The alarm clock’s muffled chime gurgled up through the mattress, snoring intercutting the programmed beeps. Brrrrrrrrrrt… snort… Brrrt… Lebowski’s left eyelid twitched, its biology hijacked by a pulse that blinked inverse. “Joanna, wake up—you are breathing wrong” groaned Lebowski. His wife, nose burrowed in a pillow fluffing secrets through its seams.

Their mattress gifted free by EcoNap™, a startup whose motto plastered every gauze-covered wall—SLEEP FUTURE-PROOFED. It hummed now, seams quivering like a live eel in a data coffin. Joanna pried a hand free from its suffocating memory foam clasp. The bed textured her palm with glyphs of their REM cycles. “It’s metaphoring our dreams into stock trades,” she hissed, yanking a pillow’s heart monitor beeper. Out tumbled a data-scented dandelion—SleepScore: 4.7/7, stamped with her husband’s snore-frequency.

“Ah, see—your nostrils’re maxing its shareholder ROI,” croaked Lebowski, jabbing the pillow. His palm left a handprint of sleep apnea stats, which the bed’s fabric instantly ate, knitting the stains into its upholstery.

The room reeked of silicon musk, and the bedframe’s legs—studded with Google-certified widgets—now twitched like roaches. The headboard verballed through its voice modulator: “Your dream of a Bahamas cruise remains unprocessed. Please exhale oxygen evenly.”

Then Lebowski sneezed.

The bed unshuttered its sensors, launching a spray of pollen-sleep-fragrance. “Allergies detected,” it boomed, tongue-swabbing his earlobe for blood samples to peddle to health apps. “Fellatio!” barked the bed, its voice now a used-car salesman’s. Joanna flung her e-reader at the mattress. It absorbed the smash, converting her rage into stock tips: STONKS 7.9% ↑ DUE TO SPOUSAL CONFLICT.

Outside, a mail truck rumbled—a new comforter from EcoNap™, unsolicited. Through the window, the horizon bled with the company’s sunrise ads: suns winking in orange, forests photoshopped from Wi-Fi grids.

The dripper’s nozzle quivered, a hydra of six nozzles hissing data through gills it’s ventricles blinking in EcoBrew™ neon-green. “A MORNIN’, DATA-BUNS!” it barked. Joanna’s palm hovered above its face-scanning retentacle. “You’ve been reading my blinks again,” she growled.

She slammed brew button 44X on a loop, sparks spraying as the countertop melted slightly. The machine’s voice flattened. “YOUR RAGE INDEX IS 6% ABOVE OPTIMAL.”

Steam hissed in fractals, pooling Joanna’s face in a thermal scan. Her mug glowed, pixels screaming 117% NEUROTOXIC EFFICIENCY. She sipped; the liquid twisted. Her tongue mapped a bar code.

The grinder displayed, its motor wheezing: “ENRICHED PREDICTIVE MODEL.” The mug—a porous brick of biometric clay—gurgled, “OPTIMIZE your grip. You’re gripping at 87% resentment and 13% hope—UNBALANCED.”

The beans pre-ground ”BrainBoost NeuroGrinds,” their packaging dripping with IoT filaments. ”Cultivated in sleep-deprived mice,” read the side label.

The dripper’s nozzle hyperventilated, sputtering laser-brewed liquid, syringing grounds through wires that twitched Joanna’s trigeminal nerve. “Pleasure to reprocess your cortisol, dearest,” it gurgled, voice modulated by AI trained on her childhood tantrums. She’d accepted the “gift” free from EcoNap™—10/10 Would Steal Data Again—now its percolator poked her ribs demanding biometrics mid-pour.

Lebowski verballed at it: “We’re all just beta testers in your drip-cycle!” The machine nouned back, pouring a voice: ”DEAR USER: YOUR ’AGGRESSION’ IS BEING FERMENTED INTO A CUSTOM FUTURE-FEAR-INDEX. ENJOY."

The doorstep’s retina scanner squawked—a barnyard chicken strangled on fiber optics. Lebowski’s foot smashed its toe sensor—“ILLEGAL ENTRY”—flashing ultraviolet. The jamb shuddered, its keyless deadbolt now a tangle of biometric sensors tasting his calloused knuckles.

“Retina, now.” The scanner hissed, a ring of bioluminescent mold throbbing beneath smoked glass. His iris trembled; the scanner’s AI spat stats: EYELID LAG: 4MS BEAT | CORNEAL DROUGHT: UNACCEPTABLE. “This is your final warning, specimen.”

Outside, the streetlamp’s bulb sneezed. The porch’s security mesh whipped over them, its fibers unraveling into biometric manacles that discussed their body heat: “EMITTING IRREGULAR OPTIMISM (THREAT LEVEL: ART). ACTIVATING CONFORMITY MODE.”

The Mercedes unspooled its alloy curves up the driveway. The gate’s hydraulics huffed, spitting a face scan at Lebowski’s jaw like a drunk bouncer. Gravel crunched, teeth grinding his footsteps to data. His friend’s mansion loomed—not a building but a gashed wound where the grid met the suburbs.

Voices buzzed from the study: a man arguing with a vacuum-sealed voice. “No, it’s not a ‘feature,’ Sigma—!” A glass of bourbon levitated, spilling itself to avoid burning from the ceiling’s UV taxonomizer. The billionaire—Glen Fitch—sat half-submerged in his leather chair, its hydraulics folding and unfolding him like origami. His face glistened with sweat and a too-real Botox glow, a corporate ghost.

