SHOW HOME - Chapter 10
The BBQ
Mark
We stepped out of the front door into crisp, motionless, golden air. It was the Sunday before the kids started at their new school. We started walking down the gravel path to the Preston’s house. The sky had cleared and the wind had completely dropped off. The still, clarity made the valley beyond look like a screensaver.
“Just look at that,” said Sarah, stopping. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with her new life. She was wearing a light linen dress with a thick, oversized woollen cardigan, sunglasses pushed up into her hair. She looked easygoing, ready for a day laying down social roots.
“Incredible,” I said, admitting it.
I didn’t say that the air was so crystalline it made me feel exposed, or that my lungs felt like there was not quite enough oxygen up here.
Four hundred metres of manicured gravel track separated our plot from the Preston house. In the quiet stillness our footsteps sounded violent, like robot feet crushing human bones.
Chloe and Leo walked ahead of us, trailing long afternoon shadows from the autumn’s low hanging sun. They had their heads down, checking phones, ignoring the view - digital individuals, no sense of the real world around them. Sarah walked beside me. I could smell her perfume, something floral and light. It was mixing with the faint scent of woodsmoke, drifting through the air from behind the Preston house.
“Listen,” I said, keeping my voice low. “We need to be careful what we say around these guys.”
Sarah didn’t break stride. “Mark.”
“I’m serious. Living here is their job. You don’t know Telos like I do.”
“Please,” she said. She stopped walking and turned to me. The hard sunlight hit her face but she didn’t squint. She looked hopeful. Desperate. “Can we just have lunch with them and decide for ourselves?”
“I told you, he’s a creep.”
“Which is it?” whispered Sarah, starting to get annoyed. “Are they corporate spies, or sexual predators?”
“I’m just looking out for our family.”
“You’re being intense,” she said. “I can feel you vibrating from here.”
“Fine. Let’s see for ourselves.”
“Perfect.” She reached out and straightened my polo shirt collar. Her touch was firm, a physical edit. “Just remember, they’ve invited us over and made an effort. They have a daughter Chloe and Leo’s age. This could be good for us. All of us.”
She looked at me, waiting for compliance.
“Just don’t agree to every Sunday or something like that,” I said.
She let out a short, tight breath. Not quite a sigh but close.
“Be a bit more open minded, Mark. Please.”
She walked on, catching up to the kids.
I took a breath. The mountain tops stretched out for miles, ancient and brown, the sky a limitless blue. It was stunning. Isolated. Terrifying.
I followed them.
The Prestons’ house was identical to ours. The same sharp angles, the same timber and glass, but it felt different. More authoritative. Secretive. All the glass on their ground floor was mirrored, I realised.
Their walls caught the afternoon sun, turning the house into a gleaming jewel. When we reached the front of the house, I half-expected the heavy door to open, the voice of their OS guiding us through to the back garden, but it stayed shut. The timber remained a solid, impenetrable wall. The panel beside it remained dark.
“Round here.”
The voice came from the side of the property. Rebecca was standing by the corner of the house, waving us over.
“It’s too nice to be inside,” she called out, smiling against the sun. “We’re out back.”
Sarah smiled and adjusted her course, steering the kids towards the side of the house. I lagged.
“Come on,” she hissed, quietly.
We followed Rebecca around the side. The wild scrub of the moor had been replaced by a manicured lawn that felt like deep-pile carpet underfoot. Beside their rear terrace, David was at a large brick grill, smoke rising in a thin, straight line. He waved - a casual, confident gesture.
Their garden looked like an advertisement for the life we were supposed to be living.
The furniture was low, Italian, and arranged near the grill. The table was laden with vibrant, healthy colour: a rocket, pomegranate and goat’s cheese salad drizzled in a dark balsamic glaze; a platter of charred asparagus spears with shaved pecorino; bowls of olives and artisan breads.
“Welcome,” David called, waving us over.
Rebecca quickly grabbed two glasses of chilled white wine from the table and offered them to me and Sarah. I took a glass and nodded my thanks. I spotted the bottle, Sarah’s favourite. Their OS had chosen her taste over mine.
