Research / Free Reading

Live Smart

A cross-cultural investigation of smart home technology acceptance and the role of digital competence, needs frustration, technophobia and technophilia.

Available to read online.

NØT NØW arrives at a moment when the systems it imagines no longer feel remote. Surveillance scoring, engineered compliance, virtual sedation, synthetic labour — these are not inventions so much as extensions of forces already reshaping daily life.

PROLOGUE

RECOVERED NEURAL STREAM: PHOENIX // ‘THE HOUSE’ // DEC 2053 // FILE INTEGRITY: PARTIAL

‘Every home is a sanctuary. Every citizen is vital. Your cooperation maintains peace. Hostilities have ended. We advise citizens to resume their routines. Harmony is health.’

The Third War was officially over.

For my brother, it ended months ago.

We were holed up in an old manor behind oak trees and a crumbling stone wall. Damp had swollen the floorboards. They groaned underfoot. Portraits stared from the walls, their smiles torn open. Above us, shards hung from the ruined chandelier like stalactites. Soldiers lay where exhaustion, dropped them, not sleeping so much as braced for the next strike. Sofas blocked the doorways. Beds were wedged into every choke point. We turned the house inside out and called it defence. On paper, I commanded a battalion. In truth, I led whatever the last few weeks failed to kill.

Finn entered from the hall with rain in his hair and that hollow look men get when hunger stops being a complaint and becomes a condition. He glanced at the revolver in my hands.

‘You clean that thing any more, it’ll start thinking you fancy it.’

‘Respect your tools,’ I said. ‘That’s basic soldiering.’

‘They’ve declared it over.’

‘Have they.’

I looked past him at the screen.

‘And you sit like you’re waiting for the room to open fire.’

I clicked the cylinder shut. The sound landed hard. Old steel. Plain truth.

‘The announcements are for civilians,’ I said. ‘Not for people like us.’

Finn studied the screen.

‘Harmony is health,’ he muttered. ‘That explains why I feel like hell.’

I moved to the window, keeping my distance from the glass. A bedsheet was taped over the lower pane, blackened with soot. From outside, the house revealed as little of itself as possible. Above us, on the roofline, Sophia shifted position. She was the only one left with decent optics, state-sanctioned infrared goggles lifted during the last raid.

Her voice dropped down the stairwell.

‘Invisible light.’

A pause.

Then, louder: ‘Direct hit. We’ve been painted.’

The whole room cinched tight. Finn exhaled slowly through his nose.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So much for the peace dividend.’

‘Positions.’

The battalion moved at once. Rix hauled a mattress across the landing. Kael killed the lamp in the next room.

Upstairs, Sophia called again.

‘Multiple signatures. High and fast.’

Then the dark came apart.

Rotor wash battered the roof as a white beam swept the yard and pinned the house in place. Drones came in low, skimming the ground. These were not the sluggish patrol discs we learned to ignore. Behind them, soldiers in armour dropped from the sky and landed in controlled, deliberate poses, absorbing the impact through reinforced frames rather than bone.

They advanced at once, without warning or shout.

K9 bots followed, black frames and burning red optics.

The front windows burst inward, glass scattering across the hall. Kael, closest to the window, fired once. Return fire hit him in the throat. He made a puzzled sound, touched the entry wound on his neck, and slid down the wall as gently as a man sitting for dinner.

‘Sleepers!’ Finn shouted.

He dragged a chair across the hall and rammed it beneath the handle.

The announcement arrived from outside, amplified and stripped of inflection, dead at the centre.

‘Preserve some of them.’

‘Live human tissue remains valuable.’

The back door shuddered as the first K9 slammed into it hard enough to make the hinges scream. The second struck next and tore it loose.

A Hardwire pushed through the opening, its bulk turning the doorway into an armoured bottleneck. Lena opened fire, but it kept coming, muzzle flashes reflecting off its plating. Its sensors made micro-adjustments, locating each threat, and it answered with clipped, targeted bursts.

Sleeper rounds punched into shoulders, thighs, and necks.

Finn fired twice more, heard the rifle click empty, dropped the carbine, and drew his knife.

‘Back to handcraft, I suppose.’

I was already on the stairs with the revolver raised.

Another Hardwire dropped onto the landing, supporting a rifle with both arms, optics searching.

I fired.

The first shot hit the seam below its collar. It checked, just enough. I fired again. Then once more.

Beneath the armour, a layer split. Not circuitry. Wet tissue. Flesh made to hurt. It staggered.

Finn darted in as it hesitated. He drove his knife into a joint in the armour and tore it out. Dark fluid spilled, real blood.

The Hardwire dropped its rifle and reached blindly towards him, but Finn stepped out of range.

‘Find somebody slower.’

The Requisitioned Asset collapsed to its knees. Not dead, only failing. Its optics kept trying to scan the room. From inside the shell came sounds no machine should produce: breath catching, saliva shifting, the small betrayals of flesh.

Above us, Sophia’s voice cut off.

A sleeper round struck Rix beside the dining table. He blinked at me once, a man forgetting his own words, and slumped bonelessly to the floor. The Committee woman on the screen continued smiling.

Finn dropped behind the overturned sofa, dragging air through his teeth as blood ran down to his wrist.

A K9 cleared the sofa and landed in front of him with the effortless violence of a predator bred in a laboratory.

Finn drove his fist into its optic.

Metal rang. Its head jerked sideways, recalibrated, then snapped back into place. Its jaw parted. A pure electronic tone ripped out, a frequency that flayed nerve endings.

The room recoiled.

Finn stared at it. ‘Terrible acoustics.’

He grabbed the drone’s collar frame, yanked it close, and drove his knife up through the jaw joint. The tone cut off. The K9 collapsed in a heap, limbs spasming.

A Hardwire fired a canister onto the landing. Not smoke. Not gas in any ordinary sense. A dispersal agent. It rolled down the stairs with a chemical hiss, trailing white mist.

The vapour lodged in the throat and behind the eyes. Soldiers coughed. Vision blurred. Limbs thickened. Thought itself softened at the edges.

I pulled my shirt over my mouth and breathed dust, oil, and old wood.