She was pretty sure he’d told the truth when he said he wasn’t at BNL anymore, but he still hadn’t said it to her again after that one mention in the park that he seemed to have forgotten. She couldn’t tell if he knew that she knew. Why did he bother with the deception of wearing the BNL shirt if it wasn’t to fool them?
It took her longer than it should have to realize Sophie must have been talking about David when she posted her discovery that Pilots could be turned off with the lights still on. Not until she caught him at breakfast one morning, still in his BNL uniform but looking like he must have slept in it. He sat in the kitchen chair he usually hated, the one with its back to the room instead of the wall, drinking coffee with his eyes closed.
“Good morning,” Julie said, and David startled so badly his coffee left his mug, like a cartoon, hovered above it for a second, then spilled over his hand, his lap, the table.
“Why would you sneak up on me?” He sounded petulant; he’d never been a petulant kid.
“I didn’t. I walked into the room and said hi. It’s a normal thing to do. Are you hurt?”
“No, but now I have to change.”
“It’s not like you’re going to work,” she said. “Put something else on.”
He stared at her. “How do you know?”
“What do you mean, how do I know? I ran into you in the park a few weeks ago, remember? You said you weren’t working at BNL anymore, so I don’t know why you’re still wearing their uniform.”
His expression was laced with doubt, but she didn’t know which part he doubted. After a minute, he went upstairs. She wiped the table and chair and poured her own cup. He returned wearing jeans and a button-down shirt.
She searched for a question to ask him that wouldn’t sound like parental nudging. In the end she settled on apology in the name of clarity. “Sorry if I surprised you. You’re usually aware I’m coming into the room before I even know I’m coming in.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. I was distracted, I guess.”
“I hope it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience to change.”
She waited for him to say no, no inconvenience, he didn’t need to be wearing those clothes anymore, this was his plan for the day, any or all of the above. He just shrugged again, got up, and left.
She thought about it all day at work. Got back to find Val making her usual giant dinner.
“Hey, love,” she said, putting her hands on Val’s waist and kissing her neck, careful not to get in the way as her wife stirred whatever was in the pot. It smelled good, like onions and butter. “Can I do something to help?”
“Nah. I’m almost done, but thanks.”
“Is either kid here?”
“I don’t think so.”
Julie took a deep breath. “Have you noticed anything strange about David recently?”
“Strange, like what?”
“Have you noticed he’s distracted? Like that thing the other night where he didn’t hear us say hi when he came in? I think . . . I think his Pilot is off.”
“Like it’s broken?”
“Like the light is on, but I think the Pilot isn’t.”
Val turned and frowned. “Is that possible? I’ve never heard of that.”
“I saw it mentioned somewhere.”
“Huh. I guess he’ll tell us when he’s ready, if that’s the case . . . crap.” Val turned back to the stovetop, where the onions had started to burn. Julie waited for her to say more, but she busied herself with salvaging the meal. It figured she wasn’t as concerned as Julie about this.
The front door creaked open and then shut again. “What’s burning?” called Sophie.
Val smiled at Julie to share her happiness that one of the kids had joined them for dinner. Julie changed the subject to ask how Val’s day had been, so they were on safer topics than Pilots and the lack thereof when Sophie entered the room.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
VAL
Val was good at ignoring the outside world. She’d never seen the point of social media, so she’d never felt the temptation to check for updates during her school day. She kept her phone on “do not disturb,” with emergency overrides for her family.
The day after Julie said she thought David had deactivated his Pilot, she found herself itching to go online, for the first time in ages. It had come to her after lunch: the memory of the BNL Pilot parent forum that she had looked at only once, the morning of David’s activation. At the time, she’d been surprised to find that every post was positive. She desperately wanted to know whether that was still the case. She waited through her afternoon’s classes, then track, trying to keep her head in the game, to give her focus to her students, as they deserved. What did David deserve? Something better than noise.
While her last students finished their cooldowns, and the neighborhood joggers and walkers replaced them on the track, she sat on the bleachers and pulled out her phone. She navigated to BNL’s website, but couldn’t find the forum. Was she misremembering? Had it been on some other site? No. She distinctly recalled wondering if the fact that it was owned by BNL meant they would censor negative comments. Maybe they’d deleted it entirely.
She tried a web search for “Pilot parent forum” with no results, then “Pilot forum,” also nothing, then “Pilot group.” Did you mean to search for “Pilot Survivor Group”? She hadn’t, but now she most definitely did. It was on a site she boycotted, but the privacy restrictions were set so she could browse it without an account.
The pinned post began They tried to shut us down but we’re back. Below that, one story after another, all of which she read in David’s voice.
I tried to tell them it wasn’t working like it was supposed to . . .
It’s hard to find the language to explain the way the Pilot makes my head feel. I got it checked but they said it was working fine.
