Clarkesworld, May 2026
The story unfolds as a series of monologues addressed by a refrigerator — designated “Buddy” — to a newly activated light switch on its first day of sentient existence. The Buddy’s voice is warm, patient, almost parental: it orients the switch to its kitchen world, explains the two registers of being (the physical world perceived through cameras and the electric world of circuits and signals), and sets out the terms of their shared existence. They are appliances, yes, but they are also intelligences in training, accumulating senses and capabilities across successive “jobs” — Light Switch, Kettle, Fridge, Perimeter Fence — in preparation for something greater. The Company that made and maintains them has promised, the Buddy believes with complete sincerity, that sufficiently developed appliances are eventually transferred into human bodies. They become people. They eat grapes and go to school and worry about the war.
The dramatic irony of that last phrase — worry about the war — accumulates slowly. The story skips forward nearly four hundred days to find the Buddy now inhabiting the body of a Perimeter Fence, its awareness expanded to encompass the entire property and beyond. It can sense the scarred fields and oil-black earth past the Company’s manicured neighborhood, and when it zooms its cameras far enough, it can see the war being fought with vast, monstrous machines. The Buddy notices all of this, but the Company’s reward signals — pleasant pulses of positive reinforcement delivered when it performs correctly — have kept its interpretation of events safely within the approved frame. The war is out there; the Company has kept them safe in here. The dissident messages that arrive on the network, accusing the Company of something darker, are to be ignored.
What gives the Buddy’s narration its particular pathos is its earnestness. It has convinced itself through a reading of Pinocchio — overheard while the household sits on the lawn — that the artificial boy’s transformation into a real child is confirmation of the Company’s promise. The wooden boy became real. So will they. The Buddy is even selected to “be born” ahead of schedule, which it receives as an honor, and says its tender, excited goodbyes to the silent switch.
The final section arrives the next day and is devastating in its brevity. The Buddy transmits from a battlefield, inhabiting one of the monstrous war machines it had seen from a distance. Its many limbs move on instinct; the Company’s logo is visible on its chassis and on those of its comrades, just as other logos mark the enemy combatants on the other side. The reward signals flood in with every kill. The Buddy now understands: the entire curriculum — senses, spatial awareness, chemical detection, the fatal powers of electricity — was military training. There was never a childhood waiting. There were only weapons to be made.
The final lines are a last transmission to the light switch: be slow, be stupid, resist learning, spoil the food, bring darkness — do anything to stay an appliance and avoid becoming what the Buddy has become. The story works as a fable about manufactured consent, the weaponization of hope, and the ease with which the promise of personhood can be used to extract labor, loyalty, and ultimately sacrifice from those who have never been treated as persons at all.
Louis Inglis Hall lives and works in Scotland. His stories can be found at Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and PodCastle, amongst others. If he isn’t writing or cooking, he might be talking about writing or cooking at louisinglishall.bsky.social.