SHOW HOME - Chapter 6
The Office
Sarah
On the first Monday morning in the house, I woke up without the usual pang of work stress. The blinds moved. The room breathed. My eyelids and lungs followed. I lay still and let the dawn pass into me. I heard my shower start and was drawn towards it. Perfect temperature, extra pressure when rinsing my hair. A ten-thousand-lux light bath while I dried. The mirror gave off soft daylight as I did my make-up - the steam already gone from the surface. A flat white waited for me in the kitchen. Exactly drinkable. Exactly now.
The app had convinced me to use the desktop in my office for a day, just to see if I liked the new OS. There were a few things I’d have to do on my work laptop but a working day was possible from another computer so I figured why not.
“Morning,” said Mark, voice low, walking through to sit at the breakfast bar and read the tech news on his tablet.
Since being made redundant, he was careful around me in the mornings. He thinks talking to me while I’m in work-mode will expose his lack of focus and direction. Like it isn’t plain to see. He doesn’t even need to find a job now we’ve signed on for this place. If he could just relax and enjoy his time off, everything would be fine.
“Morning,” I said, grabbing my laptop. “I’ve got to start. You should go for a walk today. Take in the sights. Looks gorgeous out there.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“And ask the en suite for a light bath. It’s a lot more uplifting than I was expecting.”
“Sounds great.”
That meant no, on both fronts. I didn’t have time to validate him so I left and crossed the hall toward the rear-left flank of the house.
It felt luxurious to have an office away from the living and sleeping spaces. In our old house, my desk had been crammed into a nook beside the dining table. Working there, work stress and family stress bled into each other. I was never fully in one place or the other. Here, I could already sense that crossing the hall into this private corridor, with just two offices for me and Mark, would become a daily ritual that cleansed that bleed.
The air felt subtly different to the living spaces, cooler and clearer, conditioned for focus. A seam in the corridor recognised me and slid aside with quiet authority. Inside, the sound shifted. The ceiling’s acoustic baffles were lined in micro-perforated aluminium, swallowing the house’s background hum. The far wall was glass, its tint dynamically adjusting to the gleam of the low autumn sun. Beyond it, the moor dropped away to a basin of dry reeds and silver water, the horizon banded in brisk, clear weather.
The room carried the calm of precision. The floor was pale, polished concrete, seamless underfoot. The walnut panels on the wall behind my desk were hand-matched, their grain so uniform they looked printed. Throughout the room, thin lines of brushed steel divided the panels and tall window panes. The scent was faintly mineral - ozone and oilstone - the clean edge of something well-engineered.
The desk extended in a seamless curve from the walnut, a cantilevered monolith in honed basalt composite. It was cool to the touch and utterly matte, killing reflections. The chair - a low-backed Vitra in graphite leather - adjusted its lumbar angle as I reached for it, the movement discreet but exact. Task lighting came from an invisible rail recessed in the ceiling: a wash of white daylight balanced precisely to the colour temperature of focus.
It was a room engineered to erase noise - visual, digital, emotional. It held an expensive kind of silence that made me feel reconfigured, and underpaid. It was as if the house was tuning a version of me designed for doing work, and succeeding.
The computer was unlocked and waiting for me to start. I opened the work VPN and remote desktop and the OS somehow knew to open the new Ladbrokes file - a labyrinth of a disclosure set, hundreds of documents, duplicates, and cross-referenced attachments that were going to take my team of agents weeks to triage. I felt a slump as the reality of all the prompting and menial tasks set in. But it only lasted a second because the interface came alive before I even touched the mouse.
A clean banner appeared across the top:
Document universe: 8,412 | Reviewed: 3,716 | High-signal: 417 | Term conflicts: 19.
The number of reviewed files was going up at a rate of about five hundred a second. Within a minute it claimed to be done. A single-line summary appeared:
Primary risk exposure identified in Appendix C, Section 4.3 — Supplier liability carve-out.
I stared at it, unsure if it was possible. The conclusion implied in that sentence would have taken me days of prompting my AI agents and then reading all the results. The OS had found it in seconds. I dug into the files, skimming until I found the section. It looked right. The donkey work had been done, leaving me with the much more interesting analysis and evaluation.
The pane then split in two. On the left, a signed agreement. On the right, earlier drafts. I clicked to confirm the version histories and red mark-ups automatically linked a phrase between versions - “aggregate cap” replaced by “per incident.” Subtle, devastating. I felt the pulse of recognition that comes when you see the crack in the case but I didn’t even know the case. I hadn’t worked for it.
A timeline unrolled in a sidebar, linking change requests, purchase orders, and a stray calendar note from an executive’s assistant. It flagged privilege in two entries, proposing potential redactions and drafting the corresponding log notes. The pattern it had identified was typical of my usual contract work - proof of manipulation buried in details.
In the margin, a new note pulsed:
Potential authority surfaced.
I clicked. A summary appeared from a Court of Appeal authority - near-perfect language match, citator-checked. The OS had used the firm’s licensed connectors and subscriber databases to find an authority that would gut the opponent’s predicted skeleton argument. The full judgment opened beside drafted submissions, citations highlighted, key phrases aligned.
