Followers

by Megan Angelo

  “Seriously. Gorgeous.” Kendra’s voice broke the silence. It cocked its head to one side, the mechanical whisper that went with the motion giving its nature away. “Have we found the dress?” it sang giddily.

  Marlow was thinking that she would rather wear the yellow dress every day of her life than stand here topless with this perky bot for one more moment. She was thinking that all that stretched in front of her was doing things she didn’t want to do. What difference did it make what she wore?

  “We’ve found the dress,” she said to the man-made girl. “You can go ring it up.”

  * * *

  The three women left the gown, smothering in its garment bag, in Floss’s car. Then they walked across the wildflower-flanked artery of the shopping center, toward the café. Ellis was waiting outside, the sole of one sneaker braced against the wall as he stared into nothing. His mouth puckered open and closed. Marlow knew that look: he was dictating something. An email, or, she thought with bitterness, a grocery list full of things to hide from her. Though it was entirely unnecessary to do so—and though Marlow had expressed repeatedly that it sort of repelled her, the fish-lipped habit, like chewing food with your gums flapping open—Ellis always mouthed the words he intuited to his device.

  Bridget hated it, too—it was the one thing she and Marlow agreed on. As the women approached Ellis, Bridget tried to catch her son’s eye with her disapproving own, clucking. “Well,” she sighed, as Ellis ignored her, “it’s better than the alternative, I suppose.” Marlow knew what she meant. People her parents’ age often spoke of the way things were when the old phones were still around: whole waiting rooms, whole planes, whole parties full of people with their heads bent chin to chest, staring at oblongs of blue light, as still and as oblivious to their surroundings as if a gas leak had put them to sleep. Bridget spoke of this phenomenon with distaste; Floss always talked about it wistfully.

  Marlow had trouble picturing it at all. She had missed the era of the so-called smartphone by a few years. The Spill had killed those, too. In the chaos, in the aftermath that seemed like it would never end, doctors first mistook the alarming symptom cropping up in middle-aged patients—sudden, fierce forgetfulness—as a side effect of the country’s collective shock. But the mental fog kept rolling in, thickening, spreading. Finally, a study was soberly unveiled. It linked the use of personal screens—phones, tablets, anything that aimed blue light at the human eye from point-blank range—to a rapid dementia doctors predicted would eventually devastate Marlow’s parents’ entire generation. The millennials. Overnight, a company called Apple went under, and its products went away. And shortly thereafter, a nineteen-year-old genius who had been taking apart her parents’ phones since birth stood on a stage in a crop top and unveiled the thing that would replace them: the device.

  On her seventh birthday, like everyone else she knew, Marlow had one of the blank, black square-inch gems pressed into the softer side of her wrist. The device did not make a sound; the device did not have a screen. It did everything the old phones had done, and all it needed was brain waves. It did all its work inside its user’s head.

  Marlow could still recall the sample prompts her device came with, could still remember working through them with her eyes closed. Tell me where to find delivery pizza. Tell me the current weather conditions at the Great Wall of China. Show me a photo of the president in college. The staticky nudge at her skin, and the sudden bubbling-up of the very first answer in her brain: Flower Crust Express, two-point-one miles. Am I hungry? Would I like to place an order? Then the instant doubt of: Her brain knew that already, didn’t it? It was where she got pizza all the time. But after that came the swoon at her next thought, natural as her own name: It is currently eleven degrees Celsius at the Great Wall of China. And finally, materializing on a backdrop in her head she hadn’t known existed: the sixty-nine-year-old president, many decades earlier. She stood jauntily on the Princeton quad, fingers curled into the belt loops of her high-waisted blue jeans, her hair rounded in a neat, soft afro. Would I like to see more? “It’s so weird,” Marlow had said to Floss, who was watching her daughter anxiously, as if Marlow had swallowed a party drug. “It’s calling me ‘I.’ Or it’s saying it’s me.” A week later, there was nothing strange about it. Gone was the line between who she had been before and who she was now, what she had known before and what she knew now. Which was, for all intents and purposes, everything.

  Inside the restaurant, Ellis and Marlow ate quietly while their mothers engaged in passive battle.

  “My maternal grandfather,” Floss said, waving a forkful of dripping kale, “had a full head of naturally dark hair until he died. Never lost a strand of it. Never went gray.” She cast a sympathetic look at the top of Ellis’s sparsely covered head.

  “Wonderful,” Bridget returned. “I think they would be wise to use a lot of your family’s physical attributes.” She scraped the dressing off of a blade of her salad and turned to Marlow and Ellis. “Now, you two do know that my father was a distant cousin of Stephen Hawking’s, yes? I’m told that the designers can go through Ellis’s input and find his genes specifically.”

  “The skateboarder?” Floss screwed up her face. “From like, a million years ago?”

  “The genius,” Bridget said. She looked at Ellis, only Ellis, and laughed.

  “Well,” Floss said, patting Bridget’s hand, “I agree that when it comes to you guys, it’s best to concentrate on the brains. Marlow shared your story with me.” Floss shook her head, maudlin. “About your buck teeth. It couldn’t have been easy, being ugly as a child. But I’m sure it toughened you up, too. You have such a strong, almost masculine energy.”

