On an irrelevant day of an irrelevant month in an irrelevant year, a baby unwanted by his parents was sold to the Verity family. On the same day of the same month of the same year, a baby girl born in an asylum was adopted by its owner.
The unlucky lineage of owners for Ovidor’s Psychiatric Hospital began in 1953 with the founder, Dr. Ovidor. He visited Guildford, England and thought it to be the perfect place to build a home for lunatics. “No one requires psychiatric help more than the middle class!” he said.
Just one year after its doors opened, a patient bit Dr. Ovidor, and he died from the utter gall.
The man to follow him lasted one month before his imprisonment for drug theft. Quite the legacy.
The next owner familiarized himself with the rich and clever—one of whom was the talented inventor Soomin Dan. She sold her robots for the small price of several life savings. Her humanitarianism moved the asylum owner so deeply, he turned to her while on his deathbed—having served for only two years. Disease had thinned the once thick man, now, he lay in a bed with too soft a mattress, which he sunk into while coughing up blood and pleading to Soomin.
“Take care of the hospital. Please.”
She had not seen this coming and thought she too may die from the utter gall. “I don’t know a thing about psychiatry.”
He waved his hand. “Bah. You’ll figure it out.”
His eyes proceeded to roll back into his head. Soomin waved her hands in a useless attempt to keep him from dying, but his tongue stuck out with his last breath. His last words were final: Ovidor’s belonged to Soomin.
While figuring out how to run the damned thing, the inventor did what she did best and automated herself out of the job. She built H2, who carried Ovidor’s legacy with as much grace as a robot could.
Then the humanoid machine clanged home with a baby in hand.
It entered the rectangular mansion with copper parts covered in blood. Soomin glanced up from her most recent work. One day, the cluttered mess would be a toaster that turned bread the perfect shade of golden brown, since no other toasters met her specific needs. Knotted black hair gathered in a messy bun; she put on her glasses to see what H2 had done. “H2… what are you holding?”
“Baby.”
The inventor looked ready to flip every table, chair, and toaster the world offered. “Why?”
“Wanted child.”
The screwdriver Soomin clenched in hand dropped to the table, clanking and pushing a metal piece over the edge. It fell, bouncing. Soomin awkwardly scratched her head. H2 computed nothing ‘awkward’ and waited for a response, tilting its blocky head. The inventor picked up the metal piece, staring at the baby still covered in vernix. She, too, did not compute what was happening.
“You wanted a child, so you took a baby,” she stated. H2’s two green lights for eyes held no emotion; robots often had that quality. “You wanted… a…” Soomin abruptly stood like pins pricked her bum. “Daebak!” She abandoned English the way one tossed improperly toasted bread, and spluttered in Korean, “You wanted! Desire, you felt desire.” Her hands shook at this discovery. She saw the newspaper heading: SOOMIN DAN, First Inventor to Create a Robot with Intelligence and Emotions, AKA the Smartest Person to Live. Einstein, Weep Your Hair Off!
“I’m a genius,” she said, as though she only just learned this.
“Yes,” said H2, also in Korean.
The inventor basked in her breakthrough, when the baby wailed in H2’s cold copper grasp. Soomin huffed a huff that could be described as dissatisfied, horrified, and unsure. Actually, there are more words to describe it, but the point has been made. She took the baby, holding her awkwardly, especially since the poor thing only wore a bedsheet. Next to H2, her skin shone darker than the robot’s copper body, and she wriggled in Soomin’s hold. She had to admit; the baby was adorable. “Where did you find it?”
H2 tilted toward the baby, not taking its illuminating gaze away. “Woman in asylum pregnant. Helped give birth. She couldn’t take care of baby. Took baby.”
That’s the way it went when artificial intelligence was left to its own devices.
Soomin puffed out her cheeks, which she did when she was both stumped and annoyed. The baby suddenly sneezed, the mist of saliva landing directly in her eyes. She rubbed them until she saw black spots, and the baby took the splendid opportunity to scream. The inventor yelled over the abominable sound, “Alright, but why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”
“Already in hospital.”