“Wonderful, thank you,” said Sarah, taking hers.
“We thought, why waste a day like this? We’ve got everything we need out here.”
“This looks fancy,” said Sarah, pointing to a sleek, detached structure at the bottom of the garden. A cube of black glass and cedar, separate from the main house.
“The Media Pod,” Rebecca said, having grabbed a tray of soft drinks and snacks for the kids. “Cinema screen, surround sound, kitchenette, bathroom. Doubles as a gym and a yoga room, or a guest suite. You just tell the OS what you want it to be and two minutes later, voila.”
“Wow,” gasped Sarah.
“If the kids go in there, we won’t see them for hours,” said David.
“Fingers crossed,” said Sarah, laughing.
Chloe rolled her eyes.
“Olivia is in there if you want to check it out,” David said to Leo and Chloe. “I think she’s got the VR rigs set up. Crazy what these AI games can do these days.”
Leo didn’t need telling twice. He grabbed a soft drink and a bowl of nachos from Rebecca’s tray, thanked her and jogged across the lawn. Chloe took a drink too, forced a smile and followed Leo slowly. The glass door of the pod slid open to admit them, then hissed shut.
“Handy,” I said. “Good to have a bathroom out here too. You can keep your guests’ muddy shoes out of the house.”
David paused. Just for a fraction of a second.
“It is handy,” he said. “Great to have outdoor days. Forget about the house and everything it can do.”
He laughed but his eyes didn’t leave mine.
I looked at the main house. The rear wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, vast and imposing, also mirrored. I could only see the reflection of the garden, and us, standing in it. Had it always been like this? Or was it just so that we couldn’t see inside?
I leaned in close to Sarah as David turned back to the grill.
“Do our windows do that?” I whispered.
“What?” she whispered back, smiling at Rebecca arranging the cutlery on the table.
“Stop people looking in.”
She pulled away from me, her smile tightening into a grimace.
“Go and talk to David,” she murmured through gritted teeth.
She stepped over and started helping Rebecca at the table, without instruction. I stood alone on the perfect lawn, staring at the windows, then walked over to the grill. I had no choice.
“Tomahawks,” David said, sensing my approach. “Locally sourced. Forty-eight hours in the water bath.”
He lifted one of the seven large cuts of beef. It was dark, wet and raw. The bone extended from the meat - clean white porcelain.
“The house sourced it, and prepped it,” he said. “I didn’t do a thing. Just asked for the best steak it could find.”
He started slapping the meat onto the heavy cast-iron skillet section of the grill. Seven hisses and roars of fat and heat cut through the garden’s silence. Smoke billowed up into the blue sky, smelling of thyme, garlic and seared butter.
“Impressive,” I said.
“Having good meat on a barbeque, feeding the neighbours, it just smells and feels like abundance, don’t you think?”
“I think of it as a tribal smell,” I said. “People positioning themselves to make sure they get their fair share, even when there’s plenty.”
He nodded as if that tidbit had settled both sides of the argument for him, and spooned foaming butter over the seven cuts with a rhythmic, well-practised motion.
“We used to spend Sundays cleaning the house, shopping for food, prepping the dinner. Now we stand in the sun drinking fine wine - grilling the country’s best steaks just to feel useful.”
Sarah and Rebecca stepped over to us, drawn by the sizzle and scent. The smoke drifted over us, thick and savoury. It overrode the higher brain functions. It smelled like safety.
“Tomahawks?” said Sarah. “I’ve never tried one. Do we have to throw them into each other’s mouths?”
David laughed. Rebecca too.
“Look great, don’t they?” David said, not breaking his rhythm with the butter. “The OS said you all eat meat.”
“We do,” Sarah concurred. “We used to be pesky pescatarians, until we could afford farm quality meat.”
“The meat industry. It’s a shame,” said Rebecca, nodding.
David started flipping the tomahawks, sending another seven huge hisses and sizzles into the air, a cloud of delicious meaty promise filling our noses.
