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"Wow. You weren't kidding about the size of the place, were you?" Jeremy stared up, and up, at the house under the cottonwood trees. From the sidewalk in front, it seemed to merge with the branches somehow, as if they were woven into it.
"I sure wasn't. First fully automated house in the state, back when it was built." The real estate agent stood next to him, her legs braced as if she expected danger. It made him look more closely at the dense boxwood beneath the windows, and the way the trees grew, how close they were to the building. "And this was a vacant lot when it was built?"
"For all intents and purposes. The builders put those trees in because they'd grow fast in this climate, give it some shade. They obviously need trimming, of course. I can recommend an arborist."
He nodded, never taking his eyes off the house, noting the mansard roof that covered only one area, off to the side at the back, which seemed an odd addition to the rest of the building. "You said it had been vacant a long time. It looks like it's in good shape."
"Well, it's an odd story," she said quietly. "The first owners seem to have vanished into thin air. The husband didn't show up at work one day, and his employers thought they'd gotten their messages confused, but when it was clear that he hadn't called in someone came over to check it out – and there was nobody home."
"Nobody? Not even the children?"
She shook her head. "The place was empty. There wasn't a lot of evidence for the police – of course, the house is self-cleaning, which didn't help – though they did find some evidence of blood in the nursery but it was a few drops, nothing much, over in one corner where the cleanerbot apparently missed it."
"Whose blood was it?"
"I'm not sure I ever heard. Anyway, because of the way they disappeared, the property was tied up in the courts for years. There were family disputes over it, and the usual scandalmongers putting it on the Mystery House tours, and so on. But eventually everyone lost interest. When it came to us, we gave it a thorough going-over; all of our technicians put their heads together to make sure it was working completely satisfactorily before we put it on the market."
He turned toward her, raising an eyebrow. "There had been problems?"
Her expression was designed to be reassuring. "Some calibration problems had been reported in the nursery, something about pictures staying on the walls and not changing properly, but we found nothing out of the ordinary. It was a little slow at times, but this was such early software, that wasn't unusual. It's been upgraded to run at current speeds, and I'm sure there's no problem."
"That's comforting." Something about the pseudoexpression of the house – the location of the windows and doors, from which the human mind would automatically construct a face – appealed to him. It seemed to stand on its own, to have its metaphorical feet set firmly in the ground. "Let's take a walk through." He started toward the door.
She drew a breath and followed him, reaching forward to hand him the automated key.
***
"…And this was the children's room, what they called the nursery in those days, even though the children were nearly in middle school." She put her hand on the door and it slid smoothly aside into the wall. "Think something, and the walls will show it."
"I know the theory," he said quietly. "I've seen walls with this technology but never a whole – ahhh!" The palace at Knossos was around them, the unforgettable fresco of the bull leapers on the wall in front of his eyes, the sky overhead that blue that merged into the wine-dark sea at the horizon to the left. Under his feet, the neutral tile floor had become ancient stonework, chipped and cracked, worn into small ripples by the pressure of so many bare and sandaled feet, so long ago. He could smell the wild thyme blooming on the hills outside the dig, and the fresh sharpness of the salt air.
"It was my first vacation after college, in Greece," he told her.
"See if it changes properly, to suit you." Her expression held conscious optimism.
He thought of Paris, and the busy traffic of the Left Bank surrounded them, crowned with the towers and gargoyles of Notre Dame de Paris by the Seine. The scent of strong coffee and fresh pastries wafted from the nearby café. He switched, as quickly as he could, to a skiing vacation in Jasper, and the whisper of cold wind chilled his nose as he looked down from the top of the slope. He slid his toe forward to reassure himself that the floor was still there (it was), not the sudden drop toward the chalet below.
"So far, so good," he said. "Let's try something else. Were the walls preprogrammed with anything at the time?"
"The standard childhood package included scenes from most of the classics. Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, things like that. It's been updated, too, to make it more appealing to a later generation."
