“Are you alright Gran?” George stared at his grandmother’s shoes sticking out of Sadie’s apartment doorway and thought the worst. He’d been stupidly irresponsible to have left this crazy cleaner in charge of her. Was she dead?

“George! Come in, you have to see this.”

Okay not dead then. Maybe drunk? Alcohol was no good with her meds.

His grandmother and her new caregiver lay side by side on the floor. The older woman elbowed Sadie and started wiggling and pushing her.

“Scoot over and give him some room.”

There wasn’t any room. Half of the far wall hosted a fold down bed that would take up most of the available space when it was in use. And there was a lot of space taken up with a workbench and electronics – probably the stuff she’d used to hack his system. And wait, there was a reconstructed Crown on the bench, sitting on some old … Custom Autonomous Task System electronics. Huh. Cats. Those were the cats.

About this time George’s eyes finally moved upward and found a strangely familiar sight. And that was what the others had been looking at. He crouched and lay down in the landing, just managing to get his head and shoulders in the apartment. The 3D jigsaw puzzle he’d delivered that morning was completely assembled and glued to the ceiling. The optimal view would probably be from the fold down bed.

“Who did this?” asked George.

“The CATS, of course” Mrs Zimmerman said. As if he should have known. As if this was a very ordinary thing to happen. But CATS were designed to make tea and vacuum floors, not assemble puzzles.

“I don’t have a cat,” said Sadie.

“She means those Custom Autonomous Task Systems you have sitting there. Sitting there with my tech. Which I need to ask about. Urgently.”

“What? Oh okay I do have cats then. I call them Things. And what do you mean your tech??” Sadie scrambled up and George watched how she helped his grandmother up too, giving her the only chair. Now he could enter he stepped over to the crown.

“It was in a trash bag when I left this morning, in pieces,” Sadie said, looking worried. “I’m sorry I really don’t know, well I can explain, I think I do know what might have happened. It’s the Things.”

The crown had been cobbled back together, it wasn’t as slick as it had been, larger parts had been added, other parts substituted and there was a physical connection to one of her ‘Things’, as she called them which then piggy backed, he guessed, to the rest of them.

George laughed.

“Wait till you see what the Things did to the inside of my project. Here, jack in.” He spooled out a wire and a temporal connection pad from his pocket, and gestured to Sadie to put it on. Worriedly she applied the pad.

“Whoah!”

She was standing in a grass field on the outskirts of a town – a town she sort of recognized from her apartment ceiling. She started to shuffle her way forward, not sure how her tiny room would let her get around.

“Try and think your way forward, you don’t need to move too much. It takes a little to get the hang of it.”

But Sadie got it pretty quickly, making her way to a bridge where the grass gave way to boards. She paused to look at the clear river water running at a slow pace under the structure and to hear it rushing along – a nice touch. The bridge took her to a cobbled path that traced its way along the river leading into the town of Graz.

It was very close to the place she’d been studying from her floor 20 minutes ago, except this virtual town had many more details. She saw bicycle stands and bus stops peppered through the medieval buildings – whoever had designed this had added modern additions to the town – so it wasn’t a historic replica it was something else. As she took a detour she scanned shop fronts – the rendering wasn’t as sharp everywhere, there were repeats of the same shop sometimes, she saw a cobbler (what was that?) and a shop full of knitted clothing, and another selling antiques.

Rounding another corner she found a builder working on a row of buildings. The figure literally blurred as it moved materials into place in a horizontal fashion that completed more than one building at a time, following a programme that was making a section rather than a particular building. It was all happening so rapidly that she felt like she was watching sped up time lapse video.

“Hello!”

The figure slowed. Morphing and flickering as it did so, several times she saw herself or a close replica of her and then finally an amorphous figure in blue dungarees, a flat cap and old fashioned leather boots. The cap was pulled forward and hid the builder’s face. And as the figure slowed she found there was more than one. Three more figures joined the builder – slightly different and unstable in their form but gradually morphing to a team of builders.

“Hi, I see you’re putting up a town?” She wondered if these were avatars or NPCs.

“Greetings Sadie. We are still at home in the perimeter.”

Sadie had a strong suspicion. “Things?”

“Sadie, this one is Thing2. My adopted form is best to make order from chaos. I am still in the perimeter.”

