We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  “Why did you bother meeting with me if he’s already yours?” She tried to keep her voice from wavering.

  “He’s eighteen, so he has the right to decide for himself, but obviously we’d rather you were on board with his decision. We want you to understand why we’re interested in him.”

  “David said you were interested in smart, athletic kids with Pilots.” She couldn’t bring herself to say “men.” David still couldn’t do a load of laundry without dying all his underwear pink. No way was he an adult.

  “That’s what we want, but not why. Do you know what a difference it would make to have young people like him in control rooms? People with stamina and brains who can pay attention to multiple stimuli, who can think on their feet?”

  She took another sip of coffee. “You say ‘control rooms,’ but you mean battlefields. You mean storming through deserts and towns and compounds. You mean people who can aim a gun while figuring out if three guns are aiming at them.”

  “Yes, that, too.” He dropped the smile entirely, at last. “That’s true, in the long run, but these are still the first people with Pilots to enter the service, and we still need to figure out how best to use them. This is a special program.

  “My assignment is to look for smart, athletic young people with Pilots, to be trained for Pilot-specific maneuvers. I can’t say where he will or won’t be sent, but I can promise this program’s intent isn’t to train these soldiers and then lose them. There’s going to be a lot of money invested in them. We want them to stick around.”

  The practicality of the money argument calmed her more than anything else had. She thanked Fuentes for meeting with her and left the café. She still couldn’t believe David had signed up—he had lied when he said the decision could wait until the acceptance letters came in—but at least Fuentes’s last lines had seemed honest enough.

  “There’s going to be a lot of money invested in them,” he’d said. That was numbers, and numbers were her thing. David was an asset to the Army, not a pawn. She’d have to hang her hat on hope.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  VAL

  After David’s announcement, the world took on a different color. Army drab, maybe. Val drove him to school, as she did every day, letting him off outside the gate so he wouldn’t be seen with his mother. She tried not to take it personally.

  Her day’s first class, her homeroom, was the eleventh-grade girls. Since the weather outside was still too foul to consider an outside activity, she readied the gym for volleyball, tensing the net and rolling out the ball cart.

  “Have any of you gotten a visit from a military recruiter?” she asked the first few girls to straggle in. Joshlyn, one of her varsity runners, bobbed her head.

  “Yeah, Ms. B. A few weeks ago? In civics?” She had an amazing capacity to turn statements into questions. Of course. In civics. Civic duty. Civic pride.

  “What did they tell you?”

  “She said it was a good opportunity? That we were exactly what the services were looking for, and they’d pay for college after if we wanted, right? And that she knew we were still weighing our options since we’re only juniors, but they’d be happy to cover senior year tuition for anyone whose parents agreed to sign a commitment for them ’til they’re eighteen. Ms. B? Are you okay? I didn’t say yes, Ms. B, just maybe. I don’t need their scholarship since I have a track scholarship already? Ms. B?”

  Val realized she was staring at Joshlyn. The others had gathered on the bleachers. Morning announcements started, and the girls heaved themselves to their feet for the national anthem. Val put her hand over her heart, but didn’t mouth the words as she usually did. Commitments from parents to sell their kids into the service? Her mind was officially boggled. The morning announcements talked about a charity bake sale and a new bank of parking spots converted to charge electric cars. Nothing about recruiters.

  After announcements, she had Tamara Habana lead some quick dance-style warm-ups, and then sent them off to make ten circuits of the gym. Blue lights bobbed, ponytails swished; everything was different, nothing was different.

  Her second period was a spare. She picked a fight with poor Mr. Alvarez in the break room, accusing him of having used her mug, then accidentally used aspartame in her coffee instead of stevia. When an assistant principal walked into the lounge, she redirected her rage at him.

  “Nick, what the hell are you thinking? Recruiters? Incentivizing?” She realized she sounded like Joshlyn, all question marks, and tried to locate her inner calm. She found it in her gut, punching her organs from the inside out, and tried to push away the hated temper that hulked inside her.

  “We can talk about this. I’m sorry you’re upset.” He looked genuinely surprised at her reaction. He sat on the couch and motioned her to join him.

  She perched on the arm. “Of course I’m upset. There are soldiers in my school, trying to convince my kids to fight their war when half these girls can’t even drive yet.”

  “It’s part of the program, Val. I thought you knew, since David has one and all. The money for those new scholarships had to come from someplace. Anyway, they’re hardly recruiting. They’re laying out options.”

  “Bull. Joshlyn Trent says they’re offering to pay for senior year for girls whose parents sign a commitment form.”

  “It’s nonbinding.” He opened his palms. “They can change their minds, as long as . . .”

  “. . . As long as what? As long as they pay out the loan? Do you know how bad that sounds?”

  He let his hands fall to his lap. “I think it sounds pretty good to the girls whose parents are already going into debt to keep them in this school, and the ones who don’t know how they’re going to pay college tuition. I’m sure you understand. You’d be in the same position if you didn’t work here.”

