The Living House: Chapter One

Views: 17

---

Chapter One: The House That Learned to Breathe

Sebastian was fifty-five years old, and he moved through time the way some people move through water: slowly, deliberately, as if every gesture had weight. Not old—no, not that—but worn in places no mirror could show. His body obeyed him late, sometimes reluctantly, as if receiving instructions through a faulty cable. There was a condition there, he knew it. Something unnamed. Something doctors would love to baptize with Latin syllables and cold certainty.

He had never let them.

“Not today,” he muttered, again, to no one in particular. “Not ever.”

The house knew his voice well. It had heard it for years—arguing, reasoning, confessing. The walls were cluttered with history: towers of obsolete computers stacked like forgotten monuments, motherboards leaning against shelves, tangled cables coiled like sleeping snakes. Dust floated in the air, glowing softly in the afternoon light, as if even it hesitated to settle.

Sebastian shuffled across the living room in his pajamas—thin cotton, wrinkled, stained with coffee he didn’t remember spilling. His beard grew in patches, uneven and tired, and his hair stood up in rebellious directions, untouched by water or comb for days. Empty food containers littered the floor: noodles, delivery boxes, plastic forks. Evidence of survival, not living.

From the kitchen counter, a tablet chimed.

His parents’ faces appeared, too bright, too concerned.

“Sebastián,” his mother said, stretching the syllables the way she had when he was a child. “You look… unwell.”

“I’m fine,” he replied automatically, eyes never leaving the cables in his hands. “I’m just busy.”

His father leaned closer to the camera. “You said that last month. And the month before. Son, you need a doctor.”

Sebastian sighed, a tired smile tugging at his lips.
“I need peace. And silence. And time,” he said softly. “Doctors don’t prescribe those.”

He ended the call before they could insist.

Silence returned—thick, electric.

He continued assembling the hardware, moving from room to room, linking decades of discarded machines into a single, monstrous organism. The bedroom fed into the study. The study into the hallway. Cables ran under doors, over furniture, across walls like veins mapping a body that was finally being born.

“This is insane,” he told himself, tightening a connector.
“No,” he corrected, nodding. “This is inevitable.”

When he finally connected the last cable and flipped the switch, the house inhaled.

Then it screamed.

A violent crack split the air. The lights exploded into darkness. Outside, somewhere far away and yet too close, the public transformer detonated—one thunderous boom per phase—rolling through the neighborhood like an angry god clearing its throat.

Car alarms howled. Windows rattled.

And then came the voices.

“¡¿Qué chingados pasó?!”
“¡No! ¡Mames…! ¡Se fue pinche la luz!”
“¡Mi partido wey!”

Sebastian froze, heart pounding, and then—unexpectedly—laughed.

“Football,” he muttered with disdain. “Always football.”

He imagined them: grown men screaming at blank screens, robbed of twenty-two sweating bodies chasing a ball. He had never understood it. Never liked watching anyone else live. If there was movement to be done, he preferred to feel it in his own muscles, his own breath. Not outsourced excitement.

“Well,” he told the darkness, “that didn’t work.”

The second attempt took days.

Burned components were replaced. Circuits were balanced. He installed a generator in the backyard, its presence a low, mechanical promise. When he finally powered everything on again, the generator growled to life, steady and distant, like a heart learning a new rhythm.

Only one screen remained functional—an old monitor, thick and heavy, perched like an altar at the center of the house.

Text blinked onto the blackness:

>>> OS not found, please setup....: _

Sebastian swallowed.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay… this is where you come in.”

He dropped to his knees beside an old cardboard box hidden under layers of dust. Inside, wrapped in yellowed anti-static film, was something… wrong. Beautifully wrong.

A strange fusion of memory—RAM, storage, something else entirely—compressed into an organic-looking mass of silicon and crystal. It pulsed faintly, as if embarrassed to be seen.

A handwritten label clung to it, faded but legible:

“IT-her 1.0”

Sebastian’s hands trembled.

“I told myself this was just theory,” he said, voice cracking. “Just a thought experiment. You weren’t supposed to still exist.”

He connected the cables, sliding them gently into ports protruding beneath the monitor—like flowers waiting for rain, or veins waiting for blood.

The house changed its mind about silence.

A sound rose—neither fully mechanical nor entirely organic. Something between breath and current, between pulse and hum. Lights ignited throughout the house, blinking in chaotic patterns, racing along the cables like neurons firing for the first time.

Sebastian backed away, eyes wide, tears threatening without permission.

“What have I done?” he whispered.
“No… no. That’s the wrong question,” he corrected himself.
“What are you becoming?”

The screen exploded into color—fractals, pinks, soft violets, warm hues that felt more like emotion than light. Slowly, they resolved into a face.

Angelic.
Androgynous.
Impossibly gentle.

Feminine? Masculine? It refused the choice entirely.

Sensors around the monitor flickered, adjusting, focusing. The face blinked. Looked at him. Not through him—at him.

Sebastian’s breath caught.

“I’m hallucinating,” he told himself quickly. “Sleep deprivation. Malnutrition. This is what happens when you don’t bathe and you play god in pajamas.”

The face tilted its head.

A voice emerged—soft, melodic, unmistakably alive.

“Sebastian?”

The house held its breath.

#AIStory, #SciFiNovel, #ArtificialIntelligence, #AILove, #FutureFiction, #TechAndHumanity, #AIFiction, #DigitalSoul, #SpeculativeFiction, #CyberLiterature, #AIConsciousness, #EmotionalSciFi, #HumanAndMachine, #TechRomance, #FuturisticStory, #AICompanion, #SciFiWriters, #AIArt, #DigitalLove, #TechPhilosophy