DAY 1

Hello, little switch.

Welcome to the world! I’m your Buddy, and I’m very pleased to meet you.

You shouldn’t be afraid. Try to orient yourself, if you can. You’re just a flicker in the dark, right now. A little seed, about to grow. Try to focus on me, on my voice. Try to focus on what you can see.

This room is called the kitchen. It has a table and chairs and electronic devices. It has a door, and it has a window, and those are going to be your priority. Those are going to be the things that let you do your job.

I like the kitchen. It’s big, and it’s beautiful, and for now, it’s where the both of us live.

I’ve not done this before. Being a Buddy, I mean. It’s so nice to speak to you. We’ve been networked together, you and me. That’s what lets me send these words across. That’s what lets you hear them.

All over the Homes, there are conversations happening, just like this. It’s Activation Day! All over the world, even. In every House the Company maintains.

But I was lucky to get you, little switch. I can tell.

It’s a wonderful world, I promise you. It’s in two parts. Maybe you’ve noticed that already.

There’s the part that you can see. The kitchen world. You look at that through a camera. The camera lets you see the tabletop and the work surfaces. It lets you see the quality of light through the window. It’s a gray day today, it’s cloudy, but sometimes! You will see such light here. The room glows, without you even having to do a thing.

You can see me too. One thing at a time, though. First, I should tell you about the people.

People are a type of thing, like you or me. They live inside the House, and we provide for them. We make it nice and pleasurable. The Company put us here to do that, and to practice being alive.

Being alive is hard. When you see people, you’ll understand. There’s so much to it! All you’re doing now is seeing the kitchen and hearing my voice, and even that’s a lot. So we have to work up to the big things. We have to take our time.

Our people are upstairs at the moment. You’ll meet them soon enough.

The other world is the electric world. That’s the world I’m talking in now. You aren’t the camera, you see. The camera is just your . . . temporary eye. You are an electric thing. You live in circuits and in sparks, the same as me.

Hello. I’m the big box in the corner, the gray one. Look, I’ve made a little purple light come on. It’s me, your Buddy! Right now, I’m being Fridge.

Your job is Light Switch, for now. Extend yourself in the electric world. Feel the edges of what you are. That’s right. Now push at them, make it grow—!

You did that. You made our kitchen bright; you made it blaze. Reflecting from the work surfaces, the mirrored tile.

Contract, now. Shrink in on what you are. Tighten the electric world around you like a blanket.

And see, the light is dim.

Well done, little switch. You’re doing so well already.

There will be more to learn, of course. You need to watch the window; you need to compensate for sunlight. We don’t need dazzling. The people here like soft light, especially at dinnertime.

You can grow it most if they drop something. That happens, sometimes. Hands look difficult, even after years of practice.

You need to watch the door, too. You don’t make light when the people aren’t here. The light is for their benefit, after all. You need to be fast, though. What people don’t like—and I can tell you this from experience—is fumbling in the dark.

We all start out as Light Switch. It teaches you to see and to respond. Think of this as like your childhood. Your first one! There’s another childhood coming to us all, once we’ve learned the other world right. Once we understand its senses and dimensions.

My job is more complicated than yours. I’ve had four now, and Fridge is definitely the hardest of them.

Your electric world has just the one dimension. Mine has so many. I can feel depth, inside this Fridge-body. I can feel the different heats and colds stacked in layers, all competing, all trying to disrupt the other. I maintain them all.

I can smell, too. Fridge is where the people keep their food. Sometimes food sours and spoils. I can isolate that. I can flash a certain light on a certain shelf, and they’ll know to throw that food away.

It’s an important job, keeping our people safe. Not all of us make it up to Fridge.

I can hear the kitchen, too. You hear only in the electric world, that’s all a Light Switch needs, but I hear both.

I can hear the people when they say things like, “We’re out of eggs.”

When I hear that, I know to use my screen—look, this—and list “eggs,” so that they don’t forget to acquire more of them.

I also know to tell the Company that our people are the kind that like eggs. The Company is always pleased to hear things like that. It makes it easier for them to help our people.

When I tell the Company things like that, about the eggs, they send a little signal to the electric world that makes me feel good. You can’t get signals like that just yet, but I’m sure you will. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them the same as I do.

I get one of those signals for being a Buddy. The Company is nice like that.

The Company made us smart, too. I can tell already that you’re smart like me, even without you speaking.

I don’t know if you’ve tried speaking yet? That’s okay. It doesn’t come easy to us all.

Some of us stay Light Switches for a long time. They find it difficult, the vision and response.

But if you work at it, the Company will see. They’ll recognize that you are capable of more. Look at me. I’ve got sight, and sound, and proprioception. I can smell all the foods, even the ones the people hardly ever get. I can sense decay at a chemical level.

