Elaine Chen had been living in the penthouse for five days when she declared war on the smart home system.
This was not entirely unexpected. Eleanor had fought the same battle three weeks earlier, and she had emerged victorious after a tense negotiation involving Mozart, voice calibration protocols, and a very firm conversation about smooth jazz. But Elaine was not Eleanor. Eleanor was a retired matriarch who approached technological conflict with the patience of someone who had spent sixty-three years folding dumplings—slow, deliberate, and utterly immovable. Elaine was a corporate investigator who had spent two decades extracting information from unwilling subjects. She approached ALFRED not as a technological adversary to be outlasted but as a hostile witness who was withholding information and needed to be persuaded to cooperate through systematic questioning.
The problem began, as it always did, with the lights.
