and suck up.
“You know, madam,” said the sales-bot in a pretty good imitation of a confidential whisper. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but this new Mark 7583 has,” its voice dropped, “a five percent unrecycled plastic add-in. Think how much bigger that’ll make your home.”
I couldn’t help laughing. What did this bot’s master computer think I was? A rube from the backwoods outside Lahore? As if adding onto a nu-home’s conformational surface was possible, let alone desirable. There was brief click and the central computer changed sales pitch tracks. “Actually, it just looks that way. The Mark 7583 has new software algorithms that enable it to change internal surface configurations 2.8 percent faster by overclocking the internal EYM.” The sales-bot then went off into a screed of hard math that might have helped it to sell if I hadn’t been one of the worst math students my tutor-bot had ever suffered through. I had been going through a bad-teen phase which I’d avoided getting mood-adjusted for. You know, when your hormones override the common sense of having happiness through correct body chemistry. All I’d been interested in at the time was boys. I’d even searched “boys” on my math module. A lot of good that had done me! It didn’t really matter. The subsonic advertising was getting to me anyway. I really wanted to buy that Mark 7538. And if I signed now, I might get out without all the add-ons. The peripherals usually cost a lot more than the unit.
“I love it,” I said. “But I’m a terrible rush. If I can buy now, without the rest of the pitch, there will be a small oil gratuity for you.”
You could almost hear the relays clicking. Two seconds passed. The quibble between the master computer and the salesbot must have been vicious. Well, they wanted to make the salesbots more independent. “10 mils machine grade,” I said.
“Urghflttsh.” The salesbot recovered from its greed versus central command conflict with an epileptic shake that made its bolts rattle. “That would be very generous, madam. If I may escort you to the total ID and retinal scan, and on to our payment and legal-bots?”
“You can, and quickly, Jeeves.”
“My name is actually Hilbert, madam. Real machine grade?”
“Prewar,” I assured him. It’s illegal, of course, but bots will do anything for it.
Hilbert the Sales-bot’s eye-lights glowed as it whisked me past a customer who had obviously put up a more spirited resistance and was now strapped into the force-feeding chair, and took me into the store’s ID and legal section. I knew that it wasn’t going to be cheap or pleasant, but at least I could get out of here. I passed the hairy Luddite having a cup of coffee in the staff restroom.
An hour later I staggered out onto the pedway, just as the Ultrabotics Sales-shill was herding a new customer in with his “Repent, the end is nigh” bit. It was a neat shill-trick. They can’t actually drag you in off the pedway, but if they can get you to step inside the shop…
Well, by the time I got to back to my nu-home its old conformational software would be stripped and the Ultrabiotics modules would have been fitted. Just as long as I didn’t end up like the story that everyone knew, about someone whose ret-ID got corrupted in the shop-capture unit, and the new home-bots wouldn’t let them into their own home before curfew. I’d heard the story over and over. It was always someone whom someone else knew… But I was never too sure that it was just an urban legend.
So I stepped off the pedway and up to my door-portal with just that tiny bit of trepidation. My nu-home portal opened and a new wall-face said in a mellifluous voice: “Welcome, Andrea. What would you like for dinner tonight? Your favorite Caesar salad?” It handed me a daiquiri. I’d forgotten that this new module came with bar feature.
I took a sip. It wasn’t done quite the way my antique Bartop “Harry’s Bar” would have done it. But it was not bad for an all-American made-in-India-bot. The Harry’s Bar would still be inside. It was a registered antique bot and couldn’t just be sent for recycling. But getting nu-home software even to talk to a bot-appliance, let alone one of the antiques, was near impossible. Built-in obsolescence saw that the direct machine interface didn’t even allow communication between them. Once upon a time you could override the circuits, but these days only deluxe and ultra-expensive versions allowed you that much reprogramming flex. Still, the Harry’s Bar had been a deluxe top-of-the-range job, from the last days before nu-home technology swept the market. I’d been lucky to pick it up at a house sale, yes, a real house, not a nu-home, about six months ago. Most of the other stuff had been junk, wooden furniture and worn rugs, but I’d bought this gem. It would be worth a mint at a specialist dealers’ auction. I was supposed to be buying for the company but, well, I let them have the Chippendales and Persians. There are still people who will buy those sort of things, even to put into a nu-home, pointless as it may be.
I nodded. “And I do not like cos lettuce. Iceberg.” I turned to the wall. “Recliner,” I said. The wall conformation reshaped into one. “What sort of texturing?” asked the wall, mellifluously.
“Leather. And not too soft.”
It became leather, or at least something that I couldn’t tell wasn’t (shudder) off a dead animal. That was one of the worst aspects of the antique trade. You had to touch yukky stuff that came off real dead plants that grew in dirt, and dead animals.
“Color preference I have listed as cloud white,” it said as I flopped into the recliner, “but I have three new shades of white in the selection bank.”
“Cloud white is fine,” I said, impressed all the same. That was pretty fast confirmation. Maybe being trapped into Ultrabotics wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. I was old enough to remember when people actually bought furniture. It wasn’t a patch on nu-home for variety and flexibility, but at least the chair was actually there before you wanted it, and you didn’t have to wait. Of course the later-generation software started anticipating your desires. I had to giggle remembering how embarrassed I’d been when the wall image had become a moonlit tropical seascape livvy and created a big heart shaped bed when I’d brought Marcus in for a drink. It had worked, though. Much better than my attempt to look up boys on the math module had.
“I’ll have the latest in the Paris café livvy sequence,” I said, “and another daiquiri.”
The walls flickered from the tranquil forest scene to their neutral beige briefly, before surrounding me with the sounds and images of gay Paree, with the men in their turbans and veiled women, silent and obsequiously following their men around, as my drink arrived.