  Marlow drew back her leg to kick her mother, but her foot only found empty space. Floss had seen the hit coming, and reeled back from the table in time. She flounced off to the bathroom with an arrogant pulse in her step, as if the followers who were no doubt fawning over her bitchiness were actually there in the room with her.

  Once Floss was far enough away, Bridget looked between Ellis and Marlow, her face taut and disapproving. “When are the two of you going to tell her?”

  “That’s our business, Mom,” Ellis snapped through a forkful of eggplant.

  “We’ll tell her soon,” Marlow said. And she meant it. Guilt had been gnawing her over this breach of bloodline protocol: no matter how Floss drove her crazy, Marlow didn’t want to keep something from her that Bridget—not to mention anyone who had been watching Marlow’s or Ellis’s channels when they came to the decision—already knew.

  “I hope so.” Bridget set her silverware over her barely touched meal in an X. “Otherwise, things will get ugly,” she said in a warning singsong.

  Things would be ugly no matter what, Marlow thought, watching Floss push through the narrow space between the tables. The quivering mass of her backside brushed diners on both sides. Her baby would never have an ass like that, Marlow thought. Her baby would never share anything with her mother. They had arranged, after not much discussion, to ask the designers to ignore Floss’s genes as they assembled the baby’s DNA. To toss them out altogether. Marlow wished it had been Ellis’s idea, something she could claim she had been talked into. But it hadn’t been. It had been hers.

  * * *

  At 3:05 in the morning, Ellis’s alarm went off. He shook Marlow awake. “Off-camera time,” he whispered to her. He settled onto his side and punched his pillow into a ball beneath his face so he could see her. Briefly, she was worried that he wanted to have sex. She tried to calm her resistance to the idea. She could ask her device to call up photos of Constellation’s firefighter talent.

  But it wasn’t sex Ellis wanted. “We’ve got to decide about the baby,” he said. “The sowing’s next week. This is getting ridiculous.”

  Marlow hugged the comforter to her neck. “I said we could do acne,” she murmured. They had pored over the forms for days, reading the questi
ons in their head and trading answers out loud. They drew up extensive family histories, reporting birthplaces, death locations, diseases, distinctions. This was how the baby would be built: the inputters would map a genome based on all the contributors’ traits. Marlow and Ellis would choose everything they wanted their child to be from the DNA they had to work with. It was tempting to make the baby perfect, but studies, and Jacqueline, claimed that children who were programmed without any potential flaws ended up “psychologically disadvantaged,” as the studies put it—“petri-dish weirdos,” in Jacqueline’s words. “You’ve got to mess them up a little,” she had told Marlow, with a surreptitious nod at a mole on her daughter’s neck. But even mild weaknesses seemed cruel. Marlow couldn’t think of a glitch she could live with. Finally, Ellis suggested acne. “No one ever died from a couple zits,” he said.

  “Not the flaws,” he said now. “The gender.”

  Marlow knew that Ellis wanted a boy. She knew he was already thinking of passing on the family fortune he had yet to inherit, and that despite the fact that he had a mother revered as a business legend and a vintage T-shirt that said WILD FEMINIST in frequent rotation, he had trouble imagining anything better than what he saw in the mirror.

  It wasn’t that Marlow didn’t want a boy. It wasn’t that she wanted a girl. It was that choosing the gender would finalize the child that had, so far, existed only in lab hypotheticals and overwrought party plans. There was a reason the fertility center needed to know their baby’s sex before her sowing: at the event, a mock-up of the child would be projected on a giant canvas backdrop. Marlow was dreading the sight of it. She sensed that, more than the moment she got the pregnancy arc assignment, even more than the eventual implantation of the embryo, seeing that baby-to-be gurgling at her from a screen would feel like the moment of no return. What could she do, how could she contemplate wriggling out of things, once she had seen her child?

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” she said, and rolled over. She fell back asleep almost instantly. Sleep, off Hysteryl, was a wholly new sensation, at first blunt and black and deep, then followed by vivid dreams. The old ones were back, and jarring as ever: Grace pleading, Honey mugging for the dashboard camera, the water climbing over the car. But tonight, she dreamed of her sowing. She saw herself in the yellow dress and Ellis at her side. The two of them stood, as planned, in front of a smiling crowd in her mother’s backyard. Everyone had their faces trained on a screen hung above the altar. On the screen was Marlow’s baby, with chubby feet and dimpled hands, wispy curls springing up from its scalp. But where it should have had a face, there was only a bulb of dark glass, like the one on the bot she wasn’t supposed to look at in the dress shop. Above the crush of the crowd’s shocked murmurs, Marlow heard it clearly: the sound of her mother behind her, gasping, “Omigod, look. She’s beautiful.”