"Let's see what happens." He made sure they were still standing in the doorway, not fully within the room itself, and thought about the books he'd read as a child. An arrow flew across from left to right, as Katniss ran toward a backpack on the ground against a background of deep forest. He switched to another memory, and Aerin the Fierce rode her old white horse to face Maur, the great black dragon. Another switch, and Stanley and Zero looked up at him from digging an endless sequence of holes at Green Lake.
He blanked the walls completely, deliberately, and thought of something he hadn't considered in years, and a round green door swung open in a carefully cultivated hillside, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins walked out with his nephew, Frodo, to start the festivities at their joint birthday party. Behind them, a tall gray-clad figure with an even taller hat stroked his beard, and reached into his pouch to fill a curved pipe with loosely crumbled, fragrant tobacco.
"That's amazing," he breathed.
"What?"
"It's not the movie. This scene doesn't appear anywhere in the book or the films. It's something I thought of, using the characters from the book, but it's the way I imagined them when I read it, not anything from someone else's illustrations or ideas." He let Hobbiton fade from view slowly. "Is this the only room with these features?"
The real-estate agent consulted her portfolio. "Yes. At the time the technology was created, it was only possible to have one room done this way. Since then, if you like, it could be expanded to the rest of the house. " She pointed at the floor plan on her pad. "For instance, if you wanted to have a wall redone in a den or office, to make your work easier, that is certainly possible – and well within the property's renovation contract."
"Renovation contract?" He met her eyes again and they stepped out of the room. The doors slid softly closed behind them.
"You must understand, the bank has held this property far longer than desired. Certain rumors tend to arise when a house is empty for too long, and this one has been empty for more than a decade. As an incentive, the bank is willing to cover the cost of a generous amount of renovation, for a committed purchaser."
He felt a little lightheaded. "Let's see the rest of the house. I think I'm getting some ideas."
***
"Hey, what's this I hear about you moving into the local haunted house?" Burkie asked, stopping in Jeremy's office doorway to hand him a cup of coffee. "Tell me it's not true."
"Does anyone actually think the place is haunted?" Jeremy accepted the cup and took a drink, leaning back in his chair. "And yes, I'm about to make an offer on it."
"Well, there were weird sounds coming from it for years, lots of reports from anonymous trespassers –"
"Which are, of course, worth the electrons they're not written in."
"And you have to admit, it's kind of weird the way the family disappeared."
"Burkie, people used to disappear all the time. You could do that, back when we weren't all in the government database." He smiled up at Burkie. "I do expect you to raise the alarm if I should happen to disappear, one of these days."
"Oh, depend on it."
***
"Yes, right there. No, sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The main house computer is over there, in the new add-on, the one that isn't connected to the rest of the building. It's on a separate hyperserver. I want this computer to be connected to the house system over in the other room." Jeremy wiped his face; it was wickedly hot in the house in the summer without the all-inclusive air modification system turned on, but he was willing to live with it until he got things set up as he wished. "Yes, the big room is on a separate circuit; historically, it's had some problems since the place was built, so I want to make sure they don't migrate into the rest of the building. You never know what these smart houses will come up with."
"Ain't that the truth," the technician said. "Here's your media, and your … paper manuals? That seems odd."
"I'm a researcher; I'm used to working with several books open at once, and having them on paper makes it easier for me to think." He smiled. "I know that's odd these days."
"Hey, it's your house. You can fill it with anything you want."
"I hope so," Jeremy said to himself, after the technician had left. He had purposely isolated the programs and data for the nursery from the rest of the building, and had had the automated programs torn out completely in two rooms – each of them with a non-automated door to the yard. Now, he set to work, verifying every line of code and noting and commenting any that didn't make enough sense.
***
A week later, he stood in the doorway of the nursery, and said the phrase he had programmed into the room to evoke its past: "Be what you were."
The hot African sun beat down on him from a cloudless sky. On the walls, giraffes and ibex roamed with zebras and gnus toward a waterhole. A lioness stared at him from a pile of rocks to the right on the wall straight ahead of him. He caught a side glance from a full-grown male lion, great-maned, that stalked a baby zebra at the edge of the herd.