He looked at his wife and winked, exaggerating the male prowess that working the barbecue gave him. She smiled back, a fey feminine thing with a hook of sexual irony.
Sarah smiled at them, a genuine, relaxed expression - ‘good people,’ she was thinking. The quality of everything in her new life was better - the property, the food, the people, the experience of living and being.
I took a sip of my drink and looked past the smoke to the valley beyond. From here, I could just about make out the scarring on the hillside where the construction road cut through the heather.
The rhythmic scraping and pouring of David’s buttery spoon started again.
“I hear you went down to the construction site?” he asked, somehow noticing my glance. He hadn’t looked up.
“Just having a nosey,” I said.
Sarah stiffened beside me. She didn’t look at me but her hand tightened on the stem of her wine glass.
“Real death traps. You want to be careful.”
“You went to a construction site?” asked Sarah.
“I was interested.”
“The houses are fascinating,” conceded Rebecca.
David started lifting the thick tomahawks off the grill, setting them on a wooden board to rest. The crusts were mahogany-dark, the centre promising to be perfect pink. The hiss died away, returning the garden to its silence.
He looked at me then. A calm, patient smile.
“So, you saw a glimpse behind the curtain,” he said. “Impressed?”
“Do we have our own data centre?” I asked. “For fifteen homes.”
“You should see the hydro plant,” he said, gesturing beyond the manicured lawn to the valley beyond. “Barely even visible. But if the grid goes down, or the cloud gets hacked, these houses won’t blink.”
He picked up a carving knife. The steel glinted in the low sun.
“If the world out there gets messy,” he waved the knife towards the horizon, towards the cities we had left behind, “we stay online. We stay warm. We stay safe.”
“And fed?” I asked.
He smiled. It was a winning, charismatic smile. The smile of a man who held the keys to the kingdom.
“We’ve locked in the farms for a hundred miles,” he said. “The OS handles everything. Grab the plates, will you?”
I took the large heavy plates from a surface built into the barbecue beyond the grill and skillet.
“So, what’s the vision for it all?” Sarah asked, jumping in to fill the silence I’d left. “These mountains.”
“Total autonomous luxury,” said David.
“That, I can live with,” she said.
He began cutting the steaks into inch thick slices, scooping them on his long wide knife and then prompting me to hold out a plate for him. Rebecca took each one from me within a second, ferrying them back and forth to the table.
“I’ll tell the kids it’s ready,” said Sarah, easily finding herself a role.
She walked over and disappeared into the media pod.
David lifted the meat and bone of the next tomahawk onto the next plate. Rebecca took it from me and carried it to the table.
“Next,” David said, cutting and scooping, not looking at me.
I held out another plate. Knife, meat, transfer. Rebecca’s fingers brushed mine as she took it, steady and practiced. I was fixed between them, one hand out to receive, the other passing on, redundant but functional. An object for them to use.
Beyond David, the rear glass of the house stayed mirrored. No hint of space. Just the garden and our small choreography reflected back at me.
The pod door opened. Sarah emerged with Chloe, Leo and Olivia behind her, the kids talking to each other.
“Perfect,” David said, lifting the last tomahawk onto his knife. “Let’s get you all fed.”
Rebecca took the final plate from me, her fingers tracing over mine again. Maybe it was the friction of a bored housewife. Maybe I was just a convenient grip point, extra fingers to help her balance the weight. Either way, it left me slightly off-centre.
We all sat down at the low teak table, bleached to a silvery grey that matched the decking. The setting was informal but the cutlery was heavy, brushed steel. It balanced perfectly in the hand.
Slices of beef fanned out on our plates in a gradient of red to pink to brown. David poured a sauce from a tiny copper kettle. Chimichurri. Bright green herbs suspended in oil. Most of us did the same.
“Dig in,” he said. “No ceremony here.”
I stabbed half a slice onto my fork and cut. I wanted it to be tough, or bland, or overly smoky. I put it in my mouth. It dissolved. The fat had rendered down into pure flavour, rich and iron-heavy, cut through by the sharp vinegar of the sauce. It was, without question, the best steak I had ever eaten.
