At the moment, I’m finishing up one of those Scandinavian mystery-thrillers that delight in their own gruesomeness. You’d think I wouldn’t be able to so much as touch them, after what happened just over a year ago, but on the contrary, I find them oddly comforting.
Right now, though, my copy is nowhere to be found. Which is annoying because I was pages away from finding out who the culprit was and how the damaged female detective’s love triangle finally worked out.
“Your bath is ready, Cecelia,” announces a pleasant voice, accompanied by a faraway chime from the tablet. The house knows what room I’m in at all times, of course, due to advanced motion-detecting technology combined with the input from the identity chip. It would be great if it could also locate my paperback. With a groan, I grab a decoration magazine from a side table in the hall and head to the bathroom.
The house is true to its word, as always. The bathtub is full, topped with a shimmering heap of foam. The scent of lavender and eucalyptus pleasantly tickles my nostrils as I throw off my clothes. Magazine in hand—it’s an old issue that I know by heart but it’ll do—I swing my leg over the edge of the tub and lower it into the water.
The shock races up my nerves, from my toes to my spine. It’s so sharp and sudden that I give a start, instinctively yank my foot out of the water, and lose my balance. My behind hits the ceramic, and my teeth clack. The whole thing takes less than a blink. I sit on the floor, numb with shock, trying to comprehend what just happened.
“Saya?” I yell out.
Recognizing the voice command of its name, the house’s system beeps on. The pleasant electronic voice sounds from the speakers in the ceiling. “Yes?”
But my words have deserted me. “The—the water,” I stammer. I stare at my foot, my toes a painful crimson, still throbbing.
“I’m sorry, Lydia,” says the voice. “Would you like to change your temperature settings?”
“Yes,” I snarl, relieved that finally, someone—something—decided to work with me. “Change them to—”
I stop midsentence. “What did you just call me?”
Three months earlier
“What is your problem, Cece?” Scott struggles to keep his voice to a loud whisper. He doesn’t want to make a scene here, in the waiting room. We were supposed to have “a few minutes of privacy to talk it over,” as Clarisse put it, but this place hardly feels private. I think of all the hidden cameras and microphones that could be spying on us right this second. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“What? To live in Big Brother’s guest room?”
He groans and rolls his eyes. Just like I thought, he doesn’t understand.
“This is what you wanted. This is what we need. Think of how secure it’s going to be. No one can come within a mile of the place without being seen and recorded. And should anything happen, it’ll call an ambulance…think of that! Think of Taryn!”
“They want to microchip us like purebred cats,” I snap back.
“All that information will be private. You heard her—they have the country’s top cybersecurity experts on payroll. The only way the information will ever be used is for our benefit.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
He gives a laugh, shifting his strategy—putting on the charming, boyish smile, just like in the early days when we used to affectionately tease each other, not snipe at each other at the first opportunity. “For God’s sake, Cece,” he says. “You think we’re not spied on now? Your phone knows more about you than I do.”
I sulk because it’s hard to disagree with that.
“Face it, the time of privacy is over whether we like it or not,” he says. “Unless you want to just leave it all behind and go live off the land deep in the Appalachians somewhere.”
I can’t help but shrug.
“That’s what I thought. And you say you hate being spied on but I don’t see you deleting your Facebook and Instagram. Or throwing your GPS out the car window. Only instead of selling our information to corporations for money, this place will use it to better our lives. Sounds like an improvement to me.”
I can only shake my head. I know he’s winning the argument, and I have nothing to say. Nothing I can put into words.
“And anyway, this is a trial. We can’t afford to be early adopters. At least not yet, not until I get the promotion. Because yes, people like us pay millions of dollars to live there. Are they all idiots too?”
“I never thought you were an idiot,” I point out. Just gullible.
“Worst that can happen, we live there for a couple of years—we’re not going to sell the house yet—and then we can leave! At the very least, it’s a break from the same old. A change of scenery. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Here we are again, with whatever it was I said I wanted.
For God’s sake, what I wanted…what I really wanted was to simply be out of the house where a man tried to kill me.
CHAPTER THREE
I run my fingertip over the thin skin on my outer wrist, right below the wrist bone. You can’t tell—there’s no scar and not even a mark—but this is where the microchip is embedded. A microchip that, according to the brochure, “thousands of sensors all over the house will detect and react to your unique DNA signature.”
I don’t see why they couldn’t have gone with facial recognition or any similar technology instead but, according to Clarisse, the DNA signature offers superior possibilities. The chip is powered by my own body heat, and, apart from identifying me flawlessly to every feature of the SmartHome and SmartBlock, it also takes my vital signs and will activate a call for help if it picks up on any distress. For instance, if I have a heart attack in the middle of the day with no one to see me and I can’t get to the phone, the chip will transmit a distress signal to the central command system, which will call an ambulance, sending the data along for good measure. Not wasting a single second to get you the help you need, the brochure read.
Think of what it’ll mean for Taryn, Scott said. No more panic in the middle of the night because of a rash or a fever—the chip knows best when the situation is urgent and makes the decision for us. He presented it as a good thing.
But I balked at the idea of microchipping my child, sticking that needle into the perfect, creamy skin on her chubby arm. It feels wrong, I told Scott. It feels like despoiling her. Taking away her integrity somehow.
He rolled his eyes and said I get it from my mom. Which made my face flush with embarrassment and put a definitive end to the argument, like he knew it would.
Whenever he thinks I’m acting “crazy”—his term—all he has to do is insinuate that I’m turning into Therese. It never fails. Whether it’s me suggesting—just suggesting, in passing—that we have Taryn baptized, to expressing concern that having five mobile devices for three people, two phones, and three tablets, might be less than healthy—it always means I’m turning into my mother and will inevitably go off the deep end. And this was before the SmartHome project was even on our radar.
So Scott won the argument. On the same afternoon we were handed the keys to the house, we were officially given our chips. The needle has a built-in anesthetic that kicks in with surprising speed, and I barely felt a pinch. I was so worried that Taryn would throw a tantrum when she saw the needle, with tears and wailing, and I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But Taryn was too busy looking around the office, twisting her neck this way and that, her brown eyes the size of saucers, and she didn’t even see the technician approaching her with the needle, cooing soothingly. When she pressed the device against Taryn’s arm, there was just a soft hiss that lasted for half a second, and then it was done. Taryn blinked, bewildered, wondering whether she should cry but there was already nothing to cry about. She got a little plush teddy bear for her good behavior, a logo of IntelTech on its belly, and that was the end of that.