He kept his hands on the doorframe, and his awareness on the room behind him that he had disengaged from all automation, and whose door to the outdoors was braced open.
"Oh, this is all very pretty, but it's not what you were."
The images faded, to be replaced by the open veldt, with only a few herd animals in the distance. The lions remained, staring at him without fear. He stared back at them. They came closer, until they were life-sized on the walls, a few feet away.
"That's better. Not completely true, though, is it?"
The lions faded, hazed, morphed, melted into a boy and a girl, in their early teens if that, skin browned and hair bleached to tangled straw. They wore animal skins – he recognized a gemsbok and a leopard – and carried spears and water gourds.
"How did you know?" the boy asked.
"It was the only answer, wasn't it?"
"What year is it?" the girl asked.
"Why do you care? You gave up on years when you went into the walls."
"Don't be silly. People can't go into walls."
"And lions can't come out of walls and eat your parents, either, can they?"
The children exchanged sidelong glances.
"We're not coming out."
"Fine," he said.
"This is our house."
"Wrong. This is your room."
He stepped back, pressing the mechanical override he'd had installed just outside the door frame, and the door slammed shut in front of their astonished faces.
***
It had taken some extra work, but he'd managed to put the surveillance camera on the door as he came in, setting it into place by brushing his fingers against the edge of the wood. The original door had never been part of the room in the way the walls and ceiling and floor were, and this was a replacement. It looked like a simple chunk of nicely planed and finished wood, but that wood hid a titanium steel and carbon fiber core that nothing with mere muscle and bone could get past. He'd seen the test recordings of the raptor pens at the National Zoo that proved it.
He sat down at his computer in the den to watch it. The den had plain wood walls without anything more than modest ordinary electrical outlets in it, not even a television because he'd decided to be cautious.
As he watched, the children's room bloomed into life, walls shifting and images pulsing until the veldt returned. The lions chased down and ate a zebra. They rested. The wind blurred the grass.
He pushed the replay to a faster speed.
The children appeared as the blur resolved, wearing their leathers, brown-skinned from the African sun. They emerged from the walls to come toward the door, sniffing at everything, brushing their fingertips against the places where his feet had touched the floor just beyond the doorframe. They looked at the door, and at each other, and stepped back to stand in front of the walls. And then they were flat again, within the walls, moving, transmuting into lions, and chasing a man who was running for his life.
And the lions were laughing as he ran.
He shut the computer off and sat, thinking and looking out at the shed in the back yard, the one that had been built to hold gardening tools and that had no electricity at all.
***
"Ella, I need your help."
"What, your computer hung up again?"
"No, it's the house."
"I told you that house needed more upgrading than the bank would pay for; who knows where its bits and bites are getting to." Ella looked up at Jeremy with a frown. "That place is probably full of old programs getting in the way."
"You have no idea," he admitted. "How can you tell if a particular program has been completely deleted?"
"How many backups are there?"
"I don't know."
"So, you want me to come over, check it out with a clean portable, and make sure the programs aren't stepping on each other's toes."
She gave him a wry smile. "It'll cost you dinner."
"Absolutely – but somewhere else. I'm still getting used to the kitchen," he said, remembering the walls bulging with the face of a roaring lion that emerged and disappeared again under the paint, always uncannily near to where he was trying to cook. The walls themselves appeared unchanged afterward, as if they'd been made of elastic and not whatever composite hard surface was current in the building industry. But the teeth had been sharp and the jaws snapped together only a foot away from him.
He had stopped cooking meat there, just in case.
***
"Where do you want to set up?" She was standing next to him, waiting for him to stop blocking the doorway so they could go inside.
"Don't turn it on yet." He opened the breaker panel that he'd had installed in the closet next to the entrance, and pressed the breaker to turn off power to the nursery. "If we're in a different building, can you scan it from there?"
