The Remote Control That Hides Itself

The Homebody is a television remote in every ordinary sense. Rubber buttons, a red one at the top left, an infrared eye at the nose, and two AA batteries that will comfortably outlive the sofa. What sets it apart is underneath: a pair of small rubber tracks, and a clock. At eleven o'clock every night, wherever it happens to have been left, the Homebody drives itself into the gap between the sofa cushions, settles in, and sleeps there until somebody goes looking.

The makers consider this an act of honesty rather than mischief. A remote control is going to be lost, they reason; the only open question is whether it is lost carelessly or lost properly. An accidental disappearance is a mystery, and mysteries take twenty minutes and involve lifting the dog. A scheduled one is an appointment. You already know where it is. You simply have to put your hand in.

It is a considerate machine. It never travels more than a metre and a half, so nothing ever ends up in the hall. A small light sensor keeps it still while anyone is in the room, because it considers the manoeuvre private. It takes the short way, over the throw rather than around it, at the speed of a snail with somewhere to be. On arrival it hums one low, satisfied note, which the manual calls the settling tone and which nobody has ever heard.

Not every living room has a suitable gap, so there is a fallback list, printed in the manual in order of preference: between the cushions, under the newspaper, beneath one abandoned slipper, and in a home of hard floors and firm opinions, the dog's bed. Owners of leather sofas report that the Homebody circles for a while like a cat, finds nothing that will hold it, and returns to the coffee table looking, they insist, slightly hurt.

The retrieval is the good part. In the morning you slide a hand into the cushion gap and come out with the remote, a handful of coins, a hair clip, a crayon worn down to a stub, and the corner of a jigsaw you gave up on in March. Customers describe this as the closest thing to treasure their living room has produced in years, which is exactly the review the makers were hoping for.

The deluxe model learns. It notes which hiding places delayed you longest and quietly comes to favour them, so that after a fortnight it is measurably harder to find than it was on the day you bought it. Complaints about this are answered with a short letter explaining that the Homebody is performing as designed, and enclosing a spare battery for the search.

Underneath the joke sits the most ordinary object problem there is. Remotes genuinely do vanish, and not because they move. We put them down while our attention is somewhere else entirely, mid-sentence, in a doorway, eyes still on the screen, and an action nobody was watching leaves nothing behind to remember. The memory did not fail. There was never a memory made.

The sofa does the rest without any help from a motor. The gap between cushions is a narrow slot with a wide funnel above it, and anything balanced on an arm or the edge of a seat travels down there eventually, along with the coins and the crayons. That is why a whole small industry of remote holsters, velcro pads, hooks and beeping fobs exists at all. The Homebody simply stops pretending the remote was ever going to stay on the table.