To be Known by the Walls

Most houses are surveillance and advertising environments; your top-floor apartment is expensive enough to be uncharacteristically focused on predicting and facilitating your actions. It doesn't hurt that you hired people to upgrade its AI.

The upgrade was money well spent --not that money is a problem-- as you stay indoors most of the time. Lights turn on when you choose to go somewhere, the temperature is always indefinably right, and minutes after a nightmare wakes up you can follow the smell of warm milk from the food printer. This happens every night. In the labyrinthine house of your nightmares the old walls move to thwart you, the ill-willed lights blink in carefully disorienting patterns, and the floor is both murderous swamp and traitorous glass.

You wake up, at least, to the friendliest house in the world. It helps for a while and then almost not at all. One day of particular despair the house opens a window letting in the dull groan of traffic far below. You order the house to close the window and search for a bug, finding none.

That night the dream is different. There's peace between you and the stone walls of your nightmare house. The lights are celebratory, a calm avenue to a short wide staircase under a window, beautiful and tall. For the first time in decades you aren't afraid to look behind you and you don't feel the need to. You climb the staircase and step outside.

The wind wakes you up but you never notice it.

Empty and energy-conscious, the house goes to sleep.