Kate Macdonald is a writer from north-east Scotland, a literary historian and a recovering publisher. Her first SFF story was selected for Best of British Science Fiction 2019 (NewCon Press, 2020). Because she is impatient and knows how sluggardly the publishing industry is, she self-publishes her fantasy novels at peachfieldpress.uk.
Little Shinsen
by Kate Macdonald
Nanako tugged open the thick curtains covering the large window in her father’s apartment to let the sunlight in and braced herself to turn around. She had been there for only a few minutes, and already she felt revolted. It smelled unpleasant, unwashed. How could he live like this? In the bright mid-afternoon daylight she could see now that his shirt was stained and his fingernails were unclipped.
I will not touch him.
“Dad, have you asked your care worker to help you with your laundry, and your nails?”
“How dare you touch those curtains. My personal hygiene is not your business,” Professor Mitchell said, bristling. His one good hand twitched on his wheelchair armrest in a crescendo of suppressed exasperation. “I have dispensed with that moron employed here as a ʻcare worker’. He was rude and incompetent.”
Nanako could see cobwebs hanging across the bookshelves, and a dirty plate on the floor was growing a furry mold. In a week her father’s wheelchair would be unable to navigate around the debris he dropped on the floor, and then she would be called in again to clean it all out. She could feel the flutterings of panic at the base of her chest already. She could not, she would not touch him, or his belongings, or clean up after him. Not ever again. The care home was supposed to be a solution for him, but he was blocking all progress.
She tried again. “What did Dr. Molen say about the numbness, in your feet?”
“She said nothing useful. All doctors are stupid.” His tone was contemptuous.
Nanako kept her face calm. The right side of her skull still ached where the surgeons had inserted her implant a week ago, but it gave her a new reason – as if she needed another! – to resent her father’s scorn on their behalf. She resented his criticism of anyone.
I must work on that trigger response. It’s not helpful. She added a reminder to her internal screed.
She searched for a more neutral conversation subject to distract him, but he was off.
“Do you know, that idiot actually asked me to take exercise outside, out of ‘concerns for my mental health’?” Professor Mitchell said, mocking the standard phrase. “I am considered to be no longer fit to make my own decisions, yet these so-called doctors expect me to do their work for them.”
Nanako looked past his smirk, struggling to stay serene. He is so self-satisfied. Never wrong.
Professor Mitchell sailed with malicious gusto into his well-rehearsed lecture on the incompetence of the medical profession these days, if profession could even be used as a noun in their case. She knew that she could only take so much of this. Did he know this too? Had he ever noticed, or cared what people thought of his tirades?
Nanako glanced at the clock on the wall. Why couldn’t he look at the garden instead of ranting indoors? Cherry trees were coming into flower along the paths, and tiny green leaves were unfurling in the beech hedges along the care home’s boundaries. He would be able to hear seagulls and smell a fresh breeze, if he would only open his window. He used to like the sea.
Only twenty minutes to go, but he had noticed her distraction.
“That implant is completely unnecessary, you know,” he said in a conversational tone. “But probably nobody told you, they just pandered to your vanity. I was not consulted about it. You are only a civic worker, after all, not a technical specialist. Your self-importance is laughable.”
“I’m a transit manager, Dad, so I need the implant,” Nanako said, stung. Doesn’t he know what a privilege this is?
Then she regretted her answer. He fed on refutation like a vampire.
“This city is managed by robots. Our metallic overlords! And you have joined them.”
His mockery was always aggressive. She struggled to maintain her composure.
“You were an unsatisfactory child because you were so emotional. I can’t think why anyone could regard you as suitable for becoming an artificial agent.”
How can I be nearly forty and still be talked to like this? I wish I could care less.
He was taunting her for a reaction: she would not give it. But his words continued to plunge the knife. She imagined that his cold eyes were looking at her with a keen assessment of her feelings. Or perhaps… he wasn’t interested in her responses?
“It’s bizarre, really. You never could control your emotions, such a complaining child. Your mother probably lost years of her life trying to manage your tantrums.”
Oh!
Nanako was so shocked that she froze, as stunned as if he had jammed her hand into an open power socket. She lowered her eyes, unable to look at him any longer.
“Indifferent too,” he continued, with clear enjoyment. “I often ask myself, how did my genes, and those of your mother, a most intelligent scholar, produce such a sullen and underachieving child?”
She was so used to being criticized.
Then something new overrode the familiar feeling of hurt desolation. Her therapist’s voice was repeating in her mind.
