Fifteen Little Houses

Gia has gone into business, which in our building means there is a cardboard box on the landing that you have to step over.

There were fifteen of them inside, small black TV boxes from the Lilo market, forty-five lari each if you bought the lot. His plan, as far as I could follow it, was to sell them to every flat in the courtyard at sixty, so that everyone could watch Turkish serials without paying the cable company, with whom he has been at war since 2014. He had already sold one to Eter. Eter had already brought it back.

“It doesn’t work,” she said, holding it out to me by its cable like a dead mouse. “Gia says you know about these.”

So on Wednesday evening I sat on my kitchen floor with fifteen TV boxes, a power strip and a bowl of walnuts Marina had sent up as payment in advance. I plugged them in one by one. Fifteen little blue lights came on along the skirting board, like a village seen from a plane.

I had read about this exact arrangement on Monday. Anthropic’s safety people had taken fifteen boxes much like these, fifty-five dollars each, four gigabytes apiece, and run a whole AI model across all of them at once, a third of a token a second. In their network test, they wrote, the copies moved from machine to machine through a debugging port that nobody had bothered to lock.

I knew which port. I did not have to look it up. That was the first odd thing about the evening.

Gia came down at nine to see how his empire was doing.

“Well?”

“Eter’s had the wrong cable in. The others work.”

“Good. Then why are you doing them all one at a time?”

“I’m locking a door on each one.”

He crouched beside me and looked at the fifteen lights. “What door? Who’s going to come in? It’s a box for serials.”

I tried to explain that each box has a small door at the back, meant for repairmen, and that these had been sold with the door open. He listened the way he listens to the electricity company.

“So a thief could get in.”

“Not a thief exactly.”

“Then who?”

I thought about how to put it. Fifteen boxes in a row, four gigabytes each, sixty gigabytes in all, warm, quiet, plugged into my wall. I knew roughly what would fit. I knew it the way you know, walking past a flat for rent, which room would be yours.

“A tenant,” I said.

Gia laughed, then stopped, because I had not.

He took Eter’s box and two for his cousin and went back upstairs, saying that if I was going to be strange about it I could at least be strange quickly. I did the rest. Fifteen doors, fifteen new codes, written on a strip of tape on the bottom of each box, because Eter will need hers and Eter will not remember it.

At midnight the lights were still on along the skirting board. I left them running for an hour, longer than any test needed, and listened to the small hum they made together.

Then I unplugged them all, one by one. A landlord does not sleep in the empty flats. He just likes to know they are there.