“Oh my god,” Sarah said. She closed her eyes. “David, this is ridiculous.”
I took a forkful of the salad. The rocket was deep and peppery, and the pomegranate seeds burst with sharp, sweet juice against the creamy cheese. The kids hummed and nodded in silent appreciation, scooping from the bowls.
“Don’t thank me,” David said, pouring more wine. “I just did what the house told me.”
“Everything is so easy now,” Rebecca said, tearing a piece of sourdough bread. “Before we moved here, I felt like I was running a logistics company. Shopping. Cleaning. Scheduling. Repairs. School runs. Sports teams. All on top of my job. My brain was basically just a calendar.”
Sarah nodded, her fork suspended halfway to her mouth. She looked at Rebecca with intense, hungry recognition.
“The mental load,” Sarah said. “It kills you.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “After the first two week here? The house manages itself. It orders the food. I don’t know how it does half of it but it cleans. Have you noticed how it gets cleaner? It even schedules maintenance. I’ve started painting again, Sarah. For the first time in ten years. I just have… time.”
Sarah looked at the house. The mirror-glass facade reflecting the blue sky. Sanctuary.
“I want that,” she said quietly.
At the end of the table, Chloe and Olivia were in their own world. They weren’t eating much. They were huddled over Olivia’s phone, scrolling through a feed I couldn’t see.
“You get the boost automatically if you…” I heard part of Olivia’s whisper.
“… use the script?” Chloe asked, her voice low.
I strained to hear more. Alignment. Tagging.
“Mark?”
I snapped back. David was holding the wine bottle out to me.
“Top up?” he asked.
“Thanks,” I said.
He poured. The liquid was dark red this time, heavy.
“You look miles away,” he said.
“Just enjoying the peace,” I said.
“Relaxing used to feel rare,” he agreed. “We’d forgotten how to relax when we first got here. You get more time for yourself here. You have to figure it out.”
The sun was beginning to dip onto the ridge of the mountain. The temperature should have been dropping but the air remained uncannily warm. Maybe some hidden patio heaters were on. Maybe the garden was geo-thermal. Who knows.
The kids retreated back to the Media Pod. Sarah and Rebecca were enjoying their wine, relaxed, leaning back in their chairs, talking about how raising teenagers was just as challenging as raising small children - if not more so. Then the conversation lulled. The silence seemed comfortable. I decided to test it.
“I noticed something on the hall interface yesterday,” I said.
I kept my tone casual. Level. Just making conversation.
Sarah stiffened. She knew that tone.
“Oh?” David said. He had gone back to his plate and was trimming a line of fat from one of his slices, his cutlery poised and precise, one last morsel.
“A status tag,” I said. “Next to my name. It said ‘Monitoring’. I was just checking the settings.”
The silence at the table changed texture. It shifted away from relaxed.
“It’s a standard status,” David said, not looking up. “When you’re monitoring the settings.”
“It’s the house that’s monitoring though, isn’t it?” I said. “I was just taking a glance at what it was doing.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “I never thought of it like that.”
“Is there any way we can access everything it’s monitoring?” I said. “A live read out or something? I read some of the T&Cs again. Voice stress. Pulse rate. I’d like to know where it’s getting some of its data points. Where all the sensors are. That kind of thing.”
David wiped his hands on a linen napkin. He placed it on the table and looked at me. His expression wasn’t angry. It was sympathetic.
“Everything the house monitors, it does it to try to help you, Mark. In all honesty, it would probably take you a year to read the data signals from a single day. But it doesn’t monitor anything you didn’t sign off on. Nothing that we didn’t sign off on too.”
“Don’t you think it’s worth it?” asked Rebecca.
Sarah smiled and sighed with relief.
“I do.”
“The more it knows the better it can serve you,” David said. “If they could hook it into my brain I’d let them. I think it’s wonderful.”
“I just want to know where the lines are,” I said. “That’s all.”