The FDA said the company hadn’t reported any complaints.
They told me it might take a while to get used to it, and I should do the exercises and wait out the static. I waited. It’s still here.
That last one sounded exactly like David, if you substituted “noise” for “static.”
She read on. She waited for somebody to mention FreerMind, for her children’s worlds to intersect, but the more she read, the more she realized these people weren’t looking for political action or support groups; they were struggling to survive their own heads. Like David.
What she wanted, suddenly and more than anything, was a friend who wasn’t her wife. When was the last time she’d had one? Angie at her old school, years ago; she’d been too embarrassed about the way she’d left to keep in touch. She was friendly with the other non-Piloted teachers here, but they all treated each other like they’d been thrown together by circumstance, not choice; alliances more than friendships, all afraid to seem cohesive lest the whole group get yoked together. She wanted a friend to sit in a coffee shop with, not that she ever did that, or go to a bar with, not that she ever did that anymore, either. Someone to chat about her family with who was outside of her family.
That had never been a thing she needed before. She’d had three modes forever, family, school, and solitary, with no time for anyone else. Where did you find new friends, especially if you narrowed it down to people without Pilots? Online communities weren’t her thing, and she didn’t want to invade Sophie’s space. She wanted to talk with someone who would understand when she said she looked at those lights on the heads of people she loved and she felt like she’d been balancing on top of a fence for too long, and any moment she would fall to one side at the expense of whoever was on the other.
When she looked up, the sun had dropped behind the trees and the joggers had gone. Some fraction of her family was probably waiting for her to come home and make dinner.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
DAVID
When he’d
left the military, David waited until he had a plan to tell his family; that seemed the right way to go for this as well. Go in with an announcement, not a question. If he arrived at family dinner and said he’d been let go, they’d have asked a million questions about why and how, alongside the how dare they? editorials. Then they’d suggest places for him to apply, and offer to look at his résumé, and before you knew it, the whole thing would have been a family project.
He didn’t want a collaborative process. He wasn’t sure what he was qualified for, or what he wanted to do, for that matter. He didn’t have a college degree, but he had plenty of life skills. He’d learned a lot from the military and the job with BNL.
He left the house every day in his BNL polo to stave off questions. He spent the mornings applying for jobs, and in the afternoons he went to the park and took one of the pills Alyssa had given him. They’d been introduced as Fortress of Solitude, but he had started thinking of them simply as Quiet.
The park was his own dare, a chaotic environment of joggers and ducks and ships and strollers and dogs and children and waves and sky that evened itself out as the pill kicked in, smoothing the sounds, the colors, the movement in his peripheral vision. He was exposed there on his bench, a target in the open. Sitting there, in the Quiet, he proved to himself over and over that not everyone was out to get him.
He’d told Alyssa he wanted the pills for a party game like hers, and she had given him a dozen in a breath-mint tin; he ran out in a week. He didn’t want her to know how many he was taking, in case she told Karina who then told Milo, but one day at the park he noticed someone else sitting the way he did, and he struck up a conversation, and that guy gave him a name and number, and before he knew it, he had a guy who was happy to sell him as many as he needed, no questions asked.
Alyssa hadn’t told him to space the pills out. She hadn’t said anything about them at all, and he went out of his way not to seek any information. He didn’t want anything to disrupt the Quiet. He wouldn’t have minded taking a second one as the first wore off, to sit in the Quiet forever. His self-restraint in taking only one every afternoon was his way of showing himself it wasn’t a problem.
Okay, sometimes he took a second in the evening, but that was a reward for the progress he was making on being out in public without panicking, just as the first was a reward for a morning spent sending out his résumé, going on interviews, concocting new and creative ways to explain parting ways with BNL. If he took one in the morning occasionally, that was to relax before interviews, to concentrate on what mattered and filter out the noise so he didn’t spend the whole time tracking every hand movement, every rattling air vent, every flickering fluorescent, every intern in every busy hallway.
He’d been on twenty-seven first interviews and one second interview without a single offer. The first one had been a shock, but none since had surprised him. He’d be depressed if he weren’t so elated over the Quiet. What he needed at this moment was to work on himself, to better himself, to fix everything that had broken. That was what mattered.
If his Pilot had trained his brain into the noise, had done it so successfully that even deactivating the Pilot couldn’t stop it, then he needed to try to train his brain back into its natural state. He approached it with the same dedication that had allowed him to get past the noise and finish high school and survive his deployments. Retraining his brain was his job now. Put on your oxygen mask before you help others. He didn’t research whether retraining was possible; it had to be.
Sometimes he ate dinner with Milo and Karina, but he was conscious of the intrusion on their lives. More rarely, with them and Alyssa, though he’d been careful to tell her he was working on himself and needed to take things slow. Sometimes he hung at the club where Milo worked, until Milo said his boss had called David a distraction, so if he went out at all he just drank until Milo got off work. He still hadn’t told Milo about the Quiet.
