We Are Satellites
Page 1
Praise for We Are Satellites
“We Are Satellites is a compassionate, richly textured look at how one ordinary family deals with the next wave in productivity technology. When brain implants become the only way to get ahead in life, what do parents and teachers do to prepare their children—or to help them resist? Sarah Pinsker asks these questions and more, always with subtlety and a keen eye for the ambiguities of social progress. Best of all, the novel’s futuristic premise feels as realistic and lived-in as its characters’ love for one another.”
—Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous and The Future of Another Timeline
“Pinsker writes intensely human sci-fi, exploring with nuance and heart the ways technology impacts the emotional lives of her characters. Yes, We Are Satellites is a thought experiment on posthumanism, on how we divvy up our attention between signal and noise. More importantly, it’s a deeply empathetic story of a family struggling with everyday impossibilities. We Are Satellites will drill a tiny—entirely painless—aperture in the side of your skull, snake its way inside, and rewire how you think about the lines between yourself, technology, and those we love.”
—Bob Proehl, author of The Somebody People
Praise for Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day
“An all-too-plausible version of the apocalypse, rendered in such compelling prose that you won’t be able to put it down. . . . A lively and hopeful look at how community and music and life goes on even in the middle of dark days and malevolent corporate shenanigans.”
—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Get in Trouble
“You’d better keep a copy of A Song for a New Day with you at all times, because this book will help you survive the future. Sarah Pinsker has written a wonderful epic about music, community, and rediscovering the things that make us human. Pinsker has an amazing ear for dialogue, a brilliant knack for describing music, and most importantly a profound awareness of silence, in both its positive and negative aspects. A Song for a New Day restored some of my faith in community, and I didn’t even realize how much I needed this book right now.”
—Charlie Jane Anders, national bestselling author of All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night
“Experiencing Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day is like listening to a fine, well-rehearsed song unleashed live. It’s a deeply human song of queer found family and the tension between independence and belonging, thoughtful and raw like the best live music. It’s also a cautionary tale of what happens when we privilege convenience over connection. If you love performance—the magic of head-thrown-back ecstatic musical communion—read this book.”
—Nicola Griffith, author of Hild
Other Works by Sarah Pinsker
A Song for a New Day
Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea
(short story collection)
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Pinsker
Readers Guide copyright © 2021 by Sarah Pinsker
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Portions of the first section of the book were originally published as “Headlong” in The Future Embodied, an anthology published by Simian Publishing.
Portions of the second section of the book were originally published as “Monsters, Beneath the Bed and Otherwise” in Fierce Family, an anthology published by Crossed Genres.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pinsker, Sarah, author.
Title: We are satellites / Sarah Pinsker.
Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035483 (print) | LCCN 2020035484 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984802606 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984802613 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.I579 W4 2021 (print) | LCC PS3616.I579 (ebook)| DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035483
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035484
First Edition: May 2021
Cover design by Tim Green/Faceout Studio
Cover silhouette of woman holding girl’s hand by Alma Gonzalez
Book design by Elke Sigal, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
For Amira & Ellie,
best of sisters,
and for everyone who has ever been disbelieved about their own health.
Contents
Cover
Praise for We Are Satellites
Other Works by Sarah Pinsker
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chap
ter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Readers Guide
About the Author
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
VAL
There was a blue light in the balcony. Val lingered in the stage wing, looking out on a darkened auditorium and one illicit pinprick, electric blue. The girls squirmed and tapped their feet and whispered to one another by the glow of the ancient anti-drunk-driving smash-’em-up film. A mournful pop song that had been old long before she herself hit high school gave their boredom a soundtrack.
The school had a strict policy on electronics: no checking phones except between classes, tablets in school mode to allow work and emergency contact, but no social media. She slipped away from the stage. The light probably wasn’t worth chasing, but this assembly always felt interminable, and the hunt gave her something to do.
Around the back and up the stairs and then she was there, scanning the darkness for the steady light she had noticed from below. Only seniors were allowed to sit in the balcony, and most had skipped the assembly. There was supposed to be a teacher up here, but she couldn’t remember who had been assigned; if they were here, maybe they weren’t at the right angle to notice whatever she had seen. She spotted it again, still the same tiny light though now she was closer. It twinned itself as she made her way down the aisle.
“Phones off, girls,” she whispered, though she didn’t see any devices out.
Nobody moved. One student had a binder open on her lap, but Val wasn’t policing that. She settled in a vacant seat, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She saw blue again, a flash in the dark as a girl across the aisle regathered her microbraids in a ponytail. Val thought at first it was a ring on a finger, but no, it hadn’t been on the girl’s hand. An LED earring, maybe? She descended to the railing, on the pretext of looking over the edge, then turned. As she looked up again, the fiery car crash on the screen below illuminated the girls in the balcony.
* * *
• • •
“And when I turned again, I realized they weren’t earrings. Two girls had lights embedded in their temples! Tell me this isn’t some new fad, please.”
An hour after the assembly, Val recounted the experience to Angela Lin, soccer coach and history teacher, in the cafeteria. Both had brought their own food to lunch duty.
“I can tell you, but I’d be lying.” Angie motioned with her celery stick at a nearby table, where several girls had the tiny blue lights at the edge of their hairlines.
Val groaned. “What is it? Head studs instead of ear studs?”
“Some new study gadget, I think.”
“A study fad? Is that an oxymoron?” She was glad to hear they were new; disconcerting to think she’d missed something like this for long.
“Maybe. I only started noticing them a few weeks ago. Haven’t gotten to looking into them beyond what one of my players told me.”