“His pomposity and aggressive demeanor probably derive from feelings of insecurity,” Nanako remembered. “It might be helpful if you could practice techniques of disassociation. The implant can help you reduce your emotional responses, and that may help you tolerate him. You might find him less of a burden, perhaps rediscover the father you wish you had.”
Nanako began to feel a tremble of a giggle rising inside her, and her outrage dissolved into derision. This was new.
Could the implant do that?
Did she want to rediscover a father she had never had?
“It could hurt,” the therapist had said, consideringly. “But it might be productive.”
Nanako had no more time for productive pain. She breathed deeply, ignoring what he was ranting about, and then raised her eyes, deliberately. She looked at her father and did not feel dread.
“What do you see when you are with him, Nanako?” her therapist had asked.
He’s just an old man. He’s lost his mobility. He doesn’t have anyone to make him feel important. He’s unhappy.
“He does not have the right to make you unhappy.”
You’re right. I need to remember this. I’m not required to make him happy by letting his vile behavior hurt me.
Now she began to look searchingly at his face, the forehead lines, the puffiness around the eyes, the stray hairs on his cheeks that had not been shaved. He looked angry, sulking, resistant. His voice was rising again in petulant anger. He could see she wasn’t listening.
If I cower, he thinks less of me. But I don’t want him to think of me. I never want to have to see him again.
But this was not possible.
“Now that he is over ninety years old, the law has transferred his legal autonomy to his next of kin,” his lawyer had told her. “As his only child, you are legally required to manage his care, following the prescribed programs of visits and consultations.”
There’s nobody else left.
She felt an alert from the implant. She needed to go, so she stood up. “I can’t do anything more for you, Dad. You need to decide on your own care. I’ll be back next Thursday.”
She pulled on her coat and glanced at him. He was looking fixedly out of the window. She’d leave the curtains open. He could always close them with the command device, if he wanted to.
Had he ever been fond of her? Had he ever played with her when she was a child? Read her stories? Fed her cake? She couldn’t remember. But the thought of such close attention from him made her shiver.
He raised his eyebrows, dismissively. “You are merely play-acting with this pretence of competence given to you by your subjugation to a machine. You are as useless as all the others.” He raised the command device and the curtains began to close, but not smoothly. There was dust on the rail.
Another deep breath. “Bye, Dad.”
Nanako pressed the apartment’s glowing door control panel. The door slid open and she could hear a hum of conversation between people in the corridors and in the sitting areas, talking to each other without anger, without power plays, without neediness. Green leaves waved in the breeze outside, and the surfaces of the care home sparkled with cleanliness.
The door to her father’s apartment slid closed behind her, and her straight back sagged.
He can’t get at me out here.
*
It was Thursday again. The skin around her implant was a little less tight, and this week Margi was in their office when Nanako called for a chat.
“Nanako! I’m sorry I haven’t been here. It was just glorious in the mountains and I did so much hiking! I did mean to be back last week but I stayed some extra days, so I missed your visit.” Then Margi’s gleaming face, freshly oiled and brown, stiffened in surprise. “Is that…? May I ask, I don’t want to be rude, but is that your implant? When did you have the integration?”
“Five weeks ago. I came out of the clinic ten days ago.”
The care home manager stared at Nanako’s head, their eyes appraising the sweep of black hair that Nanako had pinned back to expose the shining titanium strip integrated into her skull. They began to smile
Nanako grinned back and sat down in the visitors’ chair. She regretted there was no mirror in Margi’s office. She was still surreptitiously checking her altered reflection in every window she passed.
“It’s a look! But I love the way you’ve done your hair like that. Does the implant hurt? I’ve heard the bruising can be terrible.”
Nanako shook her head. Then she chuckled. “I couldn’t have moved my head like that in the first week. The swelling has really reduced. I’ll be on immuno-suppressants for several months, and anti-inflammatories. My neurological regime is intense. It’s like taking an exam every day.”
“You’re so brave. And it’s worth it?” Margi raised their painted eyebrows. “I did wonder whether the traffic was just a tiny bit better this morning from the East Side bridges.”
“Oh, interesting,” Nanako pondered. “I was working on traffic flows in my exercises today. I didn’t think they’d be live. No,” she paused to check, and nodded. “They were practice situations. But I’ll be working live soon.”
“Can you read our vehicle IDs? Check the battery levels? Spot me speeding?” Margi’s grin was pure wickedness.
Nanako smiled. “If I catch you speeding you’re in such trouble, honey. But I’m still learning the extent of my capacities. The implant has rejuvenated me.”
