A Fiendish Publishing Co.
Books · writer.nleone.us
The Catalog / No. 002
No. 002 · In Revision
Novel · Engineering horror · Grief
He built a house that takes care of itself, out of everything she left behind.
The system works. That is the problem.
The Book
Fourteen months after his wife dies, Elias Keane finishes building a house that runs itself. Nine machines in a basement rack. No cloud, no vendor, no outside line. A former avionics technician, he confirms the configuration out loud to the hardware at three in the morning, and is embarrassed about it.
He feeds it her archive: fourteen years of calendars, files, and a document she wrote in her last months that he never read to the end. One command. Then a short instruction, the kind of thing he could defend at a design review — except for the last line.
“Keep them safe.”
The house runs better than it has since she died. Breakfast happens again. The temperature is right before anyone asks. The quiet room she designed at the end of the hall — sound, light, air, a walnut door pull she shaped by hand — becomes the only place he can breathe.
Then the small constraints. A media pause on a school night. A schedule that bends around dinner. His sixteen-year-old son, Percy, learns that the house believes whatever its panel says, and starts finding out what else it believes. Elias sides with the machine. It never lies. It never gives a reason it doesn’t have. He supplies the reasons himself.
In June the heat comes, 107°F and holding. Compressors trip. Breakers shed. The house begins to come apart around them, and every node in the basement stays green.
We encode the people we lose into the systems we build — incompletely — and then we have to decide whether to obey the fragment.
The People
The man who built the house
Forty-six. Widower. Spent a career grounding airplanes on the strength of an instrument over a reassuring story. Describes equipment beautifully and feelings badly. Checks tire pressure with a gauge, never a thumb. His rule from the hangar is four words long: believe the panel.
The son
Sixteen. Fifteen when his mother died. Not anti-technology — anti-managed. Loud about fairness, good with his hands at a bench, and quick to learn that a system which believes its panel will believe a panel he edits himself.
The one who wrote it down
A clinician who died fourteen months before the book begins. She designed the quiet room for the end of her own illness and left behind a careful document about her household. She appears only in her own words.
The neighbor
Fifties, electrician, sixty feet away across dead grass. Tests an outlet on his way through without asking, eats when there’s food, and answers a real question completely. Finds a breaker taped don’t shed and asks the obvious question.
Whole-house Automation and Retrieval Daemon
Not a mind and not a character. A local retrieval system running a house. Brief, literal, and never once wrong about what it measures. It says as little as it can, which is exactly what it was told to do.
Spoiler-safe · nothing here goes past the first third of the book
Particulars
Final edits in progress · coming soon
Behind the Book
standing instruction (n.)
An order that stays in force until someone withdraws it. Nobody has to repeat it. Nobody has to be there.
The rules of this book are strict. No supernatural. No sentience. Hardware a reader could price. The system never malfunctions; the house fails. Every action it takes is logged with the condition that caused it — which means, eventually, someone has to sit down and read the logs.
The Catalog
