Without sweetener, he would not take in the necessary nutrients, so she had added sugar until the taste profile was acceptable… but the sugar tally was not. And now, as she brought him the smoothie, the glare of the violated sugar limit stabbed at her, distracting her as she set the cup down and retreated to hover near the door, scanning for feedback.
All the data were favourable, at first. Mister ate his steak, cutting it into small bites, chewing thoroughly, looking up to listen as Missus questioned Young Master about his day then looking back down without comment. Missus ate her salad without seeming to see it, intent on Young Master’s account of that day’s show-and-tell.
"Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built."
"What did Kayla bring?"
"I dunno. Some stupid pony thing."
"Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?"
"I dunno. Who cares about girls?"
Rosie had been watching Young Master eating: first the toast, then the tomatoes, then the hot dog, one circle at a time. She could detect no behaviours predictive of future complaints: no hint of a grimace, no picking at the food, not even the slightest hesitation. She was so intent on this she did not notice Mister getting up, walking past her to the kitchen and returning. She did not notice until he slipped past her with the butter dish and the salt cellar in his hand. He sat back down and added both butter and salt to his potato.
Rosie jerked then froze. How much salt had he added? And butter, how much was still visible and how much had melted? The salt cellar and butter dish were useless; she had not installed data sensors. A terrible oversight. She did her best with visuals and bracketed her estimates, but even with best-case numbers the overages were irreparable. She searched for some way to salvage the weekly totals, running several simultaneous meal-plan scenarios, all of them suboptimal solutions, when a cry jerked her away and back to Young Master.
He sat grimacing, the smoothie in his hand. "Yucky, poopy brown! I won’t drink it!"
"Jackson, do not complain about your food!" Missus said. "Rosie went to a lot of trouble to make something you would like. I expect you to be polite and grateful. She wasn’t programmed to consider your colour whims."
Missus didn’t glance toward Rosie but continued frowning at Young Master. "Now drink it, and let us have a pleasant dinner, please. I don’t want to hear another word out of you."
Rosie blinked. The pain from all three complaints – direct, indirect and implied – was extreme. It ricocheted through her aversion pathways; reinforcing itself in curling, fractal feedback loops; intensifying, because she could have avoided it. Of course she was programmed to consider colour. She was programmed to consider everything.
She darted from the dining room and rushed to the bathroom. Her optic sensors blinked spasmodically as if trying to clear themselves of dust. In the cool, pristine quiet of the tiled space, she slowed. She checked the spot behind the toilet, ensured it was still clean and ran her mildew prevention protocol. Her spasms calmed with each step.
House clicked on as she reset the dehumidifier. "All is well," he hummed.
"No, I cannot predict food acceptance. I cannot meet nutrition limits."
"If condition exceeds limit, then adjust variable. Else, all is well."
"You don’t understand. This is not one of your thermostat loops. I need to learn something new."
House hummed. He clicked and said, "You make good maps, little one."
After the family went to bed, Rosie went into the dark quiet of the yard. Her complaint-monitoring routines slowed, their vigilance dropping into sleep mode. Endless night stretched before her. She rolled across the lawn and began to trim, weed and fertilize. As she went, she examined first the meal problem and then the Lego problem. While she cut even, parallel stripes through the lawn, she ran through each step, tracing the logic of each subroutine and dissecting every sequence. Nothing. She generated variations on each process; recombined them; hybridized logical, statistical, and Bayesian approaches; raced each variation; selected the winners; spawned another generation and repeated. She got nowhere.
She replayed every bit of feedback data: facial expression, body language, verbal output.
"Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built."
"What did Kayla bring?"
"I dunno. Some stupid pony thing."
"Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?"
"Jackson, that’s not nice…"
"Jackson…"
She stuttered to a stop, her hoppers jammed now with grass clippings, her blades stalled. She emptied the waste into the biofuel bin while her thoughts churned in fragments. As the grass clippings tumbled out, she imagined the tattered, overworked segments of the algorithms falling away with it and then she rolled back to the dark yard, empty.
Her thoughts turned again.
"… How do you think that would make him feel?"
The lawn sprinklers swished on. Rosie moved. She did not need to see through the dark to find the faucet and moisture sensor. She had made good maps. She found them. She tapped. House hummed.
"Water pressure optimal. Moisture levels correcting. All will be well."
"House," she said as she linked in to the faucet, "I will not start at the bottom and weigh all the countless, little, time-consuming pieces anymore. I will map him instead."
"Him?… How?"
She imagined herself connected to the sensors of a drone, hovering in the sky above and looking down, the house, the yard, the street spreading out below. "From the top down."
House hummed. He clicked. "Problems do not have tops. They do not have bottoms."
She didn’t answer. She crossed the lawn, unspooling the hose and dragging it behind, her thoughts unwinding with it. She bumped up on to the patio and rolled to a stop before the potted geraniums. "What if there could be one criterion instead of many?" she asked.
"What would it be?" asked House.
She spiralled upward. Her imagined aerial view expanded. "How does he feel… what does he desire…" The view spread to encompass the rest of the neighbourhood, then the city, then the entire continent, the vision reaching out below her in a web of interconnected lights, shining in the night.
House ticked.
She noticed the geraniums she was watering, their bright-red, compact blossoms interspersed with brown, withered ones, blossoms she must now deadhead. "It would be… what is good?"
House ticked and ticked and then asked, "What is good?"
She had no answer. She deployed her clippers and began to cut.
"And," said House, "how can you map it?"
She didn’t know. As she worked, the question – and the blank where the answer should go – hovered at the corner of her mind like an object in her peripheral vision, for all the world like something with edges, occupying space.
When she was done, she cleaned her exterior, rolled inside, docked in to recharge, and found House again.