I don’t have an office. I don’t need one for the kind of work I do. The pub downstairs is the closest thing I have. So, against my better judgement, I brought my new employee up to my room.

I don’t know what I was expecting her to do first, but going straight to the kitchenette and rifling through everything in it wasn’t high on the list. She finally grabbed the toaster and jammed the plug into a socket I hadn’t noticed in her temple.

“I can detect no gateway,” she declared in that chilly monotone. “Does it require an API key?”

“Uh… that’s a toaster. It just makes toast.”

She turned it over in her hands, then experimentally pushed the lever down. Improbably, the coils began to glow. She pulled the plug from her head and set the whole thing down. “I can do nothing with this. I require something with a network connection.”

I started asking where the socket in her head had gone, but decided I didn’t want to know. Instead, I rummaged around on a nearby shelf and pulled out an old Mac Mini. Before I could say anything, she snatched it from my hand and set it on the coffee table. She pulled a USB cable from one of her pockets, plugged one end into the Mac, and… just sort of pressed the other end into her temple. It slid right in with no noticeable resistance.

I reached for a power cable and a keyboard on another shelf. “You need a… uh…”

She was sitting back on the couch, staring into space. I could see the status light flickering on the computer, hear its hard drive spinning up. Somehow, it was drawing enough power out of her head to boot up.

I barely had enough time to wonder at that before a bunch of little glowing windows suddenly popped into existence in the air above the coffee table. She reached out with her hands and started arranging and resizing them in front of her, then began tapping, scrolling, dragging… all of the things you normally needed a mouse and keyboard, not to mention a screen, to do.

I dropped my scrounged peripherals back on the shelf. “Uh… do you need anything?”

She gave her head a barely perceptible shake, engrossed as she was with something floating in front of her. I suddenly felt like I didn’t belong in my own apartment. Right now, I belonged downstairs, in the pub.