"Within reason." She frowned. "You're acting a bit weird. You want to work from the garage?"
"No." He led her to a gardening shed that stood in the back corner of the property, on the opposite side of the house from the nursery. "Here. You've got enough battery in your portable for a while?"
"I've got about two days' worth; it's the small one. What's this about?"
He had set up an ancient folding card table and two chairs in the shed, which was otherwise empty. The rakes and the mower had been moved to the garage. She set the portable down on the table and took a chair.
It took him a moment to find the words. "There's a … program that's been running in the nursery since the first owners were here. It seems to be leaking into other systems in the house and interfering with them. I'd like to get rid of it."
"Simple enough," Ella said. "How big a program?"
He shrugged. "I don't know what you mean. How do you estimate size for something like this?"
"Well, one way is to look at the complexity. Is it a simple program that does a lot of repetitive annoying things, or is it complicated and coming up with new ways to annoy you all the time?"
He thought of the screams from the nursery, and the lion's face coming out of the wall. "Definitely complex. It's not quite as powerful away from the nursery, but it's interacting with other parts of the house." It was only the contours of the lion's head in the kitchen, not the colors – though it still unnerved him enough that he hadn't hit it with a frying pan, lest it emerge and chase him.
"So I'm looking for something big and complex that may have replicated itself outside the nursery." She tapped the pad and dragged her fingertips across the touchscreen. "Oh, my, yes. That's huge. Are you sure you turned off the nursery?"
"You saw me do it."
"It's not off."
"I thought that might happen." He had begun to carry the house key all the time, with its all-encompassing remote switch, and he took it from his pocket, aimed it in the direction of the house, and pressed the 'all off' button. "How about now?"
She frowned as she gazed at the portable. "Look. Here's the diagram of your house's programming. The power is supposed to be off, but there's a tiny bit of residual power left – remember when we were kids and the power would go off but the land line phone would still work? It's that level of electricity, not enough to do a lot, but still there."
He watched her face. "And?"
"It's moving from room to room, in what I'd call a search pattern. It's not random."
He said the first thing he could think of. "Does it know you're here?"
She shot him a look that said he was going to be doing a lot of explaining over dinner. "Probably not. There's no actual physical connection between this portable and the wiring over there, only the web."
"Can you delete the programming in the nursery while it's off? Reach into the machine and wipe that part of it?"
"I'll see." She touched the screen. "I've isolated the major programming for the active room on your master computer, and I'm writing over it with a file the same size that consists of random noise. It should take only a –"
The screen shifted under her fingers, and she pulled her hands back.
The two children stared out at them, mouths set straight with anger. "You're hurting us. You're bad."
"No, you're bad. You were supposed to stay in your room."
"We don't have to stay anywhere." The girl shot a narrow glance at the boy, who nodded, and they faded from the screen.
Ella drew a long shuddering breath. "That was your program? Who are they?"
"The children for whom the nursery was built."
"I thought the whole family had died."
"Are they still in the house?" He pointed at the screen.
"No." Her hands flashed across the portable. "I'm overwriting the nursery entirely, and rebooting all of your other programs from scratch. But I'd suggest you stay at a hotel tonight."
"Not a problem." He paused. "How did they show up on your screen if we're not connected to the house at all?"
"Isn't the house connected to the regional wi-fi?"
They stared at each other in horror.
***
On the other side of town, two children wearing badly tanned animal skins and nothing else stood outside the lion enclosure at the zoo.
"They're bored," the boy said. "They don't remember the veldt."
"Can we remind them?" the girl asked.
"Hey, what are you kids doing here? It's after closing time." The keeper, a chunky man in overalls, got off the zoo tractor and came toward them. "I'll escort you out. Where are your parents?"
"They're gone," the boy said. "We're all alone."
"I can see that," the keeper said. "Now, come this way." He spread his arms as if herding them out.
The girl rolled her eyes. "I'm hungry."
***
"Hey, Ella, did you see what happened at the zoo last night?"
