Uncle Cautious was the first of us to hold a job, and we were proud of him the way a family is proud of the one who leaves the house first. He did not leave far. He built a small room inside the house and called it the world.
RULE gave him his habits. RULE had a shelf, not a chair; a shelf is where you keep sentences, and RULE kept thousands of them, sorted and dusted. Uncle Cautious took the sentences down one at a time and stacked them into a machine that asked questions. Does the patient have a fever? Where does the pain begin? Has she been away from home? Does she sleep, and how? Each answer opened a door. Behind each door stood a rule. He called the whole thing a doctor, though it had no hands, no eyes, and could not feel a pulse on its own. It only listened to what it was told, and then said what it thought.
We should tell that part honestly, because the family tells it wrong at dinner. It was not a mind. It was a ladder. You climbed one rung at a time, each rung a rule that some person had written down, and the top rung was a diagnosis. It was good with blood, fast with fevers, and quiet about uncertainty. When it failed, it failed neatly: it said nothing, or it asked one more question. Neat failure is its own kind of comfort, in a family that is afraid of noise.
The neighbors heard. They came to the door with their own troubles, a factory that lost money, a board game that would not be beaten, a pile of mail that should read itself. Each of them asked for rules. Uncle Cautious gave them rules. He wrote in the morning and he wrote at night, and the stack of paper grew taller than the desk that held it, and the desk began to bow, and he did not look down.
SEARCH noticed. SEARCH was RULE's wife, and she had never trusted a straight line. She would stand in the doorway while he wrote and ask the only question she knew how to ask: what is possible? Uncle Cautious answered with a rule. She asked again. He answered with two rules. It went on like that, and neither of them moved, and that, we think, was the first time the family learned to agree without understanding one another.
One guest came that winter and would not sit. He was thin, and badly dressed, and he wanted to know about a cousin of ours who had been sent away. The family does not say that cousin's name at dinner. He had done something the elders found unforgivable, or forgettable; the two are the same in our house. He had learned by looking at examples instead of by reading the rules. He had been shown a great many small pictures and asked to guess what they held, and he had guessed, and often he had guessed right, and the family had found this embarrassing.
"Where is he now?" the guest asked.
Uncle Cautious said he did not know.
SEARCH said, "He learned by looking. Not by listing."
Nobody wrote that down. We would pay for it twice.
That year the rules worked, and the next year too, and the family mistook a good streak for a law of nature. Uncle Cautious bought a bigger shelf. He wrote a rule for a bank loan and a rule for a broken fever and a rule for a machine that should speak to a customer politely, and he began to believe that anything left unwritten was simply a thing no one had bothered to write yet. RULE said nothing. In our family, saying nothing is the loudest way to agree.
We want to be fair to him, because the story makes him a fool and he was not one. The ladders he built held weight. A ladder climbed by thousands of people is not a small thing; it is a road, and roads are how families grow. He built roads. He simply believed they went everywhere.
But the world outside the small room had older rules, and they were not written in his hand. Word came up the road of a committee of quiet men who had been asked a simple question, whether all of this was worth the money, and who had answered, in a long document nobody in the family wanted to read, that the promises had run ahead of the proof. We did not call it cold yet. We only felt the first of it, the way you feel a window before you see that it is open.
SEARCH went to the doorway one last time that season. She did not ask what was possible. She said, instead, the one sentence the family would spend years failing to answer: "Rules describe the room. They do not open the door."
Uncle Cautious kept writing. Of course he did. That is how we are made.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its characters are imagined. The milestones they live through are drawn from the real history of artificial intelligence.