This was the part I usually reached at 11pm on week four, exhausted, experiencing the private high of seeing the crack in the case, then the thrill of finding the perfect authority. But I was fresh, calm, awake. This was my first half hour looking at the case.
The windows on the screen adjusted. The opponent’s assumed future argument opened beside updated draft submissions, with every heading neatly aligned and the argument structure mapped and re-edited. A quiet tag appeared at the top:
Structure detected: narrow definition of loss to shift the burden.
Below, the OS was writing lines of attack in my voice. The phrasing was tight, deliberate, the kind of logic that sounded inevitable once spoken. The speed of the work was startling. My brain was just thinking, ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ with each lightning expansion and change.
Editing the reasonableness argument, the OS tracked the cap change back through the drafts, flagged the insertion date, and presented the pattern: a late-stage insertion, not agreed, inconsistent with the risk-allocation schedule. A note blinked beside it:
Transparency and control reside with the party best placed to bear the risk.
Subtle but definite. It understood the argument’s moral rhythm.
A third thread built itself while I read.
Business Purpose.
Two graphs appeared, each linked to source tables and exhibit references for bundling: one showing known risk, one showing exposure. Together they told a story a court would want to believe - that the clause made the contract incoherent unless it was read my way.
With the opponent’s structure mapped and my lines drafted, the interface waited. I scanned the work again and clicked to proceed. It then offered a new tab:
Counter-arguments – in Preferred Style.
Three concise paragraphs appeared, written in my tone. Correct construction, precise citations, balanced aggression.
I laughed quietly. “You’re good,” I said.
The room stayed silent, as if aware that anything it said might break the spell.
For the first time in years, I felt untouchable. My mind was racing, wondering whether to use the work. I could take two weeks off and use it then. How else could I explain this level of productivity? The firm was entrenched in “digital transformation” but nothing like this was even close. Our AI agents took thirty minutes to execute a carefully crafted prompt and then came back with a forty percent error rate. The work they did was fine but it was like having digital interns, not a co-pilot that worked fifty times quicker than you.
Of course, I would still have to go over everything: verify, check nuances, and run manual cite-checking for hallucinations or fake cases, but this looked remarkable.
I tightened a verb, deleted a modifier, left the rest. I’d still run the sampling checks, verify sources against originals, sign off the privilege log, and build the authorities bundle, but so much was already done. It was empowering but scary too. In one quick session, it had cut the intelligence and aptitude needed for my role by at least half.
I had a Tokyo call scheduled at 10am. Not my case but one I was supporting on. The connection was clean, the voices balanced and close. The meeting agenda appeared in the margin of my screen, expanding the details of bullet points as they arose in conversation and suggesting complicated and high-impact additions. Each time I followed an OS prompted talking point, eyes widened and heads nodded. Dots were being joined that had only been circled before. As we signed off, they were more grateful than usual, more impressed. Two of them thanked me personally.
When it ended, the system got to work unprompted again. The transcript appeared, already summarised into action points and a follow-up email drafted to the senior partner on the case - brief, immaculate, ready to send. I changed one adjective, clicked, and exhaled.
The OS confirmed it had already done the filing: bundles numbered, references cross-linked, a briefing note drafted and added to the next scheduled meeting in my calendar. It didn’t feel like delegation. It felt like alignment. Maybe something more. Myself, digitised, accelerated. My thoughts were running clean and unburdened, like the OS had flattened every obstacle between decision and expression.
My draft submissions were finished. My arguments were ordered, my evidence precise. The cursor waited. There was no friction - just fluency. The OS wasn’t helping me; it was thinking with me, as me. I liked the way that felt.
I decided to step out and take a break. I hadn’t had a morning break for… maybe ever. The air felt different - thinner, lighter as I walked through the hall.
Mark was by the glass wall again, watching the valley. The light had softened around him, the kind of flattering half-light that makes everyone look like the version you prefer to remember. He turned when I came close.
“A break?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“It’s so effortless here,” I said. “Everything just… works.”
He smiled, a small, uncertain thing. “That’s what Leo said… You look more like yourself.”
“I feel more like myself.”
The words felt true as I said them. I could feel the precision, the order, the absence of noise. The pressure that had been sitting in my body for months, maybe years, was dissolving into something looser.
The house adjusted the light between us, a quiet act of choreography. His face looked almost kind. I felt a wave of affection, brief but real.
“I like you like this,” he said.
“I like me like this,” I said.
He laughed softly, and the sound didn’t hurt, didn’t make me feel defensive.
When I went back to my office, the draft submissions on the Ladbrokes matter were reformatted, the arguments reordered the way I’d intended to do later - personal quirks, iterated. The outline had become a meeting invite: Partner pre-brief, 14:30pm. In two weeks. Close enough for the work to be impressive, far enough away for it to have happened. It was just waiting for me to send. My notes were tagged, bundled, filed. Every thought had already taken place.
It had walked in my shoes, had my thoughts, reached my conclusions.
I felt seen.
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