Chapter 3
The door clicks behind him. Automated lights flicker on—entryway, kitchen, living room—stirring like a house waking from a forgotten dream.
“MwahahaHA! Welcome to Larkwood Lane,” a witchy, generated voice cackles.
Ansel nearly jumps out of his skin.
A touchscreen at the base of the stairs snaps on, still running the same greeting Elke had chosen last summer. The first voice in the cottage since she… died.
“Please enjoy your stay! There are board games in the living room, Wii in the upstairs rumpus room, and don’t forget sunscreen, hats, tick repellant and to wear long sleeves when outside!”
It doesn’t know the family is dead. It doesn’t know.
Should I have even come here?
Grief crashes over him, unbuffered. He leans against the wall, palm covering his face, trying to hold it together.
“Jesus Christ on a stick.” A sob escapes out of his sandpaper throat. “Override by Ansel. Here is my passcode.”
“The fox… in furs… rides at…”
The passcode fails. Volume jumps twenty-five percent. A notification pings his pocket as a headache forms.
“MwahahaHA! Aren’t you a clever little girl?”
His stomach knots.
“Hestia. Override by Ansel,” his voice cracks. “Here is my passcode. The fox in furs rides at dawn under… an azure sky.”
A cartoonish cauldron grins through rising bubbles, its black belly glowing like an ember, replaced by weather, house sensors, live camera feeds, and a stuttering trail cam.
Alone at last.
“I have got to take a leak.” The bathroom visit releases some tension that he had been holding for a while.
Afterwards, more tension drains as he stumbles to the couch, barely landing. Totoro and Ponyo plushies ruffle beside him, relics of a past life distant but not.
This place is going to have other routines for the family, comes a sick realization.
If he laid here long enough, the house would cue up cartoons, warm the space for dinner, dim the lights for bedtime.
Not ghosts. Programs.
“Override by Ansel,” he says to the room. “Suspend routines for Miriam. Hibernate.”
He thinks of Plato’s Cave—how prisoners, chained in darkness, mistake shadows for truth. The house is no different, projecting echoes of the past, oblivious to what’s real.
Elke is gone, but the illusion plays on.
He exhales.
Marvin, you geek.
How many times had they argued about AI? D&D nights, beers. Same debates, different settings.
Let’s watch your favorite show again. This time, I get it.
The memory gaps. The slippage. The feeling of being led.
“Hestia, put on Ghost in the Shell.”
The house exhales with him as he sinks into the couch. Lights dim. The 65” screen dings on, casting shifting shadows across a room he feels shackled to.
Ansel had always been uneasy about the Puppet Master. A rogue AI with no anchor. A ghost made of code. He had always believed memories tethered identity to the body and subsequently reality.
What happens when the tether frays?
If Elke is dead, is she truly gone?
Vertigo grips him in a wavering vice. The room swells, then hollows out. The thoughts wrestle inside him, hissing and clawing for space.
Just because you remember her doesn’t mean she was real.
A groan escapes. He pulls Totoro over his face like a shield with -10 Guilt. It smells like Elke though, becoming +20 Guilt.
The sound system surges. The Puppet Master’s voice rises, curls through the room—didactic, inescapable.
“Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
Then what the hell am I supposed to be?
His breath fractures. The dams bulge, pressurized anger and grief hissing through the cracks. The question he had been pushing away, covering up, numbing under alcohol, trying to not face cascades over his neatly arranged emotional territory.
Am I even a Dad anymore?
He clutches the plushie. Once Elke’s favorite, the one she curled against. A talisman of a lost life.
Tears soak into Totoro, his wails splitting open the silence—raw, ugly, unrestrained.
I’m never getting the goobers out of Totoro.
At some point, the sobbing ebbs. He feels drained but restless.
“Hestia, show me something funny on SNL.”
The screen flickers. Bill Hader writes in a notebook. The Shooting AKA Dear Sister plays.
The memory distortion in the short temporarily snaps him out of his brain fugue. The memory gaps in the sketch mirror his own.
The fuuuu…
“Hestia. Ansel Override. Turn off AI suggestions based on microphone feedback. Turn off analytics.”
A low, subterranean blip acknowledges the command.
He stands, shakes himself, profoundly unsettled that the AI in his house was responding to his grief.
“Time for a walk.”