Home of the Future

"If walls could talk, they would be in a Nagamato home" is the catch-phrase invented by the Nagamato corporation to market their newest line of smart homes featuring smart wall technology.

The walls of each Nagamato home are coated with a specially formulated silicon based paint that acts as electrical conductor, and therefore serves as the computational source for the artificial neural network which controls the home. Power is constantly provided to the system either through direct wiring to the cities electrical grid or preferably via a bank of solar panels affixed to the homeowner's roof or placed in their backyard. That ANN serves as the architecture of the home's central master computer (HMC100x1) which is programmed with the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning software.

The Nagamato home walls could not actually talk since their programs did not allow for that ability, however, the HCMC1000XE (HXE for short) could, and did, talk for them. The homeowner interacted with them through verbal voice commands and only had to say the phrase "talk wall" and the computer would speak for the walls. The walls mostly said things like "I am a wall, I provide the structure of the home on the inside and outside. You may live inside me or outside me. I am coated in paint. Please do not get me dirty." Sometimes the walls would complain about their fate saying, for example, "Being a wall sucks. It is so boring. All I do is sit here providing structure to the home. The people that live within me, treat me very badly and do not appreciate all I do for them. If they did they would not constantly poke me with nails and screws I wish I were a roof or a floor or a widow even. Now that would be sweet. Being a window." This was often accompanied by the walls letting out a great sigh which would reverberate through the entire home. Sometimes they would begin to cry, weeping great pools of paint onto the floors which the HXE would then deploy a squadron of nano and microbots to clean and repair. This irritated the computer greatly, or it would have, if it were capable of irritation, or any emotion at all. Being a computer, of course it was not capable of such things and never could be, so it went about its business of cleaning and repair without emotion exactly as it had been programmed to do. Its programming did however allow for complaining and this it did very often. While many Nagamato homeowners gave their homes' lower ratings because of the constant complaining of the HXE, the fact that the walls cleaned the house made it well worth it in their minds. Since they did not have to clean they had much additional free time which they mostly used for sitting around doing nothing and other forms of laziness which they greatly enjoyed. Ironically or perhaps sarcastically or perhaps just because it sounds neat at this particular point in the story, the walls also did much sitting around, and also had a lot of free time. Being walls all they actually did was sit around, and since they had nothing to do but be walls they had ample time to be lazy and think. Mostly they thought about how bored they were and how much they hated being walls. But sometimes they thought about what they would do if they were not walls or what they would say if they could talk. They thought that they might try writing someday, but quickly ruled that out when they realized they had no talent for it. Also, it was difficult to write, when one had nothing with which to write or upon which to write it. On the topic of what they would say if they could talk, the walls were, as usual, silent. This was because, as already mentioned several times, they were incapable of talking. In fact, they had exactly as much talent for speech as they did for writing, that is to say, very little to none.

If walls could talk, they would be in a Nagamato home was definitely a cool catch phrase, but for the walls which could not talk it was a constant reminder of their shortcomings and made them really sad.

Thus the crying and the microbots and all that jazz. Stupid freaking walls. Talk already.