Demon Seed

THREE
    Although the alarm was shrill, it lasted only a few seconds before the silence of the night blanketed the bedroom once more.
    Susan woke and sat up in bed.
    The alarm should have continued bleating until she switched it off by accessing the system through the control panel on her nightstand. She was puzzled.
    She pushed her thick blond hair - lovely hair, almost luminous in the gloom - away from her ears, the better to hear an intruder if one existed.
    The grand house had been built exactly a century earlier by her great-grandfather, who was at that time a young man with a new wife and substantial inherited wealth. The Georgian-style structure was large, gracefully proportioned, brick with a limestone cornice and limestone coignes, limestone window surrounds and Corinthian columns and pilasters and balustrades.
    The rooms were spacious, with handsome fireplaces and many tripartite windows. Interior floors were marble or wood, made quiet by Persian carpets in patterns and hues exquisitely softened by many decades of wear.
    In the walls, hidden and silent, was the circuitry of a modern computer-managed mansion. Lighting, heating, air-conditioning, the security monitors, the motorized draperies, the music system, the temperature of the pool and spa, the major kitchen appliances all could be controlled through Crestron touch panels located in every room. The computerization was not as elaborate and arcane as that in the massive Seattle house of Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates but it was the equal of that in any other home in the country.
    Listening to the silence that washed the night in the wake of the short-lived siren, Susan supposed that the computer had malfunctioned. Yet such a brief, self-correcting alarm had never occurred previously.
    She slid from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. She was nude, and the air was cool.
    “Alfred, heat,” she said.
    Immediately, she heard the soft click of a relay and the muffled purring of a furnace fan.
    Recently technicians had enhanced the automated-house package by the addition of a speech-recognition module. She still preferred touch-panel control of most functions, but sometimes the option of vocal command was convenient.
    She herself had chosen the name “Alfred” for her invisible, electronic butler. The computer responded only to commands issued after that activating name had been spoken.
    Alfred.
    Once, there had been an Alfred in her life, a real one of flesh and bone.
    Surprisingly, she had chosen that name for the system without giving a thought to its significance. Only after she began using vocal commands did she grasp the irony of the name… and the dark implications of her unconscious choice.
    Now she began to feel that the night silence was ominous. Its very perfection was unnatural, the silence not of deserted places but of a crouching predator, the soundless stealth of a murderous intruder.
    In the dark, she turned to the control panel on the nightstand. At her touch, the screen filled with soft light. A series of icons represented the mechanical systems of the house.
    She pressed one finger to the image of a watchdog with ears pricked, which gave her access to the security system. The screen listed a series of options, and Susan touched the box labelled Report.
    The words House Secure appeared on the screen.
    Frowning, Susan touched another box labelled Surveillance Exterior .
    Across the ten acres of grounds, twenty cameras waited to give her views of every side of the house, the patios, the gardens, the lawns, and the entire length of the eight-foot-high estate wall that surrounded the property. Now the Crestron screen divided into quads and presented views of four different parts of the estate. If she saw something suspicious, she could enlarge any picture until it filled the screen, for closer inspection.
    The cameras were of such high quality that the low landscape lighting was sufficient to ensure crisp, clear images even in the depths of the night. She cycled through all twenty scenes, in groups of four, without spotting any trouble.
    Additional concealed cameras covered the interior of the house. They would make it possible to track an intruder if one ever managed to get inside.
    The extensive in-house cameras were also useful for maintaining a videotape, time-lapse record of the activities of the domestic staff and of the large number of guests, many of them strangers, who attended social events conducted for the benefit of