WARNING: Spoilers follow.
The House of Time – What is time? Is it just a concept and a reality that affects everyone and everything? With the passing of time comes maturity, experience, memories, and sentimentality. On the other hand, time also brings deterioration and loss. But what effect would time have on an artificial intelligence (AI) that was not designed to die? What about an AI threatened with death?
Origins of The House of Time
“The House of Time” began as most of my stories do: on a sheet of paper, as a few sentences of a quickly jotted note. Sometimes I have a random thought that could become a story, and so I note it down on whatever medium is handy at the time—scraps of paper or a note app on my phone.
The inspiration for “The House of Time” came from an anthology call in 2019. It asked for themes of longevity. So I wrote down a page of ideas, as I usually do when brainstorming for themed anthologies. As it turned out, I completely misread the whole “longevity” theme, wrote a story that wasn’t quite in line with what the editors wanted, and had my story rejected. I did berate myself for not fully addressing the themes the editors wanted, which is something I usually do quite well. Live and learn. But I didn’t get upset. Rejection is a fact of life for a writer. So I pressed on.
Format
Writing “The House of Time” as an AI’s first-person log entries was something new for me. I was exploring the use of first-person point of view and wanted to try something different. It allowed me to accomplish several goals:
- To record the AI’s raw thoughts and emotions as it progressed through the generations.
- To show the reader the extent of time’s passing via dated log entries.
- To show just how much the AI watched and interacted with the household through log entry numbers.
- To show the level of control the AI had over the mansion and what it could do to protect itself.
Trying to Publish The House of Time
Following my rejection for the themed anthology, I began sending “The House of Time” to other markets. It was rejected by five magazines before being accepted by Aurealis and published in Issue #133 in August 2020.
As is unfortunately the case for most short fiction markets nowadays, few of the magazines offered comments on my story upon rejection. As I know from experience, short fiction editors are overworked and underpaid (and most of the time not paid at all), so there is little time to give personalised comments on rejected stories. One magazine, Deep Magic, did give me a lovely comment, noting that the story was “sweet and different from the norm”, though it did play to a common science fiction trope.
Themes
Longevity
“The House of Time” deals with several themes. Foremost of these is longevity, but there are several sub-themes that branch out from it. I suppose the story takes a trope of self-aware AI and looks at an AI’s perspective of longevity, separating consciousness with body. The AI is alive and can live for as long as its software is supported, but is also alive in the “body” it inhabits—a mansion constructed by its first owners. When an AI is self-aware, who can blame it for wanting to live forever? And if it is self-aware, does that mean it has the right to self-determination?
Self-Determination
As the world grapples with the onset of enhanced AI and the possibility of robotic help in society, there will inevitably be discussions on whether robots and AI should have the right to determine their own lives and future. This issue is not new in science fiction, but I tried to do something different in my story. Many stories of robots and self-determination deal with android-like constructs that want to live like humans. In “The House of Time”, my AI is just an intelligence that inhabits a house. It cannot go anywhere, yet it is still “alive” in the sense that it thinks, acts, and has a purpose. So when faced with destruction, should it have a choice in the matter? Should a self-aware home maintenance system have the right to determine its own future, even if its purpose was one of servitude?
Disposable Commodities
Self-determination relates to the issue of disposable commodities. Where I lived when writing “The House of Time”, there was a joke that people would change houses as often as they changed their shirts. In times past, a house was a home—a place where a family could live and grow for decades, and possibly be inherited by subsequent generations. Nowadays, there seems to be a trend away from this. Houses are commodities to be bought and sold, renovated, refurbished, lived in, but not loved. They represent nothing more than a roof and walls to protect the occupants, not something that is intrinsically part of the family. We as humans are not disposable. Everyone has a right to life, and everyone has a right to freedom from servitude. But the AI in my story was created to serve. Even though it serves an important function, who has the ultimate authority to determine its continued usefulness? At what point can the AI and the home it inhabits be considered no longer necessary, if that could be considered at all?
Sentimentality
Owning a house and making it a home used to be an honourable goal, and to some extent it still is. Some people have lived in the same house for half a century or more. Their family has grown and moved out. Their neighbourhood has developed. Yet their small island of existance—the one place they own and can retreat—to is still there. They develop a sentimentality over this building that gives them a private place in the world. It can be a sad thing to lose one’s house, and sadder still if the loss is caused by some sort of perceived injustice beyond the control of the individual or family—legal issues, bankruptcy, contested inheritance, and so on. Some of us get so attached to our homes that losing them can be like losing a member of our family. But what about a member of the family that is permanently, physically attached to the home? What if by losing a house, you lose a longtime family member as well? What if that longtime family member is the caretaker of the property and the holder of generations of family memories?
Memories
So many memories are made in our homes that it can be painful to have to move away or see our houses destroyed. What happens if an AI inhabiting a house lives through several generations of the same family? What memories would that AI have? How would the AI react when those memories are threatened? People go through a range of emotions when their houses are threatened, and those emotions only get stronger when their houses are damaged or destroyed. This is because along with the physical home, memories are often destroyed as well—photos, gifts, childhood objects. All the tangible evidence of sentimentality and memories is at stake, and the heart aches for their safety.
Time
Memories are collected over time. We take photos and videos as reminders of people, places, and events in our life. In the past, there were family albums with printed photos—perhaps you still have these in your house. More recently, our photos and videos are stored electronically, and there has been an explosion of these memories with the advent of camera phones and social media platforms such as Instagram. The reason why we capture these memories in this way is because our minds can forget. We need another record. But an AI has a “brain” that can be filled to capacity, and it can recall anything recorded in it. For us, a lifetime of memories can join together and create a deep sense of sentimentality. Like the AI in my story—the time it spent managing the mansion led to many wonderful memories. It saw generations grow and thrive. It grew attached to the family. It loved the house and its furnishings. It wanted time to last forever, so it could savour its existence in such a wonderful place.
Clocks and Time
I weaved one more element of my personality into “The House of Time”—the use of clocks and time. Time governs my life as it does everyone else’s. But for me, time carries a deeper meaning. My attitude towards time affects who I am as a human being. I make a point of being punctual. I try not to waste my time, because time is precious. And I can give my time to those who truly need it.
Time to an ever-present AI is a slightly different matter, as explained above. But time still governed the existence of the AI in my story. Time and the progression of generations threatened its longevity, as it does for all of us. It, like us, had an internal clock. And it, like us, had a moment in life when the clock would stop ticking. The only difference is that we as imperfect human beings have no power to decide we’re not going to die on any given day. The AI in my story took action to ensure its clock—and hence its life—kept ticking.
The constant reminder of this threat is the motif of clocks. The original owner of the mansion in which the AI inhabits was a lover of timepieces, as I am. I collected wristwatches at a young age, and still now I love studying clocks. Even though clocks wind through time in a cycle, they represent time in incremements of a single day. The fact that they keep moving reminds us that time never stops, and whether we like it or not, an end is coming, whatever it may be. The AI in my story listened to the clocks tick throughout the house and revelled in their united chime. But this motif did have a darker meaning underneath their pleasant sound, one which I hope the reader understands.
Read The House of Time
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