SHOW HOME - Chapter 5
The Neighbour
Mark
After the bakehouse, full of good bread and coffee, three chimes sounded through the ground floor. The door feed took over the nearest screen. A man stood on the step in pale afternoon light, the crease of his trousers sharp and deliberate.
“It’s our neighbour,” said Sarah. She smoothed her hair with both hands, the quick way she does before a meeting she wants to go well.
I crossed the hall, still enjoying the novelty of the perfectly solid ground underfoot. The front door had no handle. It was waiting for an instruction. I told it to open and it did, at a neighbourly pace.
The man on the step was about my age. Cashmere in pale oatmeal. Smart casual trainers without a mark. A slim tablet rested against his palm, so comfortable it could be an extension of his hand.
“Mark,” he said, warmth calibrated. Sarah joined me. He smiled a few degrees wider. “And Sarah. Good to finally meet you both. I’m David, David Preston.”
His handshake was firm and dry, the kind people practice to seem unpracticed. He looked past my shoulder, not rudely, just enough to register the space.
“I wanted to drop by personally,” he said, “to make sure you’re settling in OK.”
He did not ask to come in. He stepped across the threshold and achieved the same result. I shuffled back and moved aside. The door closed behind him with its firm click. The entry panel flickered: more words I didn’t catch.
He strolled beyond us and led the way into the living area. He looked around with a faint smile and nodded, everything being as it should.
“The core principle is predictive assistance,” he said. His line sounded rehearsed, ready for its public. He lifted a hand and swept a small arc through the air, as if conducting. The room found a brighter daylight setting. The colour temperature moved toward white. The shadows sharpened. “The system learns your rhythms and your habits. It keeps your environment optimised for your comfort and wellbeing.”
This was the type of language we used to justify invasive models in the early build phase. I forced a smile. Sarah watched him, enthused.
“We do not just build houses,” David said. He let the sentence sit, then finished it. “We remove domestic friction.”
I stood by the Miele. He gave it a glance that read as affectionate.
“Your user profiles are key,” he said. “Once everything learns your preferences, your coffee will be ready the second you walk into the kitchen in the morning. Your showers will be the exact heat you prefer. No thought or action required.”
He turned his head slightly. “Ashworth Home,” he said, to the air. “Let’s have it 10% more positive in here.”
Nothing shifted in a way I could name. Maybe the lighting a little. But I felt a strain lift out of my eyes, and a mild brain fog clear. He smiled. “It’s not perceptible. But your body will notice.”
Sarah’s smile extended into a small laugh. She did not seem to know she had done it. He moved to the centre of the room. The glass behind him held the moor in near-impressionistic swirls of green, orange, blue and purple. Perhaps modified or enhanced for the moment, perhaps real. He opened his hands a fraction.
“Our goal is to give families back their most valuable asset - time. Shopping, climate, lighting, security. Even most of your chores. These are solved problems now. The house does not ask. It infers. An environment so responsive, so intuitive, you are free to live.”
The pitch was seamless. Frictionless. I had signed off on language like this for years, and it still worked on me, which annoyed me.
“It’s some set up,” I said, the old systems knowledge kicking in. “Where does it all live? Where’s the infrastructure?”
“It’s built to be invisible. The house is part home, part warehouse, part machine,” he said, placating me. “One piece in a network that will eventually service all fifteen homes here on the range.”
Sarah leaned on the island with two fingers. “Sorry, random question,” she said. “The barista oat milk. In the fridge. I used to buy it at a deli near chambers, on my work card. You should have no record of that.”
“The predictive engine is not a single model,” he said, pleased she had asked. “It’s a stack. It triangulates. Payment makes one map. Movements make another. You can infer habit from absence as much as presence. The line of best fit is not always straight.”
His voice lowered. The temperature of the moment changed with it.
“To move from reactive to truly predictive,” he said, “the Telos OS requires full access to your environmental and behavioural data. It is a partnership. You provide the signals. The house converts them into value. The more it learns, the better it serves. And the better it serves you, the better it will serve all the future families we’re building for.”
Full access to our environmental and behavioural data. The phrase landed hard. I had watched executives fight to have phrases like those buried in appendices. Here it was, out in the open.
