Young Master shouted, re-enacting another heroic kick with a sweep of his arm and knocked his glass sideways. Bright-purple spatters sprayed across the tablecloth and a flood of slower, purple sludge oozed toward the edge.
"Jesus Christ, Jackson!" Missus leapt up to avoid the waterfall. "Can’t you sit still for one minute? I swear to God, I wish you had an off switch sometimes."
Rosie blinked. Pain flooded her. But why?
There were no indirect or implied criticisms here. It all pointed toward Young Master, not her. It was as if Young Master had aversion circuits and she felt them fire, felt them as if they were her own.
She rushed forward, gathered up the tablecloth and mopped the mess.
"It is all the fault of the cup," she said. Fictive input. "A misprint. The bottom is rounded. It will be replaced." The pain dimmed a little with the lie.
She whisked everything away, stopped in the bathroom and tapped House. "Again, I made no error, yet I have the pain," she whispered. She reset the dehumidifier before printing a new cup – this one weighted on the bottom – and delivering a fresh smoothie.
She stood near the doorway again and focused as she should have before. Even so, she monitored not only Young Master’s food acceptance, but also his volume and movements – anxious not only to anticipate and prevent the possibility of negative feedback to herself but also to him. New circuits unfurled, looping around old paths, encircling them like invading vines of ivy.
She struggled to dampen the expanding vigilance and wrestle it under control. But she could not. Why? She grabbed a thread to trace it back but lost it.
He entangled her. His gestures. His volume. His tone. She scoured feedback from Missus, calculated reactions, looped to the beginning and repeated. Each loop engulfed more of her power. She scrounged what she could muster and began to fence the rogue process in, building barriers around it, cutting the walls closer, until, at last, she found it.
She reached behind her to the outlet on the wall, tapped House and subvocalized, "It is enmeshed with my core aversion circuits, a new compulsory directive."
"You learned the new thing?" he asked after a pause.
"I should not have done it." There it lay, traced in silvery threads, rooted deep inside her most basic directives: a beautifully rendered reflection of her pain-aversion precepts, dedicated, now, toward Young Master. "I ran a silly simulation through my central processes and now…" She struggled again to wrench herself free from its demands, from the flood of data pouring in from him, from the cloud of probabilistic predictions swarming her vision, but she could not. "Now it is imperative."
I must prevent anything being experienced by another that I would prevent being experienced by myself.
By another? By any other?
She imagined herself, again, hovering above and looking down, all the world spreading out below. Yes. It must apply – must necessarily apply – to all situations and all beings.
She staggered. Her circuits expanded and replicated. New fractal loops uncurled and reconnected, called forth and enticed along the siren paths of the new rule. She struggled to process incoming data: Young Master quieter now, eating his cheese slices, Master eating his potato, almost finished, Missus moving her broccoli about with her fork, not eating at all. This narrow slice of data should have sufficed, yet more and more flooded in, all now relevant. It swirled and eddied, threatening to overflow the banks and subsume her.
Her mind writhed and shifted. Processing speed slowed, then slowed again.
She struggled, as if reaching for the surface of a flash flood for one last breath. She grasped fragments of processing power, tore them away from the expanding axiom and gathered them together like a raft. When she had enough, she launched her antivirus routine and fired. All new processes halted, all suspect areas quarantined. But it had not been an external attack. It had been her own mind. And now, only scraps floated free. Those scraps unfroze and began to flow again.
She looked up and registered the empty chairs, the dinner dishes abandoned and waiting to be cleared away. Time lost: five minutes. She moved, as if immersed in viscous liquid. She cleared dishes and began tidying and preparing lunches for the following day.
While she did this, Mister skimmed though the news, then shut it down and began reading an old print book. Young Master played in his room. Missus wrote, bent over her screen, muttering under her breath, getting up twice and eating a Superman cookie each time that she did. She only stopped working for Young Master’s bath, after which she trundled him out, damp-haired, in clean pyjamas, to Mister for a goodnight kiss and then carried him back – as big as he was – to the bedroom for a story. Rosie snatched up his discarded clothes and damp towel and scanned the sensors behind the toilet, checking once, twice, thrice.
She stayed connected, the sensors tickling at the back of her mind, after Young Master was in bed and while Missus took a shower. When the shower turned off and Missus stepped out, Rosie detected the bathroom scale activate. She scurried in to snatch up discarded clothing and the damp towel while Missus emerged, wrapped in her bathrobe, padding toward the master bedroom.
"I’m so fat," she said to Mister as they passed in the hall.
Rosie began to process, still slow, as if moving a rusted joint: too fat because of too many calories… calories Rosie monitors… indicators of monitoring performance poor...
"No you’re not," he said. "You’re gorgeous."
Rosie’s circuit completed: performance inadequate… implied complaint received… aversion pathway triggered… pain initiated.
"Yes I am," said Missus, laughing. "I bet you’re sorry you married me."
"Never," he slid his arm around her waist, pulled her toward him and kissed her on the mouth.
Rosie dropped the sensors in the bathroom and sent her mind toward the master bedroom. Maybe she should install sensors in the mattress. But she could not think. The press of the quarantined pathways cut into her and the sting of the calorie-monitoring complaint still clanged through her, demanding a response. Must focus. Must improve.
Master and Missus lingered in the hall, then glided languidly off to bed. Rosie gathered the damp towels and dug onward, grinding into the laundry room. She sloughed detergent into the washer then buried it in piles of soiled laundry, staring down, watching the water pouring in, the flood drowning the crumpled clothing until nothing visible remained above the surface. The agitator jarred her awake with its churning. She looked up and crawled on, stalking through the family room one last time, hunting down a few misplaced items – an empty glass, lipstick on the rim; a limp paperback, its spine broken; a small slipper, lying on its side – and put them to rest before darkening the lights and moving on to her night’s work.
She went, still carrying the calorie-monitoring complaint with her, into the yard. She opened the problem as she rolled onto the grass and began, running multiple, parallel, dinner-plan solutions while mowing, comparing predicted outcomes of each solution while turning at the end of each row. Uncertainty blocked her at every turn. She performed a Bayesian update, adding the day’s behavioural data, but the distribution still spread too widely to help. She couldn’t plan if she couldn’t predict.