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Serial Domicide: An Analysis of the Swinton Home Slayings

Those of us who design living homes regularly steal ideas from nature. We know that, in order to make a house really live, both the conception and construction require a delicate balance in neural and structural composition. Like any living creature, a sentient home is a functioning marriage of mind and body. And as in any marriage, this union is necessary to household survival. When the mind wanders away, the body withers and in time perishes.

A vile but brilliant murderer named Crane understood this essential bond all too well. He also knew that, in cases where the mind was unaware of the sundering, it had no hope of preventing its own isolation. The result was inevitable and bewildering doom. Crane sought this irresistible extinction time and time again when he embarked on a plan to murder a series of brilliant homes created by a well-respected IASA Fellow, Martin Swinton of New York. In so doing he also sought an undetectable, and thus untreatable, prescription for death.

His prescription rose straight out of nature's handbook. There, he found the insidious malady we Americans still call "Lou Gehrig's Disease" (after an early twentieth century baseball hero): Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. It's a progressive and lethal neuromuscular disease still without a cure. ALS attacks the motor neurons that transmit electrical impulses from our brains to our voluntary muscles. By incapacitating these muscles, ALS creates creeping atrophy. Our muscles harden, shrink, and die. After a while we can't coordinate movement. Then we can't move at all. Ultimately, we stop breathing.

Three centuries of medical work haven't solved every mystery of ALS, so Crane recognized it for what it was: the perfect killing model. He ruthlessly employed the same formula to slay a series of at least three Swinton masterworks like Ivy, Nostradamus, and Cahir-the IASA House of the Year in 2141-in a covert and unstoppable reign of domicidal horror.

Crane is dead now, apparently the victim of an assassin's bullet. His relentless house killings have hopefully ended with his passing. The motives and methodology behind the murders, especially the exact nature of the viral formula, have yet to be fully revealed.

What we do know is this: apparently blackmailed by an unforgiving enemy of Martin Swinton, Crane implanted a "changeling" virus into each AI, probably accessing the homes through obsolete (and rarely examined) keyboard driver pathways. After a lengthy period of mimicking legitimate commands, the changeling would begin to issue sinister instructions progressively retarding and redirecting data flow to the home's various systems. Creating an increasingly constrictive effect similar to that of sludge accumulating in a plumbing system, Crane devised an "erosive" way for the AI to cut off its own household machinery. But the true genius of his plan resided in the AI's utter ignorance. Whenever the AI issued an order, it went out and the AI received a reciprocating acknowledgement from a "deflected data mirror." Everything appeared okay, despite the fact that the system was increasingly lethargic, then dysfunctional, and finally inoperable. Before anyone could respond, the home's mind had cut itself off from its own body and the rapid atrophy resulted in a sudden and catastrophic neural suffocation. In this fashion, each Swinton home stopped "breathing" and died.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Crane's plot was the fact that, in the end, both the home and the homeowner realized that death was impending; and yet they could do nothing to stop it. As long as the AI uttered edicts, the situation grew graver. It was as if the home owned a new and very suicidal conscience.

Crane wrought his terror and cruelly killed his prey. He wounded Martin Swinton, deeply and brutally. And he scarred everyone in the living architecture community. His was more than a casual hate crime.

Fortunately, though, this peculiar serial domicide has brought us all together and taught us a host of lessons-not the least of which is: the more we mimic nature, the more we suffer its wrath.

- Bambrick Wang