Sarah put her glass down. Hard.
“Mark,” she warned.
“No, it’s fine,” David said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. He looked at me with kindness. “Mark spent twenty years in Trust and Safety. His whole career was about finding ways to close loops for exploits, risks, bad actors. Isn’t that right?”
“It is,” I said.
“You’re still in Trust and Safety mode,” he said softly. “I get it. You spent all those years hunting for bad apples. Now you’re in a garden and you can’t stop scanning the trees.”
He gestured around us. The perfect lawn. The golden light. His wife enraptured by his words.
“There are no bad apples here, Mark,” he said. “That’s the whole point. You don’t have to be the one looking anymore.”
I could see Sarah was convinced.
“I just want to know how our data is used. Where it goes,” I said. “Simple stuff.”
“It all stays on site,” David said. “The system sends reports, but not your data. You’re safe here, Mark.”
I looked at Sarah. I wanted her to back me up, feel the need to protect her children’s privacy, anything. Instead, she gave a short, tight laugh. She shook her head, apologising to Rebecca with her eyes.
“He finds it hard to switch off.”
“It takes time,” Rebecca said soothingly. “Decompression is a physical process.”
“Exactly,” David said. He picked up the wine bottle again. “Drink, Mark. You’re among friends.”
He filled my glass. I watched the red swirl rise almost to the rim, catching Sarah’s reflection in it as she smiled at Rebecca.
“That’s something I wanted to ask you,” she said. “I noticed that the kids will have a self-driving car that comes to do the school runs. Do you think they should pool their rides? It seems silly to have two cars doing exactly the same trip at exactly the same time.”
“That’s a great idea,” said Rebecca.
This was the beginning of an avalanche of segues in which Sarah started educating herself on how to be a socially acceptable and good parent in this environment. Instead of engaging me, David listened to his wife giving nuggets of advice appreciatively, agreeing wherever he could.
I sipped my wine and watched them as the sun dropped behind the ridge. The garden lights came on in a soft gradient. The air stayed warm. The terrace might as well have been indoors.
When we finally stood up to leave, it was fully dark. I retrieved the kids. Chloe and Olivia were still talking quietly and intensely. Leo was describing the pod’s VR capabilities in forensic detail. They were in good spirits. As good as I’d ever seen them.
“We should have you all over sometime. Soon,” said Sarah.
“We’d love that,” said David and Rebecca, almost in unison.
“Thanks for the lovely dinner,” I said, remembering to be neighbourly.
We turned to go and walked towards the side of the house.
“Chloe, hold on a sec,” David called.
I stopped and turned back faster than I meant to.
He had stepped off the deck and was standing close to her. Too close. His hand rested on her shoulder – the kind of neighbourly gesture that would look paternal from a distance, but also proprietary. His fingers pressed into the fabric of her hoodie. He dipped his head until his mouth was level with her ear.
I took a step towards them. My stomach tightened.
“Mark?” Sarah said, a warning in it.
David said something short. Three or four words. Chloe looked up at him. She didn’t pull away. She smiled – a quick, private flash – and nodded. Then she waved to Olivia, who waved back.
David straightened and saw me watching. He didn’t look guilty. He looked composed. Professional. He gave me a small, tight nod.
“Safe travels,” he said.
We walked down the side of the house.
“What did he say?” I asked Chloe as soon as we were ten paces away.
“God, nothing,” she said, rolling her eyes, her hand clamped round her phone in her pocket.
She walked off ahead.
The gravel began to crunch under our feet, loud in the mountaintop silence.
“He gets too close,” I said to Sarah. “You saw him.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” she said. “It was a lovely day. They seem great.”
“Sure. Fine. No conclusions.”
I took a breath and smiled at her. Ahead, the kids were already back on their screens. Behind us, the Preston house stayed in mirror-glass mode, garden and sky pasted over whatever was inside.
They all walked on, easing into the life this place was offering them. I was the one looking back at the blank dark glass, waiting for it to blink.
Copyright © 2025 Matt Wilven. All rights reserved.