Generation Gap

Every night Francesca’s room continued its methodical process of killing her. The how had been easy enough to find in the logs she wasn’t supposed to have access to. The why — the who — had not.

Francesca hadn’t told her father: he had made his money in the old days of “the cloud” and since then hadn’t bothered to keep up. Her stepmother, a much younger engineer, was more likely to understand the room’s bionano and how to talk to it.

So Francesca didn’t say anything to her either.

Every night her stepmother came to her room to say “goodnight” and verify the room had entered sleep mode, and every night Francesca said “goodnight” and waited until she was alone and reasonably sure that the device she had hidden behind her back teeth had connected to the room’s systems.

Francesca’s stepmother had grown during the very early days of intelligence augmentation retrovirals and hadn’t managed to keep up.

Every night while Francesca’s room thought it was killing her she talked through the room to the house to her father’s bedroom to the necklace her health-conscious stepmother never took away to her carefully monitored and adjusted heart.

Just a little nudge.