  * * *

  The fog facility was twenty minutes away on foot and hidden by the artificial woods, because the network didn’t like it showing up in any footage. Marlow didn’t mind the walk; she couldn’t sleep after that dream. She went halfway there in almost pitch dark. Finally, just as she reached the forest, an illumidrone picked her up, its long beam turning the ground white in front of her as street gave way to dirt. She passed the matte black brick of a building where the network’s servers were housed, avoiding eye contact with the armed guards who stood along its walls. It was awkward, since the guards were real people. The network took the task of protecting its data seriously. The humans, their long guns, the building’s stealth-bomber paint job—it had all been there since the beginning, meant to convince the people of Constellation that securing their privacy was a priority. Marlow had never really gotten the logic: What did anyone in Constellation have that was private? They had to eat and cry and give birth on camera. But here was a fortress for their data—which, in her estimation, was just another word for boring stuff: how much they spent at the dry cleaner, the combination to their locks at the gym, the messages they composed to each other in their minds. Who was coming after that stuff?

  “That’s what we used to think, too,” Floss had said dryly, once, when Marlow made that point.

  Then Marlow understood: the fortress must have reassured her parents when they came here. Like the gleaming fitness facilities and the shimmering village swimming pool—there were so few in the state, now, after all the water restrictions—data security must have been an attractive amenity. Constellation was launched at the dawn of the new, government-run, government-supervised internet, when Americans were still too scarred and scared to use it. Marlow’s town was a lure, a way to get them back online. The shtick was irresistible: come watch these beautiful people be on camera all the time. Marlow was old enough now to know her town’s history, to read between the lines: the real talent from back then—Oscar winners and rock stars—wanted nothing to do with Constellation. But the B-listers, like Marlow’s parents, were broke, and heartsick for their old fame, and susceptible to the pitch the network used to recruit them: What you did back then, driving all those people to vulnerable platforms—do you think you had nothing to do with the Spill? Blood is on your hands. So the old reality players and socialites and actors’ dull siblings signed contracts. They moved in and lived. They shared all day and night—proving, with their fearless return to the form, that all-important American refrain: the terrorists had not won.

  The sun was rising at Marlow’s back when she reached the fog facility. A slippered man on the other side of the glass stared as she touched her device to the grid on the door. Even this early, the door slid open; she was next of kin.

  Floss made a big deal of shuddering when she talked about the facility, but Marlow liked the place. It was the only spot in Constellation, besides anywhere people disrobed, that the cameras didn’t roll. There wasn’t an audience out there for fog-addled people letting their breakfasts fall out of their mouths. Marlow wasn’t afraid of the patients, though. Her father had looked like them for years before she and Floss admitted it was time to move him here. She was accustomed to the blankness in the eyes, the stillness in the faces. The place felt peaceful and weighty to her—almost royal, somehow. These were wealthy people. The men always wore pristine cashmere robes; the women had jewels in their ears. Once, the nurse Marlow liked best, a chubby man named Sean who was as old as her dad, bought her a coffee and introduced her to some of his favorite patients. “I was Twitter-famous,” one of the old men croaked at her, glaring, and Marlow just nodded and smiled, pretending to be impressed. She had never quite understood Twitter, though Floss still talked about it like a dead, beloved friend. Short messages, but to everyone, mostly pointless, with blatant lies allowed—Marlow could not imagine what had been the appeal.

  As she stepped off the elevator on her father’s floor, Marlow spotted Sean at his desk, the violet sky outside the window framing his head as he frowned over charts. “Early bird!” he said when he saw Marlow coming. “What are you doing here?”

  Marlow grinned and shifted her bag on her shoulder, patted it. “Oh, you know. Brought the big guy all his favorites. Filet mignon, lobster. Strawberry shortcake bars.”

  It was a dark joke between them. Her father would hardly eat anything now.

  “He’s up,” Sean said, nodding to the room behind him. CLIPP, ASTON read the nameplate.

  Marlow found her father in the chair beside his bed, already wrapped in his own cashmere robe. Floss had rushed out to buy him one the same day they moved him in, like a nervous mother wanting her child to fit right in at college.

  “Dad,” she said, “how are you?”

  When he didn’t answer, she talked about the sowing. How she wished that he could go, or that she didn’t have to. How Ellis wanted a boy, and how she didn’t want Ellis. She said more than she had to just to hear herself being honest, enjoying that every word she said would live and die in this room.

  “I’m fucked, Dad,” Marlow said. “I’m thor
oughly fucked.” That was another thing she loved about coming here: getting to curse, the real stuff, no seafood substitutions necessary.

  She thought she saw him lean forward, so she put the straw into his mouth. Her father pulled water in. Marlow felt glad, a bit of gladness so tiny she wouldn’t have known it was possible until his sickness shrank her world.

  It was her father, she remembered, her mind drifting, who took care of her after she had her eggs reaped, all those years ago. Her mother had double-booked herself, something that took her away for a few days, over the week of Marlow’s surgery. Marlow’s parents were barely talking then, she recalled, though the exact reason why eluded her. Marlow had lost count of how many times her parents had broken up and reconciled in the course of her life. Sometimes, when Floss told old stories, she referenced separations Marlow didn’t remember. If Marlow said as much, Floss would softly exclaim, “Oh, yeah!” Then she’d explain the rift in the sort of misty, rueful tone one might use to describe a long-ago vacation where it rained.