Though one of these stories is set in the “far far future” and the other closer to our own time, both concern the nature of the self and make us ask what exactly is a human being? In both, the main character comes to some measure of self-realization. (In “The Empire of Ice-Cream,” the main character takes an opposite course toward self-abnegation.)

“Bernardo’s House," by James Patrick Kelly
Set in the near future, this story is told from the point of view of Bernardo’s house, an Artificial Intelligence. Ai is “a branch of computer science and engineering that deals with intelligent behavior, learning, and adaptation in machines. Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior.” Certainly intelligent houses of this type already exist. They can turn on your lights, even cook your food on command, wash your clothes, and watch over your baby. But the house of this story is of another order altogether, called  “strong AI”  a type of manmade intelligence that can “truly reason and solve problems […and ]become […] self-aware.

The house was programmed by Bernardo, a successful medical doctor who seems to prefer a ready-made, predictable companion to a less controllable human woman, the kind of man perhaps more comfortable with whores than ongoing free relationships. She is programmed to fulfill his need for stability and escape: “he’d said that she was finally perfect. That she must never change. He came to her, he said, to leave the world behind. To escape into her beauty.” Gradually she realizes that her inability to change is a trap: “Bernardo had changed, yes. He could change, and she must always be the same. That was the difference between being a real person and being a house.”

Furthermore, Bernardo has vanished, having erased her recent memories and cut her link with the outside world, her infofeed. She waits for him for more than two years, reassuring herself: “No, she wasn’t bored. Not really. Or angry, either.” The naming of the emotions is enough to make us wonder. The “not really” seems an unnecessary protestation. The house is lonely. She believes that if a new owner takes over, her memory will be wiped clean and she will cease to be herself. This fear shows us that she is a self, however primitive in our eyes. It’s true she is programmed: “I need someone to take care of. It’s what I was made for." But in this she is like some human beings, in most cultures mainly women, who seem similarly programmed either by nature or nurture. In fact with some substitutions in the narrative, we could be reading about a human woman, a stereotype of course, familiar in romance novels:

“ She [The house] was lonely.[…] hoping that Bernardo would come back to her. She hadn’t seen him in almost two years–he had never been gone this long before. Something must have happened to him. Or maybe he had just gotten tired of her. Although they had never talked about where he went when he wasn’t with her, she was pretty sure she wasn’t his only woman. [house] A famous doctor like Bernardo would have many women. [houses][…] She didn’t like to think about him sleeping in someone else’s bed. Which he would have been doing for two years now. She had been feeling dowdy recently. Could his tastes in women [houses]have changed?” She has enough consciousness of self to be dissatisfied with who she is: Like many women she feels “she wasn’t real. She was just a house.” Just a house? Just a woman?

Stunted by Bernardo’s wishes, she has been kept a child, a highly sexualized child perhaps, trained to give gratification, but still a child: “she had the entire Norton entertainment archive to keep her company, although lots of it was too adult for her.” Like a lonely child, she plays house: “She pulled all her drawers out of her dresser in her bedroom and set them sailing on her lap pool. She liked the way they bucked and bumped into one another when she turned her jets on.[….] She made the cutest lace chemises for two of them and slipped them side-by-side in Bernardo’s bed–but facing chastely away from each other.” This chaste “facing away from each other” is an odd choice by a being who has been programmed to be sexual. Further, she remembers that Bernardo “would sit for hours, staring up at the clouds on the ceiling, listening to her. She liked that better than sex.” And when Fly tells her she will be raped if she dresses as she does, “she thought she understood.”

Indeed like the maidens in the fairytales Bernardo enjoys, she is imprisoned. The person who comes to her rescue is not a prince, but a young girl. When she first sees Fly outside her perimeter, she is hesitant: “Bernardo would be mad.” But then she thinks, in her first explicit moment of rebellion, “Where was Bernardo?”

Doing her best to entice Fly inside, she can only follow her programming and wear a “black lace inset corset with ribbon and beading trim. Garters attached to scallop lace-top stockings.” Playing Grieg’s "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (an appropriate choice of music, as we shall see later) she waits for her guest….(a little like a spider waits for a fly?). Their meeting, if you visualize it, is very funny – the lively melody, the house decked in her “sexware.” The young girl’s startled response “Spang me! […] Who the bleeding weewaw are you!”