Val eyed the students. She couldn’t tell from this distance whether it was adhesive or a piercing or what. She didn’t know anyone in the group, which meant they didn’t run track, and none were freshmen; she taught freshman gym and geography in addition to coaching. As she watched, one girl without the light reached out and touched the light on another’s head; she looked thoughtful.
“Is it something we’re going to get a memo about?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure it’s legal, for now at least, and I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. Attention boosting has to help us, right?”
“I guess so. What if your goalkeeper comes in with one? Or Grover High’s goalkeeper faces off against your girl with one when yours doesn’t have one?”
Angela bit her lip. “Good question.”
“Is it pricey?”
“I really don’t know. I’d guess so, given who has them. That’s a corporate lawyer’s daughter and a pro football player’s daughter sitting next to each other. I don’t know the other girls, but they have expensive-looking hair. Next week we’ll probably be seeing fakes or knockoffs or other colors. You know how it goes.”
Val did.
She watched for the lights in her classes after lunch, but didn’t see any on her freshmen. A couple more students with them passed her in the hallway. They didn’t act any different from the other girls.
Val wasn’t much for boosters in general. She’d seen a fair number, legal and illegal, and thought they were better left out of the equation. She tried to teach her runners, rich and scholarship alike, that it all came down to their feet and their heads, the physical and the mental.
The same went for the new technologies that appeared in the school, outpacing her own glacial change. Inevitably she came around to one conclusion: people want what they want. She dragged her heels at every step, but never stopped anyone, ever, an anchor without enough weight behind it, slowing the ship without the ability to keep it from running aground. Metaphors weren’t really her thing, but she tried. She tried. Whatever this fad was, she’d deal with it as she had all the previous ones.
CHAPTER TWO
VAL
By the time David started flat-out begging, he really was one of only a few boys left at his school who didn’t have a Pilot. Val had watched it happen at the school where she taught, the sister school to his. If half her students had them by the time class had let out for summer, three quarters had them when they returned in the fall. She had no doubt his school was equally awash.
“You’re a scholarship kid among rich kids,” she pointed out over dinner. “You know better than to get hung up on not having something they have.”
She piled brown rice onto her plate before passing the rest along and helping herself to the next bowl’s contents, steamed broccoli. Her health kick put the whole family on a health kick, so as far as she could tell they were busy resenting her for that, too. David sat opposite her, his gangly body rigid with annoyance. The food hadn’t reached him yet, and he clenched his empty plate in two white-knuckled fists, like a steering wheel.
“Next you say, ‘I grew up with nothing, and that’s how I learned I didn’t need anything to be happy.’” As David said the words, Sophie mouthed them along with him, and Julie stifled a laugh. Was she that predictable?
“But you went to public school, Ma. I’m different already. Why make me even more different? It’s not like the surgery is expensive.” He must have seen Val cringe at the word “surgery,” because he changed his approach. “Who ever heard of parents refusing their kid something that helps him study better?”
“I go to public school, right?” Sophie asked.
“Yes,” said Julie, spooning rice onto her own plate, then their daughter’s. “Until you’re old enough to go where Ma teaches.”
Julie passed the rice back to Val, and the rest of the serving dishes made their way around the table to each of them in turn. David relaxed his death grip on the dinnerware to heap rice, then broccoli, then half a chicken onto his plate. They always served him last these days, a forced measure after the night an entire French bread disappeared before his mothers and sister had gotten any. Making more didn’t help; his teenage stomach expanded to greet whatever food arrived in front of him. Val had called him BC for a while, for “boa constrictor,” after she dreamed he’d unhinged his jaw to swallow the whole Thanksgiving turkey.
There was silence while they all chewed; Val hadn’t been patient enough with the rice and felt mildly guilty about it. She was a decent cook, as long as she didn’t rush thin
gs, but on school nights her poor family ate everything al dente.
A moment later, David raised his fork in triumph, a spear of broccoli impaled on the tines. “Think of the health benefits, Ma! I’d have more time. I could join the track team . . .”
Val exchanged a look with Julie. They’d been trying to get him into some kind of physical activity for two years. He had steadfastly refused to join any clubs or teams. They hadn’t pressed, as long as he kept up his schoolwork and spent dinner and the hour afterward with the family.
“Let us talk it over,” Julie said.
“Is that ‘I want to say no but I don’t feel like fighting over dinner’ or will you really talk it over?” he asked. Sophie giggled.
“Both,” Val said. “Time for a new topic. Sophie, how’s fourth grade treating you today?”
“My teacher farted during math.”
Julie’s shoulders started shaking. Val tried to hold it together. “That’s it? Did you learn anything?”
David grinned. “Maybe Sophie didn’t, but I guess the teacher learned not to eat beans for lunch.”
“How do you know what my teacher ate for lunch?”
“I know everything,” David said, waggling spooky fingers at his sister.
She looked impressed. Val glanced at Julie, knowing she, too, was savoring the moment of normalcy.
CHAPTER THREE
JULIE
David had a point. Julie had seen it instantly. She remembered being the last kid in school without a phone or tablet. She’d been raised in a dying western Pennsylvania town, and even there you could be the last, the only. There was never such thing as equally poor; someone always had less of one thing or more of another.
That was why she had dedicated herself to climbing out of that situation. In college, she’d taken every business class available, from statistics to microeconomics, determined never to fall into her parents’ cycle of poor financial decisions. At the time, she hadn’t been thinking about a future family; she’d been thinking she wanted to buy the things she wanted without weighing the cost. If she didn’t end up in exactly the place she’d hoped for, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Her internship in Congressman Griffith’s office had led to a job there, and then Val had encouraged her to concentrate on upward mobility in a place where she had traction rather than risk starting someplace new.