These were the Things? They’d fixed the tech and entered the world George was creating. Now she started to realize why George had come to see her. And, the Things were communicating more in the VR world.

“Wait lovely Things. Wait for instructions.”

The flickering figures froze. Sadie reached up to her temple and found another hand helping her to detach from the virtual space.

Her eyes readjusted and she looked from George’s face, which held an expression reading something like: do you get it now? Meanwhile Mrs Z’s face, which was more of a resting-confusion.

“Mrs Z it appears that after the Things built your puzzle here, they built another version inside George’s project. I’m sorry George. They’ve stopped now. What do you want them to do? Put it back how it was?”

George reached for the crown and put the temporal connection on. His head moved back and forth, probably surveying the damage.

“There’s a lot more built since I biked over here. A lot more. It actually looks pretty good.

“Let me see!” His grandmother tapped at his shoulder.

George walked around the frozen ‘builders’ checking out the latest construction. Sadie’s cleaning bots were capable of so much. He’d been fooling around with a lightweight headset that improved game integration, but she’d created a team of virtual helpers who could cut down time building worlds. His mind spun with the possibilities. His grandmother was tugging on his shirt.

“Okay, a quick look grandma, but be careful, this isn’t like a Playstation.”

“I’ve tried VR before, give it here.”

Sadie gestured down the stairs. George nodded and soon they had decamped to the larger apartment. Mrs Z was taking a walk around virtual Graz while Sadie and George were deep in discussion about the Things.

They were sitting the big cushioned couch that Sadie had been sitting on earlier. The coffee table had been moved back and Mrs Z had the center of the room. From time to time she called out “chair.” And one of them pulled up a large overstuffed sofa chair for her to sit in. She was slowly getting the idea she didn’t need to actually move but she still forgot.

“My colleague was drunk last Friday and he lost his balance. He fell and smashed the headset, that’s how it got in the trash.”

The two of them had Mrs Z’s big screen down and were poring over code. George’s code that had built the large grassy space and identified the building blocks of Graz, and the new code the Things had added to make the town. And that code was like orchestral music notation, George thrilled to the neat but quirky scripting that had built virtual Graz. There were references! The Things has searched the net for pictures of Graz to supplement the jigsaw they’d completed earlier. They’d used a randomization method to choose when in time a section might reference – the 900’s 1400’s the 1800’s the 2020s and all the way up the 2045 when privacy laws banned casual neighborhood that gave large amounts of architectural detail.

The Thing’s Graz was a mash up of time.

Then George came across the interiors.

“Oh oh Sadie, did you go inside any of the buildings?”

“I only had maybe 5 minutes. Your grandmother has been hogging the visual interface forever. I have seen some internal coding though so, hey wait, did you see how much code there was when we started? The Things are back building.”

The bar at the right of the screen was decreasing in size as if new material were being added as they slowly worked their way down the new code that the Things had added.

“I told them to,” Mrs Zimmerman called out. “They’re so good at it.”

They both had the same thought at once but George got there first.

“You need to share the toys grandma,” he said, as he gently removed her connection. Mrs Z, disorientated, gently collapsed into the chair as Sadie growled at George and made sure she was okay. She held up a glass of water just as the med chime sounded. Again. It was a wonder Mrs Z didn’t rattle, Sadie mused as she fetched the pills and boosters, the amount of meds she took.

“I think I’ll lie down dear,” Mrs Z announced, attempting to get up. Sadie helped her to her room and eased her into bed. She was itching to see what Graz looked like. A whir beside her feet alerted her to Thing3 emerging from under the bed, and intoned.

“TWO OUT OF PLACE ITEMS. TWO UNKNOWN OBJECTS.”

Sadie sighed and took a hairbrush, a handbag and two letters from Thing3. She put the bag and brush on Mrs Z’s dresser and took the papers out to George. Mrs Z was asleep – it was nearly 7pm and Sadie needed to talk to George about getting more care. She couldn’t stay with Mrs Z every hour of the day. She needed to sleep too.

The code screen was gone when she returned and George was interviewing care workers.

Rude! Sadie thought. “George, when you fire someone you usually let them leave before you hie their replacement.”

George mentally kicked himself, he needed to work on his communication, that was where he relied on his partners.

“Sadie I want to hire you to work with us on this project.”

“Well what makes you think I want to ditch your grandmother?”