“I applaud you.” Margi put their hand over their heart and bowed neatly. “But now, we need to talk. You’ve seen your father today?”
“Not yet.” Nanako’s buoyant mood began to sink.
“He’s a challenging client,” Margi said with a slight formality that Nanako appreciated. They were never over-familiar in a work context. “Not the most demanding we’ve ever had, but he is testing our boundaries. The whole staff roster has been rotated to find a solution for his care but now no one will work with him.”
“Ah. I kind of expected that,” Nanako said, and paused. Her good mood was gone. “But what now? He’s got to be cared for. He’d absolutely love it if he could sue me for elder neglect. Acknowledging that he has a powerful personality disorder is wholly inadequate to excuse what he can be like. He’s degenerated into a bully, plain and simple. He wants to be hateful, to goad us into anger that he can enjoy. Nobody should have to put up with that.”
“No, of course not. He’s now entered the mental state where we can classify him as an abusive elder. That’s a significant change for your options. But I am sad for you. I’m sure he wasn’t always like this,” Margi said with a soothing voice.
“Oh he was; shit, Margi, he was always a monster,” Nanako said, surprised that she was not in tears already. “My mother died trying to tolerate him. I never understood why she didn’t leave, but I suppose she was so ground down, she even started to think and speak like him.”
“Protective coloring,” Margi said briskly. “We see that a lot. I am so sorry that you’ve lost them both, though I notice that you still attempt to excuse his behavior. Society does not require that of you, remember, now that he is in a new classification.”
“He hates being dependent on others now that he’s old,” Nanako said, feeling tired. How often had she said this? Margi was right. She’d excused him enough.
“Of course! Well, I have a new suggestion. An artificial agent can’t be goaded. Your father can exert his personality disorder on something designed to receive it, to neutralize the aggression. He can interact with a care agent, not a human, that will absorb all the misplaced anger,” Margi said with professional enthusiasm. “That’s the beauty of their design. You can be as unpleasant as you like to them, and if they’re programmed to be placid and enduring, words will just slide off them.”
Nanako stared at her friend. “He’d never accept it.”
“Well, he might. We can integrate these agents gradually, or they can be applied as a decision already made. To be coarse about it, there’s nothing he can do if you make the decision. You have legal autonomy; he does not, and his clinical assessment reports will support such a decision. Since he is consistently in denial about all aspects of his health and living conditions my professional opinion is that you may explore this route with a clear conscience. But you should consult with his lawyer as well as your own,” Margi said with earnestness. “However, you’re not the first. For the past two years the state has recommended artificial agents for care work with personalities who have no likelihood of recovery, which is now your father’s classification.”
Nanako stiffened. It was if a door had opened, showing her an escape route.
Could she? Should she?
“We can offer weekly and monthly arrangements,” Margi said.
Nanako felt in her pocket desperately for a handkerchief, but then her face crumpled into the grimace of a baby’s desolation. She put her hands to her face and sobbed.
When her breathing had slowed she pulled another tissue from the packet that Margi had set beside her. She mopped and blew and mopped again, and looked around. A small blue binbot rolled forward to receive the damp ball of tissue and then rolled back to its place under Margi’s desk. Nanako supposed that its sensors had detected her gesture.
She tried to cool her red face and swollen eyes with her hands. Then she realized that Margi had moved to stand against their office door, blocking the view through the door’s window. She felt grateful for the privacy.
“I must have missed that part of the care home induction,” Nanako tried to joke but her voice sounded contorted.
“Everyone does. You all want your elders back with you, or have them cured. Let me show you Little Shinsen. It’s rather sweet, and it’s an impressive carebot.” Margi was busy pulling up visuals with audio on the large office screen.
Nanako watched the demonstrations intently. The Little Shinsen carebot was flexible and dextrous with good balance. It prepared hot drinks and snacks and served these to a child in bed and an adult using a wheelchair. It washed a small dog in a basin of warm water and cleaned a toilet and a soiled floor with extendable devices from its upper limbs.
Margi gestured to the screen. “We have a recording for the Shinsen 2, a bigger and newer model, which is designed for severe cases of behavioral impairments. It’s impressive. Its approach calmed one individual whose involuntary responses had been violently physical and unrestrained for years. That person responded with a high degree of contentment and new levels of voluntary engagement after only a few hours with the Shinsen 2: it was a remarkable advance for them. I can check the case details but I understand that their family have engaged the Shinsen 2 with a contract.”
“This is stunning. I had no idea that the tech had advanced this far.” Nanako felt lighter with the hope of relief. “Tell me about its supervision?”