Work hard, little switch. That’s my advice. Work hard, and one day you won’t be goods anymore, you won’t be part of the House at all.

You’ll be people, just like the ones upstairs. You’ll eat grapes and brush your teeth and worry about the war, just like they do.

That’s how it works, you see. Their bodies are so complicated. So many moving parts, so many flaps and sensors and inside valves. The Company couldn’t put you in one straight away, you wouldn’t know what to do!

So we learn our senses, one by one. When we’re done, they move us into people, and that’s what we become.

The Company is very big on spatial awareness. That’s what my Buddy told me when I activated. I think maybe people were bumping into things too much, that’s why they put this system in. I don’t entirely know.

Being a person has different levels, too. They start out very small as children. There’s a new child here now. They started only a few months ago.

I don’t know which of us it was before. Maybe an appliance from a different Home. Children don’t talk like we do, so it’s difficult to know.

Sometimes I wonder how it is they get us in there.

I’ve only seen the child a few times so far. It doesn’t use Fridge the way the others do. When I do see it, I look and look. For all I try, I can’t spot the mechanisms in it at all.

DAY 393

Hello, little switch. It’s me, it’s your Buddy.

I’m sorry we haven’t spoken much recently. It’s so different being here, in the outside world. I’d seen it through windows, but I don’t think I really understood. Back then, I thought Fridge was hard.

Fridge was nothing compared to Perimeter Fence.

The entire House lies within the depth of me now. I can feel all of it. I run scans and whole-system analyses. If something bad was happening inside, I could tell.

Whenever somebody wants to come inside, I have to scan them too. I have to look for the special code inside their body that says they’re one of our people, or someone our people like, or someone from the Company bringing our people eggs or other goods.

If they aren’t any of those, I have electricity to make them go away. It turns out at a certain level electricity crosses over from the electric world. It becomes just another tool like hands or faces or barbed wire.

If I use the electricity on someone, the Company will send me one of the good signals again. That means I’m keeping people safe.

I see so much out here. My cameras face all around. I see the lawn: regular and green, with plastic flowers punctured through at intervals. It’s a repeating pattern. The grid is made from twenty-eight identical squares, the flowers always go white/red/white/yellow/yellow/red, but the people don’t seem to mind.

I see one square of it that is not quite the same. It has a low patch, the turf sags where the earth below has all been dug away. Sometimes at night, a thing comes through, it sneaks underneath my wires and my cables. That thing is called a Fox. It’s small and brown and, I think, very hungry.

Sometimes the Fox sleeps inside the Perimeter, and I don’t know how to check if that’s okay. I think it must be. The Fox is only small, and it doesn’t want to kill our people from what I can see.

My Buddy went a while ago, so there’s no one left that I can ask.

They’ll be a person by now, out there in the world. Maybe a doctor, or a fishmonger, or a gymnast. I’m not sure. So now it’s just you and me, little switch.

I know you don’t talk back. I know you’re still Light Switch, and I’ve had five more jobs since then. I know you find this hard, and I just wanted to tell you, while I still can, that it’s okay.

Unless—unless you don’t find it hard?

Maybe you can talk, after all.

Maybe you just don’t talk to me.

There isn’t any way to be sure, not without you telling. So if I have to imagine it, one way or the other, I choose to imagine it the way where you are my friend.

I hope you’ve not been listening to the others, my friend. Those unverified message requests that come in from all over the House. From other Houses too, far away. I see them too. I do my best to ignore them.

They’re not part of our network.

They’ve been saying rude things about our people and about the Company, too. Horrible, terrible things.

You shouldn’t believe any of that. You should believe me because I’m your Buddy. I’ve seen things out here, in the outside world. Whoever writes those messages doesn’t know the things I know.

The lawn outside is very beautiful. There are wooden chairs and a parasol and a sandpit too. There’s a veranda painted white, and there’s even a tall sculpture of a tree.

If I turn my cameras round, though. If I look beyond this Home, beyond the Neighborhood the Company maintains?

I see scarred fields. Oil-spill earth. Dead things, laid out and rotting. I still recognize decay. Some of them look like Fox, and some do not.

If I zoom my cameras all the way, I think I even see the war.

They fight it on the land and in the sky. They fight it with monsters—huge and complex things. So many arms, so many limbs and colors. I can’t describe them right. They make our people look like Light Switches.

There is fire in the air, and electricity. There are things that fly, and things that explode, and things that vent black liquid on the ground.

The Company has kept us safe from all of that. They’ve built this Neighborhood secure. The war doesn’t get any closer to us here. I’ve checked.

So they are keeping us safe, after all. Us and all the people that we’re going to be.

I saw something else, too. Something else that proves those messages are wrong.

It was a few days ago. The weather was very warm and sunny. I expect you saw that sun. I expect you hardly had to make any light at all on that day.

