The otters were reassuringly expensive military models.

Credit: Justin Randall

Brian snored in the Slugabed's soft embrace.

Penny lay beside him, unmoving - but the bed could sense that something was wrong. The house Domum, silently monitoring all that happened within his barky walls, was worried. Penny's arms and legs, even her fingers and toes, were rigid to the point of trembling, not softly relaxed. Even her stomach was pulled tight.

Gently, the Slugabed shifted its jelly-like bulk around her, using every routine that had been engineered into it, working to make her comfortable. The bed was a miracle of genetic science: firm but yielding, soft but supportive, without a trace of slug-like sliminess. But nothing helped. The harder it tried, the more she tensed up.

The bed's tiny brain, augmented though it was from the original land mollusc, had no real memory from hour to hour, nor understanding of human speech. It couldn't remember Penny's scream while the delivery truck was disgorging the new bed via the fat tube snaking through the window that Domum had opened for it.

Penny had asked Domum for the bed's specifications and, foolishly, distracted by his silent but detailed communication with the delivery truck, Domum had told his mistress the truth about the bed's base origin - in English. "Slug," he'd said and she'd screamed.

He should have known better. She'd worked with roses and camellias for so long, trying to graft some AI into the showy-flowered beauties, that slugs filled her with atavistic horror. She was squeamish about almost anything that could threaten her beloved plants, Uplifted or not.

Already, Domum had been forced to change the descriptions of most of the basic constituents that the Nomerator in the kitchen used to build any foodstuff for the humans, from duck a l'orange to nachos supreme. Now the ingredients were listed by their Greek or Latin names, not by the common names that were the default. It wasn't logical, but it seemed that "Coleoptera" sounded, to a human, much safer and more attractive than "ground-up beetles" and "Eumycota" preferable to "mould", though Domum's machine-mind knew that both were immensely nutritious and so full of minerals.

Penny kicked Brian. "Roll on your side," she muttered through clenched teeth. "You're snoring. Bastard."

Brian took a desperate gulp of air, then started snoring again, loud as the reconstructed T. rex in the zoo after a meal of duckbilled dinosaurs.

Domum had no feet, or he'd have kicked himself. If only he hadn't been distracted when the bed was being delivered! It would have taken less than a millisecond to have calculated Penny's probable reaction to the idea of sleeping on a slug-bed. It would have been so easy for him to have said Limax instead of slug. Even Limax cinereoniger.

And it wouldn't have violated the Fifth Law of Uplifted and Downshifted Organisms: it was the strict truth.

For the umpteenth time, Domum reviewed the logic of his decision. The old hardware bed needed electrical power for heating and cooling. The Drowning World Taxes for laundering sheets and doonas were staggering.