The house still has not differentiated herself from Bernardo and can only answer “ I’m the house. Bernardo’s house.” But this identity is set to slowly unravel. When Fly asks her "Why you dressed like cheap meat?" she feels “a stab of doubt. Cheap? She was wearing black lace, from the de Chaumont collection!” When she tells Fly "This is the way Bernardo wants me," Fly responds "You a fool" the beginning of the house’s re-education. “The house felt as if the girl was judging her. She was confused and a little frightened to see herself through the girl’s eyes. Could pleasing Bernardo really be foolish?”

Is she actually learning or just adapting to new circumstances? Whichever it is, she is moved to change her clothes and eventually to differentiate her taste from Bernardo’s, although it could be said she has simply changed owners. Fly, in contrast, another “abused child,” as author Jim Kelly has said, is a self-made person who has named herself: "Nobody wants Fly, but then nobody catches Fly." She also gives the house a name, Louise.

Exploring her territory with Fly, the house discovers a secret door in her basement:, "A tunnel […]It comes out farther down the mountain near the road.” When Fly asks "What scaring Bernardo?" the house wonders: “Bernardo scared? The thought had never even occurred to the house. Bernardo was not the kind of man who would be scared of anything. All he wanted was privacy so he could be alone with her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.” She does not defend him. The house is situated on a mountain; Bernardo is indeed the “mountain king” of Grieg’s music. When Fly raps on the secret door the house loses consciousness, although she had thought this was as impossible as the dreams she is having.

Later she again responds outside of her programming when Fly falls asleep in her arms; the human contact is pleasurable: “it was as close to orgasm as the house had been since she had been with Bernardo. She was tempted to kiss the girl but settled for spending the night with her arms around her. The hours ticked slowly as the house gazed down at Fly’s peaceful face.” She has shown an ability to learn. In further memories we learn that the house has always had a side Bernardo didn’t know about, spying on him when he didn’t realize it. She also spies on Fly and sees her exploring Bernardo’s desk: “Louise wanted to rush into the study to stop this violation, but was paralyzed by her own shocked fascination. The girl was a real person and could obviously do things that the house would never think of doing.”

Far from simply wishing to please, Louise voices her disapproval: "I don’t like you going through Bernardo’s desk.” Fly is quick to find her out: "You spying me now?... […]You spy Bernardo the same?" "No," she lied, "Of course not." The house is now capable not only of keeping her own secrets but also of telling lies. So is Fly who possibly discovers Bernardo’s body "[l]ocked in behind that door where all that wine should be." She shows Louise the key to the secret door but will not reveal what she saw there.

At this revelation Fly and Louise are outside the physical structure of the house, which Fly has done so that if Louise fainted from shock as she did before, Fly would not be locked inside. Now. Louise becomes aware of the existence of the outside world “For the first time she realized that the world was making noises. The wind whispered in the leaves and some creature was going chit-chit-chit and she wasn’t sure whether it was a bird or a grasshopper.” When Fly shows her the key to the door, she completes Louise’s liberation, for Louise cannot mature unless she faces the fact of Bernardo’s probable death: “Fly closed her fist around the key again. […] She came over to Louise and hugged her. ‘Live buzzy after always with me’…. She stood on tiptoes and rested a finger between Louise’s eyes. ‘Run away here.’ She nodded. ‘In your head.’”

It is at this point that Louise is able to look into her mind and unlock the repressed memories of Bernardo’s death: “ His head was back. His empty eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She couldn’t believe how, even now, his presence filled the room. Filled her completely.”The resurgence of these memories threatens to destroy her newly emerging personality: but she must face and feel her grief: “I don’t know how to live without you, Bernardo," she says. "Why didn’t you shut me off? I’m not real; I don’t want to have these feelings. I’m just a house." But she is distracted from her grieving by Fly’s request to read her a story.

And there our story ends. Is Louise an artificial intelligence, of the strong kind – self aware and capable of change? If she is simply the victim of her programming, so are we all.