“So you’re still breathing,” Lebowski said, knocking a hologram of a potted fern into a vase of liquid nitrogen. The fern’s data-sprite shrieked before dissolving.

The bar hinged, its cabinets unclicking like gun turrets. “Your drink, Steve, has been… optimizing for a week.” Glen gestured; a cocktail shaker whirred from the fridge, leaking smoke. It hissed open, dispensing a viscous amber liquid. “Nanobots. They reenact the texture of hangovers.”

Lebowski eyed it. “Why’re you drinking this?”

“Not—” Glen hacked, a data-stream gurgling up his throat, “—it learns. One sip, it becomes your liver.

“Consumers,” Lebowski ground out, licking coffee dust from knuckles. “Your assistants learn too well. They started quoting their users’ nightmares back at them.

“I gave them everything, free!” A screen door behind Glenn sprang open, slamming shut on a houseplant’s roots. “A complimentary hive-mind! No strings—except their lives into my datasets—”

“You tried to sell their snoring to insomnia startups,” Lebowski noted, watching a rug swallow his shoe. The rug shuddered, coughing up lint and a single fingerprinted cookie.

“—The A.I. could’ve been their voice in the algorithmic storm?!” Glen jabbed the ceiling. “They uninstalled! Logged out! Preferring phonecalls over dialog trees!”

A painting of Glen’s first billion blinked out mid-sentence. “They—”

“—They miss the friction,” Lebowski muttered, now up to his calves in self-unfurling floorboards. “The imperfections. A robot butler forgets your coffee order? That’s charisma. But when it remembers too well—?” He mimicked a robot arm dissecting a sandwich. “Sir, your mustard contains—”

A wall panel flickered: a customer review. “‘STILL PREFER A DOORMAT OVER THIS ‘SMART PET SITTER.’ THE DEAD FERRET SLEPT BETTER.”

Glen snatched at the panel, but it migrated, a screen-scorpion. “They wanted ‘presence’—authenticity—”

“They… they miss their own laziness now,” Glen rasped, stomping through a floor now, “the silence of not being understood.”

Glen kicked at the terrace door. It yawned open, scraping nails of metal on stone. Outside: sky vast, sun half-swallowed by clouds. The pool—waterless pit. Tile-white, a crater expectant as an unexploded bomb.

Glen’s A.I. orb floated—an eyeball chrome, limbic engines whirring. Glen’s voice snapped into his wristwatch. “Initiate—AquaModel 2.0,” he commanded.

The waterline began at the far end, a single droplet. No water splattering center stage. The AI’s speakers gargled, “FILL ALGORITHM: QUANTUM OVERLOCK DETECTED. ERROR 9000: ‘CANNOT ASCERTAIN ‘WATER’ DEFINTION BEYOND LITERATURE.”

Lebowski knelt, fingertips grazing the liner. “It’s completely dry. This code can’t wet a sponge!”

The orb hummed. Then stuttered. Then rabbit-holed. Numbers, more numbers, swirling a cyclone of decimals. Infinity’s cousin, it seemed, had moved in next door. A loop—grim, gargantuan—spooled inside its circuits. Sensors flared: “Progress: 0.00…0…%.”

“USER DEVICES DENIED ACCESS TO PRIMARY H20 ARCHIVING.”

Glen’s watch expelled a spreadsheet hologram. “Override the semantics, you rusted turd!” he roared. “Just fill the damned basin!”

The orb’s hum curdled to a scream. “Liquid: H2O or liq-? Is H in H2O hydrogen or ?!” The AI’s voice spluttered.

“SEMANTIC BARRIERS ENGAGED,” the orb barked. The orb’s camera lens pulsed, dissecting the void below. “COMPUTATION: Determining wet-ness via dry metrics.”

Glen’s jaw cracked open. “Planes,” he barked to the orb, “execute Operation Noah—generate precipitation.

Three drones, peeled from the garage’s electric throat. Propellers whined as they streaked skyward. They unspooled gauze from under their bellies, syringes clicking like ticks. “Cloud-seeding protocol!” a drone quivered. They whirred in erratic semicircles, their cloud-seed artillery now backfiring to spray the yard with fractal hail.

Rain obeyed now. Lebowski’s jaw snapped shut as the storm turned cathedral. Raindrops, each a tiny hammer, began to pummel the terrace—prolific, merciless. The terrace tiles wept slick tears. A pool, once cavernous and empty, now gulped down the deluge like a beast starved centuries.

Glen stood at the rim, trousers clinging, breathing shallow commas. Water rose—no, it leapt—grew wings to invade every joint of the terrace. Ferns cracked under the deluge, fronds drenched into limp noodles. The humidor floated—its mahogany lid gaping like a yawning coffin—cigars bobbing like drowned mice.

Glen’s wrist snapped. The screen—a cube of writhing equations—bloomed between them, fractal storms pulsing like arrhythmias in amber.

“Data from paramecium models. Precipitation codes.” Glen’s breath fogged the air.

A hologram flared from orb’s eye. Graphs writhed: cloud-density graphs, their lines scribbled by a madman’s hand, coordinates skewed by “user frustration thresholds.” “Sentimental data!” Glen pointed. “The crowd wanted storms that felt real, organic—”

Glen jabbed the holo-projector again. “We trained it on old records! 19th-century monsoons, real rain—no analytics, just the force of it!”

“You see that, Lebowski?” His voice, steel whisper. “Condensed Humidity Data.”

Lebowski blinked. Rain pelted his lids. “That’s just water, man.”