The next evening Viktor deliberately called her into the kitchen. A printed document lay on the table, looking like the charter of some secret research institute. Viktor’s expression was solemn, with a hint of fanaticism.
“I’ve drawn up a code, Anya. This is the foundation of our comfort,” he said, sliding the pages toward her.
Anya began to read. She wore the brightest, most radiant smile she could manage, nodded along, and acted utterly thrilled. But inside her, a gulf of sarcasm opened up.
What the hell am I reading? ‘Raising the acoustic background above 85 dB is prohibited’? Are you serious, Architect? What am I to you—some kind of sound-level measuring device? Do I have to calibrate my vocal cords before I shout ‘Help’?
‘Impact on static objects (walls) must not exceed an impulse of 10 kg·m/s at a contact time…’
Idiot, I don’t even know what those quantities are! I’m not a pressure sensor in a lab!
Suddenly, midway through the text, her eye caught on a stray foreign-looking character—one of those odd glyphs neural nets sometimes spat out—and on the document’s sterile list formatting. And then it hit Anya.
This bastard hadn’t written the rules himself. He’d fed a prompt into an AI. But since censorship algorithms wouldn’t allow descriptions of violence against people or enslavement, he’d outsmarted the system. He’d asked the AI to draft something like a “Protocol for the safe operation of an autonomous anthropomorphic robot in a domestic setting”.
Anya looked up at him innocently.
“Viktor, it’s so… professional. But how am I supposed to make sense of these values? I can’t estimate volume in decibels as precisely as you can.”
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Viktor seemed to have been waiting for that. He came over, took her hand—his fingers were dry and hot—and led her to the couch. He picked up a decorative pillow.
“Look, Anya. This is an acceptable volume level,” he began in an even, calm tone. “And this…” He suddenly raised his voice, almost shouting. “—this is already 85 dB. That’s the limit.”
Then he took her palm, curled her fingers into a fist with his hand, and drove her fist into the pillow.
“This is an acceptable impulse. Feel the resistance of the fabric? Anything stronger is already destructive behavior causing damage to household property.”
Jesus. This is complete surrealism. He’s a clinical idiot. He’s seriously teaching me to hit a pillow by an impulse formula. He’s sunk so deep into this creator-god delusion that he’s stopped seeing me as a human being. To him I’m a complicated mechanism that needs to be tuned. Fine. To hell with you. I’ll use even this.
Anya gently freed her hand and looked at him with gratitude.
“Thank you, Viktor. Now I understand the boundaries. You know…” She paused, making her voice as tender as possible. “In moments like this, when you hold my hand and teach me, I feel like a little daughter in the strong, reliable hands of a father.”
Viktor’s jaw twitched instantly, as if an electric current had passed under his skin. He tensed all over; his eyes darkened for a moment with some unbearable, long-buried pain. He turned away sharply, pretending to straighten the pages on the table.
It worked, she noted. Something’s buried there. Deep and very painful. And that something is my key to his complete collapse.
She returned to reading the “Sanctions” section. The rules laid out in detail what would happen in response to her “malfunctions”.
• Loss of walks in the garden.
• Reduced rations.
• A ban on reading books.
Strangely, he hadn’t included beatings or physical injury.
Logical. Machines don’t feel pain. Hitting a toaster because it burned bread is ineffective. Besides, how do you calculate the force of a blow under the ‘code’? Easier to deprive it of energy. He’s genuinely reduced me to the status of a thing.
Everything was spelled out except one thing—escape. At the very end, after the printed text, there was a note added—clearly written by him, not the neural net.
“For an attempt at unauthorized departure beyond the perimeter—you understand what will happen.”
No numbers. No decibels. Only a cold, naked threat.
She reread the rules several more times, looking for loopholes in his machine code, and then went to bed. The surreal bureaucracy and mental gymnastics left her with a headache.