Mostly he sat in the park and watched the ducks and then the dusk and then the darkness, and let the one move through the other gradually, a progression, a natural linearity his brain had never allowed him to witness before. Quiet.
Sometimes he sat there all night, slept on the bench until a cop roused him, and then he apologized and said he must have dozed off, and yes he had a car in the lot and a place to go home to, and he allowed his ironed shirt and his famous face to grant him the privilege of a dignified exit. He drove home, slipped upstairs and into his bed to get enough sleep to repeat it all the next day. It was a strange routine, but he was learning, he was growing, he was forcing his brain to change, maybe, hopefully.
After a while, David had to admit to himself that his attempts at brain training were making no difference. If anything, it had gotten worse. Quiet worked, but now there was a comedown he hadn’t remembered before, the ocean of noise ebbing then returning in a tidal wave, so that the gaps between the pills felt worse than anything he’d previously experienced.
He called the BNL clinic. Since he didn’t work for them anymore, he didn’t care what they knew.
“I need my Pilot looked at,” he said when he reached an actual human.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I had the implant deactivated, but I haven’t noticed any difference. My head is still full of noise.”
He heard the frown through the phone. “What was your name again?”
He repeated his name and implant ID, as he had to the machine at the beginning of the call, which had promised to route him to the right department.
“Mr. Geller-Bradley, our records don’t show that you had your implant deactivated.”
“I had it done elsewhere. Your doctors wouldn’t do it for me.” You kicked me out, he didn’t say. If he was lucky, that note wasn’t in his file, but he couldn’t imagine it wasn’t.
“I’m afraid if you had your implant deactivated at a non-BNL facility, unless it was a documented emergency procedure at an accredited hospital, you voided the warranty on your implant.”
“I’ll pay for the appointment. I don’t care about the warranty.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s not a matter of payment. If someone else altered your Pilot, we can’t do any further work on it. It’s not an insurance matter; it’s about liability.”
This time he said it. “I went to you to do it, but you kicked me out.”
He could have waited for whatever the operator said next, but instead he channeled his inner Sophie and hung up without niceties. He had missed this fine print, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to go to them first. It made him feel lousy about ever having worked for them, that they would leave him high and dry like this. Maybe his sister was right.
She couldn’t be right. For her to be right meant he had to be wrong, that he’d bought into a bad system and worked to propagate it. He’d let them use his face on billboards in service of a bad system. That was too much to acknowledge.
He closed his eyes, searching for a solution beneath his eyelids. He dialed the doctor who had deactivated his Pilot and made an appointment to get the light turned off, too. Dr. Pessoa’s schedule had gotten busy, so he scheduled a month out. Still time to change his mind.
He imagined Julie giving him a hard time about how limited his job options would be once the light was off. Val would be supportive, and that might be even worse; he’d pushed so hard for his Pilot, and he couldn’t shake his concern that the problem lay with him, not the Pilot. Even now he wasn’t ready to disavow the utility of the Pilot—it had still saved his life—but he didn’t need to be a walking advertisement anymore.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
JULIE
Julie led the noon staff meeting, suddenly conscious of the blue lights on every head in the room. She wondered if anyone was faking it, like David. If anyone else had gotten theirs taken out but still pretended to have it so that nobody could question their focus and commitment.
&
nbsp; She checked off everything on her day’s to-do list and started on the next day’s list. On her way home she drove past the park: David’s car was there again.
Neither kid came home for dinner. Julie and Val watched two episodes of Co-Pilots, the mystery series where a young Piloted priest and a skeptical old-guard reporter investigated their town’s stratospheric body count. When Val announced she was going to bed, Julie said she wanted to stay up a little longer. She puttered for a while doing her usual paranoid searches. Sophie was online, just as Julie liked it. If she was online, she wasn’t off getting arrested or seizing somewhere.
David didn’t come home until after two a.m. Julie had sat on the couch with the view out the window, and from there she watched him glide the car to the curb, then sit another minute, two minutes, five. It was light in the room and dark outside, and her eyes followed the blue pinprick from the car to the door.
He turned his key quietly, closed the door quietly, paused to remove his shoes. The opposite of the Sophie whirlwind.
“Hey, Davey,” she said.
“Oh, hi! I didn’t think anyone would be awake.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” A little lie. The kind that didn’t matter. “Sit with me a sec?”
He came into the room and settled in the high-backed chair. She studied his face. He didn’t look stressed or aggrieved or anything other than tired.
“How was your day?” A carefully calibrated question. Not prying.
“It was okay.”
She tried another. “Do anything interesting?”
“Not much.”
She had to ask her real questions if she wanted real answers. “Did you notice my car behind yours the other day?”
We Are Satellites Page 27