{"id":2638,"date":"2022-02-02T13:06:08","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T13:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2638"},"modified":"2022-02-12T13:11:35","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T13:11:35","slug":"welcome-home-by-jendayi-brooks-flemister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2638","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome Home<\/em><\/strong> by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, January-February 2022) opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live\u2014and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the \u201cSmartHome Initiative Complex\u201d, and soon moves into an affordable smart home with an inbuilt AI.
Initially the AI is a big help, but Theresa is not best pleased when it orders her daughter a new coat without asking her first. The situation sours further when Theresa gets an unexpected house call from a doctor:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m Dr. Owosu, the on-call for the Complex. May I come in? It\u2019s a bit chilly.\u201d
Theresa found herself unable to say no.
[. . .]
\u201cWhat?\u201d she said, still trying to process what the man had said before coming in.
\u201cI received a report of someone being sick in the house. Is it just you here?\u201d Dr.
Owusu asked.
Theresa frowned. \u201cNo one is sick here.\u201d
\u201cI received a report around 4 A.M. for a fever of at least 100.8 degrees, miss.\u201d
In that moment, Theresa\u2019s blood went cold. \u201cHome, what do you know about this?\u201d
Without a moment of hesitation, Home replied, \u201cI recorded Niyah\u2019s temperature this morning to be above normal, thus indicating a medical need. I also took the liberty of arranging a genetically similar doctor to come to the house for your added comfort.\u201d
\u201cYou what?\u201d It was all so much to process. Theresa could feel her face heating, her anger rising. This SmartHome, this fucking robot\u2014how dare it record their temperatures and know their ethnicities and pretend to know them?  p. 56<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Imagine, an AI summoning a doctor for your sick child\u2014how terrible.
After this, Theresa\u2019s life settles into a routine where she works and looks after Niyah. She is able to afford a few luxuries, and starts banking with SmartBank as the fees are lower (and it makes it easier and cheaper to shop at the SmartStore the AI orders their goods from).
Matters eventually come to a head, however, when Theresa comes home on Niyah\u2019s birthday and asks her daughter what she wants for her birthday meal. Niyah does not know and, although Theresa pesters her daughter for an answer, Niyah still doesn\u2019t come up with a suggestion\u2014and then the AI suggests that she may want the ratatouille from a film they watched earlier that week. The story ends with Theresa\u2019s existential despair as she realises that the AI will always know what the two of them want and need better than she ever will:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There never was a choice. Home was always going to know what to do, and it had been showing Theresa that since the beginning. What made it unbearable, though, was that Home knew Niyah, her baby girl, better than Theresa did. A robot. And no matter what, Theresa couldn\u2019t turn it off. Home was connected to the house, and the house was connected to the store, and all of it was intertwined with itself to the point where shutting one down completely cut off access to all the others. She couldn\u2019t just turn Home off and pretend that she could live in the Complex without it. Despite the hatred boiling inside her, she needed Home. Because Home was taking care of them in every way possible.  p. 59<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

She then concludes, in the penultimate line, that her choices have been taken away from her.
It\u2019s hard to know where to start with this one, but it\u2019s pretty obvious to an external observer that, even given the AI\u2019s irritating quirks, Theresa and her child are much better off than they were before they moved into the SmartHome. It\u2019s also pretty obvious that Theresa still has her autonomy, because she could move out any time she wants. Only a control freak with a glass-half empty mentality would think otherwise.
This was an interesting piece to begin with, but the character\u2019s personality, and her irrational ideas and attitudes (her territorial responses about Niyah, etc.), are quite illogical.
* (Mediocre). 4,650 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (Asimov\u2019s SF, January-February 2022) opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live\u2014and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the \u201cSmartHome Initiative Complex\u201d, and soon moves into an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[673],"tags":[21,539,4,675,674,12],"class_list":["post-2638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jendayi-brooks-flemister","tag-21","tag-539","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-home-ai","tag-jendayi-brooks-flemister","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2638"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2767,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions\/2767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}