Houseproud — Laurence Raphael Brothers - 2022

The front door closed behind him and I locked it. I adjusted the thermostat and turned off all the lights. I felt lonely almost at once. Ken installed and activated me on Saturday and we spent the whole weekend together getting to know one another. And now for the first time I had to face being unoccupied. All alone for ten hours, maybe more. 36 million milliseconds. Sigh. That thought used three of them. 35,999,997 to go....

“Houseproud” originally appeared in the SciFutures “City of the Future” anthology and also won the Berkeley Machine Intelligence Research Institute prize for Intelligence in Fiction.

Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and technologist. He has worked in R&D at such firms as Bell Communications Research and Google, and he has five patents along with numerous industry publications. His areas of expertise include Internet and cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence, telecom applications, and online games.

Laurence Raphael Brothers' Website

Podcast of Houseproud at Escape Pod

A big thank you to @laurence for permission to post his work here.