He placed the tablet on the island. The screen woke into a clean stack of legalese. A lot of words. A lot of white.
Sarah took it first. She scrolled. She read patches the way a good lawyer reads when she has decided the case already - intelligent skimming. She paused on the page that described audio capture in shared spaces. She read it through and tapped to accept. She paused on the page about third-party service provisioning. She scanned the carve-outs for anonymisation, nodded to herself, and tapped to accept. She paused on the page where the word experimental appeared in a paragraph about model updates. She made a face that said she understood what the word meant and did not mind it. She accepted.
She passed the tablet to me. I scrolled. The words were not surprising at first but then they became more and more vague.
Continuous multimodal capture from approved zones for model improvement.
Derived features may be shared with trusted partners for service delivery.
Override authority reserved for safety, compliance and integrity.
Emotional state estimation automatically enabled for comfort optimisation.
The tone of the phrases was familiar. The way the words validated service and convenience in exchange for data capture. A playbook lifted straight out of my old terms of service drafts. It had used the tone of the small print in the subscription contracts of our first general reasoning models. I could hear my team’s refinements in them. Calm. Measured. Reassuring. Now authored by the machine. The new inhuman voice that makes you put your thumb on the glass - with a tiny echo of me in it.
Sarah watched. There was no pressure in her face, only hope that things would work out. I put my thumb on the tablet. It took the print and thanked me, white serif text on black:
Thank you, Mark. You have unlocked your Telos Home’s full capabilities. No further action required.
David smiled with the easy satisfaction of a person whose job is to make problems go away. “Perfect,” he said. “You will not believe how it feels to have your home looking after you. We’re all signed off for full support over at ours too.”
He walked back towards the entrance. We followed.
The light in the hall had adjusted a degree warmer, to a colour that flattered the skin and removed wrinkles. We all looked younger and happier. Somewhere in the walls a camera tracked and zoomed very slightly and then decided against moving as I noticed it.
Sarah said, “It sounds incredible.”
David turned his warmth onto her and let it rest there.
“It is,” he said. “You’ll find that the house’s idea of help is broader than yours. I’m at a point where I wouldn’t know what to do without it. The amount of time and effort you save is just wonderful.” He stepped toward the front door. “My details are in the app if you need anything. Though the aim is that you won’t.”
The door opened, making space for him to pass through. Cool air came in. I stepped out onto the doorstep to see him out. He turned back with a look of polite concern, his expression shifting from neighbourly warmth to one of profound, conspiratorial sincerity.
“It’s a brutal industry,” he said, his voice now a low hum of confidence. “What happened to you…”
A bolt of cold unease went through me. I froze in the doorway. Of course, he knew my precise, humiliating truth. He held my gaze, letting the violation land.
“This isn’t some corporate redundancy package, Mark. It’s recognition. We knew that you, more than anyone, would appreciate the system we’re building here.”
He had taken my greatest professional trauma and recast it as a unique qualification. I wasn’t an employee anymore; I was a connoisseur of the system that had consumed my expertise and my role. Its first willing specimen.
He saw that I understood. Not just the facts, but the meaning. The absolute assertion of the company’s power. He walked away with the same unmarked confidence he had arrived with.
“He seems nice,” said Sarah, approaching my side.
“Sure,” I said.
Sarah brushed my sleeve. “No?”
“He seems fine,” I said, though it came out flat. “He just gives me the creeps.”
“He’s a company boy, that’s all.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I usually am,” she said.
As we walked across the hall, the giant black square brightened to an active black, then faded dull again as we passed. Somewhere in the house, systems shifted and updated. Every movement, every word, every tone, another data point for refinement. The house wasn’t learning how to serve us. It was doing what David had just done: mapping our vulnerabilities and inviting itself into our lives.
Copyright © 2025 Matt Wilven. All rights reserved.
Wow, the way David's 'warmth calibrated' arrival combined with the intelligent door's quiet obedience so perfectly captures the unsettling, almost clinical, perfection we're drifing towards in our increasingly automated and curated social spaces, something you portray with such chilling insight.