“It’s not the same—whatever. Look, we can’t take care of it. We’ll need to feed it, wash it… H2, it doesn’t even have clothes!”
H2’s round fingers clicked together, showing that it wanted to hold the child. “Will take care of Dream.”
Soomin looked from the baby’s chubby face to the robot. “Dream? Is that the best name you thought of?”
H2 reached for Soomin, hands twisting while its fingers clattered. “Yes. Saw word on street sign. Named her that.”
The baby writhed and screeched, and the cringing Soomin handed her over to the ever calm robot, and once holding the child, it cooed and soothed until the crying stopped. A compartment within H2 slid open to reveal a speaker, and a lullaby pooled out and filled the messy room. Of course the robot had already prepared lullabies for the child. Why wouldn’t it have? Soomin kept her cheeks puffed out and paced around the room, kicking boxes, shuffling things around on her scrambled tables, finding tools and putting them somewhere else, even though she’d eventually forget where she placed them. The ever patient H2 still played the lullaby and held the baby at a perfect angle. The inventor stomped in circles, muttering to herself until she tossed up her hands.
“You take care of the child. You do all the work, and if the baby disturbs me, I’ll put it up for adoption and turn you into a fridge.”
“Okay,” H2 said. It jerked its head down to Dream, then back at Soomin. “Dream needs surname. And middle name.”
Soomin turned back to her toaster invention, sitting down in her old spinning chair, and dug for an object she’d moved. “If it’s living with us, it can have my family name.”
“Give middle name?”
Soomin took off her glasses as she studied her work. “You can give it one—I’m sure you will come up with something brilliant.”
H2 was an astute invention, but it didn’t understand some small but important things. Such as names. “Okay. Dream Tomato Dan.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Dream Celery Dan. Like that one. Sounds nice.”
Soomin spun around in her chair, spinning a few times. “Something that’s not a vegetable. How about something that starts with a ‘D’? I do like alliteration.”
“Dream Doughnut Dan.”
Soomin stopped spinning. “You’re being daft, now. Something that isn’t food.”
“Dream Daisy Dan.”
The inventor sucked in her lips, stuck them out, and sucked them back in again, and clicked her tongue. “Alright. Dream Daisy Dan it is.”
The baby was henceforth a member of the rather strange household, and Soomin warmed up to the child and helped raise her. Dream was healthy and lucky to be taken in by those who truly cared for her.
Meanwhile, in Guildford’s adoption centre, the baby boy was not so lucky.
Imagine a building the colour of a blank sheet and with not a single decoration in sight. It was the home for office workers rather than children. The plain walls made Mr. and Mrs. Verity want to vomit as they studied the many screaming babies. They found one wriggling and watching them with massive blue eyes, and they chose him solely for the lovely shade they were.
“The colour may change as he grows,” Mr. Verity grumbled.
Mrs. Verity glanced over the information provided on the boy’s parents. “It says the mother had blue eyes. Oh pity, the father had brown. Let’s hope they stay blue. If they change, we can always get another one,” said Mrs. Verity. “Maybe Priscilla will like this one.”
She’d talked Mr. Verity into “adopting” the child, and when the day came to pick him up, neither of them bothered touching him. They pulled out blue pens to sign the paperwork, but the woman behind the desk cleared her throat and said, “Signatures must be in black ink.”
Mrs. Verity scoffed at this while Mr. Verity suppressed a yawn and directed their elderly servant Murdi to grab the baby. The child was drawn to her thin brown hair and faded green eyes, as though her wrinkles were the trails of shooting stars. Murdi never had a child of her own, had wondered what it would be like, and miraculously, the Veritys had stopped her wondering. She decided to never let go of him from then on. She brushed her finger to the birthmark on his cheek. “I’ll be taking care of you from now on,” she said with reverence. “I can’t promise I’ll be any good. But I’ll do my bloody best.”
Signing their swirly signatures, Mr. Verity said, “We will have to name the child.”