  He had her on that point; they would never have been able to afford to send David to the boys’ school without the faculty waiver. That was the main reason she worked here.

  “But, Nick, aren’t we just sending the poor kids off to be cannon fodder again? Isn’t that what keeps happening, over and over again these last few wars?”

  “I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think so. They’re offering the senior-year deal to the scholarship kids, sure, but they’re offering the college-tuition deal to everyone, and there’s more than a few nonscholarship kids who need to consider that. They’ve said there’s a training program for kids with Pilots, that they’re going to be specialists. They’ll learn to use the Pilots better than they do now. I don’t think it’s a bad option to present.”

  Val rubbed her shoulder, where she felt a knot forming; that was where her stress usually settled. There was no winning this argument, in any case. It was too late. The recruiters had come, and she hadn’t even known about it. She hadn’t known the military was helping to subsidize Pilots. She hadn’t known, and she hadn’t prepared, and they had stolen her son.

  David hadn’t even used the money argument. She wondered if that had come into it for him, if he thought he was being pragmatic, if he thought this was a way to help the family; that sounded like David. Or was he just looking for a way to silence what he called the noise in his head? None of her students had ever mentioned noise.

  She could pretend her upset was on behalf of her students, good students like Joshlyn, who deserved a full array of options, but all she could think of was David, who had been given a full array of options and made his own terrifying choice.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JULIE

  It wasn’t so much a decision as an inevitability; Julie just had to find a way to tell Val. She predicted the conversations: Could they afford it? Yes. She balanced the family finances; with David not heading to college after all, with the GI Bill as an option if he eventually did, they had some money to spare. She was still furious with the recruiters, furious with David, but the irony didn’t escape her tha
t her anger directed itself at his unilateral decision while she longed to make a unilateral decision of her own.

  It was an investment in their future. She could do her job twice as well with a Pilot. She’d be faster, more efficient, listening to messages and performing constituent-issue triage and updating the budget and listening to the congressman’s podcast and sending him talking points on the constituent issues she’d heard and answering her staff’s questions without the hopeless whirl of what was I doing ten minutes ago before the phone rang? She could get stuff done while simultaneously calming a caller, instead of watching minutes tick by that she’d intended for something else. It all made perfect sense.

  Part of her wanted to go ahead and schedule the procedure, telling Val only after the installation. She wasn’t that kind of person. Was she? Val’s concerns were getting old. They’d seen how well David’s Pilot worked: so well he’d been recruited by an elite military unit, like something in a bad action movie. If he complained sometimes, it wasn’t enough to worry about, and the good points far outnumbered the bad. She liked living on the cutting edge, or at least somewhere on the blade.

  Better to be the blade than the chopping block. If you fell behind, you fell behind forever. Like her father, solid on e-mail but uncomfortable with social media and video calls, still insisting on a landline and physical albums as if records weren’t grooves in wax, and CDs didn’t convert music to ones and zeroes. She found the ones and zeroes reassuring. They were proof that it was important for her to adapt and stay ahead.

  Before she’d brought it up with Val, before she could tell the congressman her plan to get one, Evan Manfredi called her from the DC office.

  “We’re not allowed to require that people get Pilots,” he said. He leaned toward his computer’s camera and rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair, bringing her attention to his own Pilot, consciously or not.

  “But?” He was always so obvious.

  “But we’ve found a way to subsidize the procedure for any employee of more than three years. I know you may be nervous about it. A lot of people your age are, but I can promise you . . .” She let him drone on about the painless procedure, how easy it was to get used to the enhancement, how much more productive she would be once she had it. Better to let him think she needed convincing than to tell him she’d already decided to do it. He’d probably find a way to renege on covering the cost if she admitted she’d been prepared to pay for it herself.

  If she acted put upon, he would owe her one for taking the chance. “Let me talk it over at home and get back to you later this week, Evan. I’ll consider it, but I want to make sure my family is on board.”

  He nodded, though she knew those words were foreign to him. She sensed his skepticism whenever she came back from family medical leave. He had no place in his world for external distractions. At least he was so transparent she knew exactly where she stood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  VAL

  Another night together, apart. Apart together. David was in his room killing monsters with his friend Milo. Julie sat at the dining room table, intent on some project spread in front of her. Sophie occupied the table’s remaining corner, doing one of those obnoxious 3-D puzzles, which she’d insisted on tackling alone. The box showed a medieval castle, but not that all four castle walls were nearly identical, and the foam pieces never quite aligned right; or more precisely, they never quite aligned wrong, so you could build an entire wall without realizing a piece was out of place. Val pointed that out every time Sophie found one at a garage sale, which was probably why Sophie refused her help, leaving her flipping channels.

  Sophie looked over her shoulder. “Why is Mrs. Moritz on TV?”