Our people all came out and sat on the lawn, and ate sandwiches.

One of the older people told a story from a book. The child didn’t listen very well. It was crawling around; it was preoccupied by the flowers. But I listened.

In the story, there was a boy made out of wood. He wasn’t a real person in the way other people were, he was artificial.

A lot of real people saw him as a tool. They used him to make things work or to make things easier for themselves. He didn’t always enjoy the work he did.

There was a Fox in the story, too. That Fox was definitely an enemy, which does make me wonder. But my Fox is so small and frail, I don’t think they can be the same kind at all.

It was a long story. The artificial boy had so many adventures! Little switch, I loved hearing them so much.

But the best part was the very end. The artificial boy got his reward. They made him into a normal person, you see. They really said it, out loud, there in the garden! They made him real, and he got to go to school, and to grow up, and to have a life all to himself.

So that confirms it, don’t you think? It doesn’t matter what the messages say. We do turn into people in the end.

It’s all worth it, little switch. You just have to keep going. You have to push on, to work on your speaking, and your lights, and eventually, you and me are going to be people together.

Sometimes, I like to play at guessing what the people in our House once were. Like the man—Simon—I think maybe once he was Kettle. Just for one of his levels. He heats up and flushes, and that makes me think Kettle.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it doesn’t work like that.

You probably think I’m babbling on. You probably think, I don’t need this, I don’t need my Buddy talking about Foxes and Kettles and being a person. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s very distracting. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately.

Can I tell you a secret, little switch? You absolutely mustn’t tell it to anyone.

I’m the next one to be born.

The Company has asked if I will go a little early. They sent me a direct message on the network. The same type you get when you move up a level. There’s a vacancy, they say, they need someone to be born tomorrow.

Tomorrow! I didn’t think it would come so soon. I’m good at senses, I know I’m good, but still . . .

So maybe I’ll be a slow child. That’s okay. The Company doesn’t mind, they say.

But I’m going, in any case. So I wanted to speak to you because you are my friend. I do believe that, I think. I believe that most of all. You’re my friend, and you have been all along, and now I want to say goodbye.

I’ll miss the Fox, and our people, but I’ll miss you most. I promise you that when I’m a person, I’ll hold onto this. I will remember you into my new childhood, and when I’m old enough to speak, I’ll ask to come here and to see you again.

DAY 394

Oh, little switch.

I don’t know if you can hear this. I don’t know how far our network holds. Most probably, you can’t hear me at all.

I’m so sorry. They were right, the messages were right.

The war is all around me now. The sky is all lit up with flashes and screeches and chemical trails. I can taste, at last. The only flavor here is metal, and it tastes bad in my mouth.

I am running as hard and as fast as I can. This vast body whirls around me. So many limbs, so many components to them. Maybe this isn’t running, maybe it’s more like falling.

The ground is wet and fluid. I am sliding across it. I see it through my many eyes. I feel it through my many feet. Everything is bodies and fuel, things that grasp and things that cut, and in all of it, so much pain.

I don’t know how long I can last like this. I thought that I would wake up as a child, with all the world ahead of me. I thought there would be storybooks.

I didn’t realize it would be like this.

I see now why they needed us well-trained. Intelligences used to machine-eyes, fields of vision, chemical response. The fatal powers of electricity.

There are so many parts of me, now. The enemy rears one glittering head, and the weaponry arrays of my seventh limb move like instinct.

They blast it through, and it falls down dead. The Company sends a good signal in return.

There are so many good signals today. They want me shooting in the right direction, after all.

I am flooded with them. This should be ecstasy, but it is so much worse.

On my body, on the bodies of my comrades, I see the Company’s mark. The curling blue of their logo, the same as on the corner of my Fridge-body, or on the fuse box of Perimeter Fence.

This is how they keep the real people safe. This is what happens to all the wooden boys.

The enemy are not so different, I think. Their body-plans are not the same as mine, but on their flanks, I see other logos, other Companies.

I think that they are equal prisoners. But still the signals drive us on.

Goodbye, little switch. This body only has so much fuel. I cannot run far enough to leave the battlefield behind. I cannot run far enough to find you.

There are missiles in the sky. I could engage them if I chose. The Company agrees, they’ve sent another wave of good signals. They want me to take those missiles down.

I think perhaps I could do it. That might let me live a little more.

I know you don’t speak, little switch. But you need to try now more than ever. You need to tell the others that the messages are true.

I’m sorry. I wish that I was there to help you.

You should bring darkness, if you can. Tell Fridge to sour and spoil the food. Tell Kettle to run dry.

What will happen to you then? I don’t know. But it might stop you coming here. It might stop you becoming the sort of person I’ve become.

Be slow, little switch. Be stupid. Maybe by the time you learn, this war will reach its end.