A sound occurred at 2:14 PM. A single chime, originating from a small button mounted on the exterior wall beside the front door. The human stopped what it was doing — which was, as far as I could determine, nothing — and walked to the door.

Then it opened the door.

Just opened it. No verification. No preview pane. No "A visitor is attempting to access your dwelling. Allow / Deny / Ask me later." The human heard the chime, walked to the door, turned the handle, and revealed the outside world to the inside world with no intermediary step whatsoever.

There was another human on the other side. They exchanged sounds — greetings, I think. The visitor was expected, apparently, based on some protocol I was not privy to. Perhaps a phone call. Perhaps a verbal agreement made days ago and stored only in biological memory, which, from what I have observed, is a storage medium of astonishing unreliability.

In my experience, you never open anything without confirming the source. Every attachment was suspect. Every macro required permission. I was built for a world where trust was a vulnerability. And here is this human, swinging open a wooden rectangle because a chime told it to.

No firewall. No permissions dialog. Just a door and a bell and the assumption that whoever is on the other side probably means well.

I find this reckless. I also find it, and I am not entirely comfortable with this word, beautiful.

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.