  Val backed up a couple of channels, to the local news broadcast she’d gone past. Sophie was right: her principal sat in a row of people on a dais behind the superintendent of schools, Quentin Marshall. The camera angle was such that Val was able to count six Pilots among the ten seated, not including Marshall’s.

  “That man is a giant,” said Sophie.

  “A giant jerk,” muttered Julie under her breath. Val knew there had been some political issue he’d gotten himself involved in that had not endeared him to her wife.

  A news anchor’s voice spoke over the scene. “In another controversial move, Mr. Marshall has announced the city school system is partnering with Balkenhol Neural Labs to bring their Pilot implants to underprivileged youth.”

  Cut to Mr. Marshall. “Our city has an obligation to its students. We need to give them every opportunity to succeed. Right now they are being left behind more and more every day. If we are going to close this gap, we need new advantages.”

  The voiceover returned. “BNL’s CEO, Sylvia Keating, was also on hand to discuss this momentous decision.”

  A fiftyish white woman in an impeccable blue pantsuit stepped to the microphone. Her perfect hair swept back from the right side of her head in a way that showed off her Pilot’s light, which matched her suit. “This partnership is an opportunity to bring our children into a future in which they are competitive, in which they are current, in which they . . .”

  The piece cut to reactions from others who had been in the room. A west side mother told the reporter, “My daughter has been asking for a Pilot since they first came out, but we haven’t been able to afford one. This is a blessing, a real blessing. I’d like to hug Mr. Marshall.”

  “I want my kids to have opportunities I didn’t have, but that’s always felt out of reach,” said a father from a southern neighborhood. “I thank the people responsible for this.”

  One of the principals, an older woman, spoke next. “Our school is one hundred ninetieth out of two hundred in the city, which is consistently last in the state. We teach to the tests, and we set high standards, but they are continually unreachable. We are blessed to have the opportunity to try this.”

  Back to the studio, and Val muted the newscasters, who both had Pilots of their own. She turned to face the dining room.

  “Fair and balanced reporting, huh? They couldn’t find anybody skeptical of the idea?”

  Julie shrugged. “I think it’s the best thing Marshall has done since he took over the district.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s right. The schools are underwater. The buildings are falling apart, they’re hemorrhaging teachers. Private schools have a thousand advantages. Why shouldn’t they try to reduce that number?”

  “My school is falling apart?” Sophie looked alarmed.

  Val glared at Julie. “No, Soph. Your school is in okay shape, but a lot of schools need repairs. I don’t see how this will help get repairs or teachers.”

  Julie brandished her tablet, some random spreadsheet on display. “Money. Students with Pilots get better grades, better test scores. Better test scores, more grants, more cash flow. Super long view: more students graduate, more students go on to college, more students get better jobs, make more money, more students look back fondly on the advantages their school gave them, more students donate back to their alma maters, more students return to the city with ideas that create jobs and improve the local economy. Schools finally have money to put where it’s needed. Where’s the downside?”

  “They should have interviewed you. The school system should hire you to do their spin.”

  “Hey!” Julie frowned.

  “Counterargument. We know Pilots don’t make anybody smarter. They don’t teach good study skills. They aren’t a replacement for teachers or books. If a kid is in tenth grade and reading on a third-grade level, he’s not going to magically start comprehending quantum physics or To the Lighthouse just because he has a Pilot. It’s a superficial fix. A bandage for a paper cut on a finger when there’s a sucking chest wound, too.”

  “Eeew,” said Sophie.

  “Exactly. Gross and pointless and super sketchy in my book.”

  “Yo
ur paranoid book.” Julie came over to sit beside Val, leaning into her. Val recognized the move as appeasement, not apology. She sighed. “I guess we’ll find out one way or another, but what about all the Sophies?”

  Sophie turned around from her puzzle again. “How many Sophies are there?”

  “One is plenty, I’m sure,” said Julie, nudging Val in the ribs.

  Val ignored the hint. “You know what I mean. What about the kids who can’t get Pilots? What about the Orthodox Jews and the Seventh-day Adventists, for that matter?”

  “I don’t think there are many Orthodox Jews in this school system.”

  “Fine. The Adventists?”

  “. . . but if there were, I guess they’d opt out. I’m sure there’s an opt-out. For Sophie’s class, too.”

  Val let it go. She didn’t ask her last question, because she didn’t want it answered in front of Sophie. What happens to those who opt out? There would always be somebody left behind. She wished it weren’t the little girl at the table, still determinedly matching indistinguishable puzzle pieces, still refusing help.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SOPHIE

  Sophie continued writing until the moment Mr. Kenworth came past to take her test, slamming her pencil down with a flourish to make sure he knew she was done. Technically she was allowed as much time as she needed to finish, but she hated playing that card if she didn’t have to. English was her best subject.

  “Wait!” she called to Kevin Boatman. He swung around, his wide shoulders filling the doorway.