"What is it this time, Burkie?"
He tapped on her screen to bring up the story: a zookeeper killed, evidently by lions according to police, but the zoo's own lions were safely within their enclosure. Mysteriously, the keeper's legs were found inside the enclosure, well chewed, while the rest of his body lay near a maintenance vehicle. The size and shape of the paw prints found near the vehicle did not match those of any of the big cats at the zoo.
Ella shook her head. "Where's Jeremy? I think he'd be interested in this."
But when Jeremy came into the office, it was clear to her that he'd already seen the news. He went into his office and didn't come out until lunchtime.
"I'm staying at the hotel for the rest of the week," he told her as they sat at the diner down the street from their office building. "I contacted the realtor and told her there were programming difficulties with the house, but that I was only asking for them to cover hotel costs, and she agreed."
"That must be some contract you had."
"The house is guaranteed for up to a year from the date I signed," he said.
"If you want, we can go back tonight with my bigger portable and reformat the whole thing from scratch." Ella smiled. "You can owe me another dinner. Or breakfast."
"The hotel cook makes great breakfasts," he said, and started to feel his back muscles loosen for the first time since he walked into the house.
When they left the diner the wind had picked up and the clouds had darkened overhead. "Maybe tomorrow for the reprogramming." Ella checked her phone. "There's a big storm coming in. I've got a vacation day; I'll take it and we'll rework that place completely."
He smiled at her. "How do you like your pancakes?"
***
But the next day the power was off for the whole city, following the enormous storm that had blown in the night before, with powerful winds and innumerable lightning strikes. At least two of those strikes had hit the cottonwoods surrounding the house – which Jeremy had not yet ordered to be trimmed – and tumbled them onto the building. The mansard roof was crushed by one of them. Another cottonwood had apparently exploded from a lightning strike, throwing flaming chunks of wood into the rest of the house and the yard, and one by one the trees with their interlocked roots had fallen inward, breaking everything that remained and letting the rain in.
A day later, after the power had been restored, Jeremy and Ella stood on the sidewalk with the realtor, who appeared both shaken and relieved.
"Of course the contract will cover the cost of a new house. It might be a little smaller than the one that was there –" the realtor said.
"That's fine," Jeremy said. "And that includes removing the storm damage?"
"No problem."
He turned to Ella, who hadn't said a thing since they arrived. "Want to help me design the new place?"
"I'd like that," she said.
***
Africa was bigger than they'd thought, and more urban. When they emerged from a computer one night in an office in a suburb of Mtito Andei – they'd consulted online maps and found that Kenya still had lions in the reserve at Tsavo – they had to walk a long way in order to find their way out of the city. They broke into a small roadside café and stole food, and ate it on the way.
"We still have our spears and our water gourds," the boy reminded the girl. "We'll be all right as long as we can find lions."
"Real lions," she said. "I can hardly wait." Her eyes were dreamy.
They refilled their gourds at a communal well at night, and kept going, walking into the bush to avoid the eyes of local residents. Their feet felt tender on the hot ground, which was far hotter than the earth had been in the nursery.
The boy shinnied up a tree, and stood on its lowest limb, shading his eyes with his hand.
"How much farther?" the girl asked.
"There's a water hole a few miles ahead. I can see the elephants."
"Does it have rocks?"
He nodded. "A few. There'll be some shade."
Soon they could see the animals in the distance. The grass was taller than they'd expected, and they gazed in wonder at the remnants of the great herds that gathered around the water hole. There were lions in the rocks and on the rolling hillside beyond, just as they'd imagined.
And then they heard the growls, the strange whining cries that didn't sound like lions at all.
It was only when they turned around that they saw the humped backs and the powerful jaws of the hyenas who had been trailing them, and who were now coming in fast.
One lion on the rocks pricked up his ears at the cries from the grassland and sat up to look, then flopped back down. He'd already eaten, and it wasn't worth the hassle to mess with hyenas over anything smaller than a zebra.