Mrs. Verity didn’t think too long, didn’t want to think too long, and tossed out, “How about House? That’s what he’s going to live in, anyway.”
Mr. Verity nodded. “That will do.”
Murdi shook her head. How could they possibly come up with such a name? She thanked the heavens that they were not the ones actually taking care of him. On the way home in their blue car, Mrs. Verity said to Murdi while applying blue mascara to her voluminous lashes, “No matter how many orders we give you, this one is at the very tip-top. Raise House to be the best. Teach him well enough so that he will never have to go to school and never have a rebellious phase. Oh! And raise him to draw and paint and so forth.”
Murdi adjusted her grasp on the child. “Why the arts?”
Mr. Verity cleared his throat at the wheel and glared at Murdi in the rearview mirror. “He is our designated painter.”
Mrs. Verity not only believed the walls needed to be repainted every year, but her taste in paintings was so particular, so specific, she insisted they could never find the perfect artist and should instead raise a child that met their needs. It was the opposite of a sane decision, but Murdi wouldn’t call her insane. That felt a bit too harsh. Fatuous at least sounded nicer. That would do.
She attempted to keep her voice level. “So you want to raise someone under your control.”
Mrs. Verity clapped her hands. “He will be so loyal!”
“I can see the trouble he’ll cause,” said Murdi.
The car pulled into Wanderhead Road and toward the home differing from every other magnificent mansion on the street. Some white houses had a lovely red or green door, a few yellow houses had pale orange shutters, but everything about the Verity’s house was blue. A navy roof over baby blue walls and a sapphire door stood ready to welcome them. The architecture swirled to look like water, twirling columns raised a bending roof with curly tips at the tops and ends of it. Symmetrical statues of mermaids raised their hands on either side of the magnificent staircase leading to their front door, and the railings mimicked a waterfall. Servants spread out on their lawn, trimming the hedges to keep their liquid shape while also painting the grass blue. The Veritys obsessively popped blue contacts in their eyes each day, dyed their hair blue (which included Mr. Verity’s beard), kept their nails painted blue, and much like satin bowerbirds, their closets overflowed with only one colour, which doesn’t need to be stated.
The Veritys walked into their enchanting, magnificently blue home to open their arms to their darling little girl, Priscilla. Her azure hair bounced with her frilly teal dress as they kissed and showered love on their child. The baby in Murdi’s hands sobbed, sensing the lack of attention. Mr. Verity held up Priscilla and pointed. “Here, Priscilla. You’ll have a friend now.”
The toddler with chubby pink cheeks took one second to cast judgement upon House and shouted, “Yuck!”
The Veritys laughed, and Murdi wished she could swallow her tongue to resist the temptation to curse back at them. Giving the eccentrics their space, she retreated to the backyard and walked down a path leading to the servant’s small muddy blue home—a supporting character compared to the leading role that was the Verity mansion. She entered the creaking house and found her husband, Otis. Bald and wrinkled as a raisin, he had kind eyes that saw the good in others before ever seeing bad. He abandoned his work to admire the child.
“He will be humble,” Otis said with his gruff voice.
Murdi rolled her eyes as the baby made a muffled high-pitched sound, and she gently bounced the child in her hold, shushing it. “Why is everyone heaping expectations on him? He has only lived a few days now and everyone expects him to be one way or another.”
Her frail husband looked around the rickety home with lined up bunk beds, small kitchen, and one bathroom where the water always ran cold. “If he grows up here,” he said, “he will be humble.”
Murdi huffed, still bouncing the child. “I suppose that can’t be helped.”
Otis brushed a finger against the child’s soft cheek and whispered, “And what is his name?”
“House.”
Otis chuckled, which was probably how a great oak tree laughed, and said, “Oh, yes. He will be humble, alright.”
And House indeed grew in humility while Dream grew with metal and machinery.
Despite both of them living on Wanderhead Road, it took about ten years until Dream found House—and in the most unusual of circumstances.