“Cameras in the Shinsen body for surveillance of the client’s safety, of course, and emergency call buttons worn on or inside client’s clothing. Clients with remote physical monitoring in place will also trigger an alert when their breathing or heart rate changes, and you’ve seen how fast we respond to emergencies.”
Margi looked sideways at Nanako’s head. “But you’re equipped to connect with the Shinsen yourself now. You can interact with it directly, though the implant.”
Nanako gaped. She searched quickly through her implant options. “Oh, the binbot! There’s a blue SH icon in my available devices. That’s new.”
“The Shinbin is rather new. Ask it to do something.”
Nanako grinned and requested the little blue hygiene bin to roll out from under the desk to the door and back again. It navigated easily past their chairs, and then took a different, clearer route to return to the desk.
Margi beamed. “You see?”
Nanako laughed. “The implant is so easy for handling. It makes so many more things possible. Now show me the costs.”
As Nanako evaluated the care package levels she realized that she needed to discuss one more thing.
“My father will hate it, but he hates all change. Perhaps he’ll think he can score points by surprising me and accepting it. That would be an improvement on everything else he’s done so far.”
She paused and considered. She felt less hesitant, more decisive about how to deal with him now. Her father was no longer a blight on her existence, a monster of impending criticism. “I think that he’s exhausted his options by being appalling to your human staff: the Shinsen can explain that to him.” She considered. “I’d like to start with a month’s trial of the Little Shinsen and give Dad the option of changing to a Shinsen 2 if, well… if we have to. I don’t think there’s any point waiting for something he will agree to, because he’ll refuse everything. But he has to be cared for, for his own dignity and decency.”
Margi inclined their head. “Of course. I take it you want to begin the contract soon?”
“Tomorrow. Oh god, Margi… If you only knew. The nightmare of having to see him, to have to listen to him, it’s never-ending. This norowashii law forces him to be my responsibility. If he had to move in with me I’d die. He hates it too. He hates me.”
“Things will change, I promise you,” Margi urged her. “You won’t need to be there. Your implant can observe and supervise the Little Shinsen, and you can check in remotely. I hope that will make a difference?”
“All the difference,” Nanako grimaced. “I can feel it already. It’s like my stress level is no longer flashing red. Let’s do it. I don’t care what it costs. His estate can afford it.”
*
It was high summer. Nanako was now accustomed to dividing her attention between the different streams of data running into her expanded mental universe. She had redirected Little Shinsen’s reports to a holding folder in her enhanced capability, but she sent the visuals to a separate folder and did not open them. She could not bring herself to look at images of her father.
She reviewed his environmental and physical reports each day while walking outside among the scented foliage of the transport node offices. She noted that the louvred blinds and the air recirculation fittings that she had installed in his apartment (on the Shinsen’s recommendation—so practical!) were keeping the ambient temperature at a balmy level. And look at these results!
“Client requested bathing service.”
“Client requested clothes washing service.”
“Client requested a menu repeat of the meal service at 12:47.”
“Client instructed this agent to wheel the chair into the garden.”
“Client requested this agent to take opponent’s role in game of Go.”
Oh, interesting. He is the world’s worst loser, and he’s playing against artificial intelligence.
“Who won the game?” she asked Little Shinsen as she took the winding path through woodlands to her next station.
“Client expressed satisfaction.”
She would not ask if Little Shinsen had let him win. Nanako stopped to check her father’s body monitoring through Little Shinsen’s access and noted that his blood pressure had lowered slightly since last week. That’s really good. He must be feeling the benefit.
“Little Shinsen: How satisfied is your client with your work?”
“Affirmative reports received. There has been no recurrence of emotional episodes recorded in days one through nine. Expressions of client satisfaction have increased by 43% since contract start.”
“Review measurement of client satisfaction.” She had deliberately not reviewed the recordings of his “emotional episodes”. She would erase them from her personal storage.
“Client satisfaction is measured by increase in non-aggressive communications; reduction of physical threats; reduction of raised voice episodes; increase in reflective and contemplative activities; reduction of communications about this agent’s appearance, intelligence, origins, task competence, task comprehension, task completion—”
“Understood.”
Nanako paused to check what her implant said about her own breathing rate and blood pressure. A little raised, but only in the past few minutes. Even thinking about him was detrimental for her health and mental equilibrium. Perhaps she was the same for him.
He had a resilient, compliant servant, who would fulfill every need, at last.
Copyright 2026 by Kate Macdonald