Rose/House

An AI-inhabited (“haunted”) house sits in the high California desert and contains the preserved corpse of its famous architect and owner; the architect’s will permits only one person, the house’s archivist, to visit the mausoleum/house for a total of five days each year; this is Rose/House. One day the house calls the local sheriff’s department to tersely report the presence of a new corpse. Detective Maritza Smith catches the case but due to the house’s enforcement of the will she can not enter the house; she is forced to contact the archivist, who reluctantly returns from halfway around the world so that an investigation can begin. Though its not quite that simple because even empowered by the presence of the archivist, convincing the snarky, deadpan AI to allow the detective to enter is a tricky exercise in legal semantics. This novella is all about its setting and prop pieces: the desert, the house, the AI all serve to magnify the overall creepiness of the atmosphere, it also displays Ms Martine’s ability to draw believable, normal people doing their best to cope in weird situations, but of course, at only 117 pages, the story ends just as it gets it’s legs.