The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  More tears fighting to get out. “Thirteen.”

  “I’m bad with numbers. That means you were born... when?”

  “Two thousand and six.”

  Steve Caspi put his hand to his mouth, and stared at the screen. For a long while he said nothing. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered. “I don’t believe it. Oh! Pixel-based tv! Dear lord! The woman is crazy!” He held his head in his hands. Without looking at her, his voice a vicious whisper, he asked, “Did she tell you to call me? Is this a prank?”

  “No! No!!” She could no longer stop the tears and began to sob. “She doesn’t know I called you. And please don’t tell her. She doesn’t even know I know who you are.”

  He calmed himself with great effort, and, avoiding looking at her eyes, said, “How... How is it you’re talking to me, then? How is it that I can see you?”

  “I’m connected to the Net,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing. Who wasn’t connected? What was it with grownups from the last century?

  But apparently for Steve it wasn’t obvious. “You’re... connected... to the... Net?!” He repeated as if the concept could not be grasped. “The woman is out of her MIND!” He lowered his eyes. “She probably thought it was funny,” he mumbled to himself.

  The crying stopped, although the tears kept rolling. Whatever Steve was going through, it didn’t feel like it had to do with her. Not with all this weird talk about the Net and pixels and Olivia being crazy.

  “Uh... Steve...”

  “Or ironic,” he didn’t notice. “What was going through her damned mind!”

  “Mr. Caspi!”

  He sighed, and looked at her with sad, pity-filled eyes. “Why did you call me, Glynis?”

  She took a deep breath and choked a sob, “For one thing, I... wanted to ask if you know me.”

  “Yes, I know you, Glynis,” he said in the calmest of voices. “I was there when you were... born.” The last word did not come easily to him. Then he looked straight at her, sadness in his eyes: “Do you know you, Glynis?”

  Something in the way he asked the question made her almost jump out of her chair. But she answered it just the same, steering it in the right direction. “I know that Olivia is my mother. And I think that you’re my father.”

  He was taken aback, but only for a second. “I’m not your father, Glynis,” he said in his sad voice. And then a glint in his eye led to anger, “Did Olivia tell you that?”

  “No, no, I swear! She never even mentioned your name!” She bit her lip. That might have been the wrongest thing to say! “I mean, I mean, she said my father is someone called Jonathan Hatch.”

  He let out a small, wry laugh in spite of himself.

  “You knew him?”

  “For a while.”

  “Is he my father?”

  “That—that—that—” he began to stammer, “that depends how you define ‘father’.”

  “I mean, is he my biological father?”

  “That depends how you define ‘biological’.” He suddenly waved his hand. “I’m kidding. I’m sorry, Glynis. Yes, he’s your biological father. But I don’t want to talk about him. Not without Olivia’s consent. And probably not even with it.”

  Oh, no! Not him, too! What was it with her father?!

  Her voice made of iron, she said, “Is he the same Jonathan Hatch who’s also Olivia’s father?”

  “Glynis, I’m sorry; I can’t talk to you.”

  “Oh, please! Mother doesn’t let anyone talk about him. She can’t be controlling you, not after all these years!” It was dirty, but it might work.

  “No, no, Glynis. It’s not that. It’s just... It’s just that I used to have a—” his voice cracked “—a soft spot for you, Glynis. I’ve tried so hard to get you out of my mind. It took me years. And for the last few years I actually walked around in the world as if you weren’t in it. Glynis... I can’t talk to you. It hurts too much. Now, I have to go and pick someone from the airport.” He put his hand above the ‘disconnect’ button.

  “No! Please, no!”

  “Glynis,” there was despair in his eyes. “I have to go.”

  “But—But—Please, call me back!” (Her phone number was at the bottom of the screen.) “Or—”

  “Glynis...”

  “I need to talk to someone. And mom never talks about anything, and you know so much about us, and you’re such a nice person, and it would be nice if you did turn out to be my father.”

  “Glynis. I am not your father.”

  “Can you be my friend, then? I mean... I have no friends.”

  Steve shut his eyes. “I know you don’t,” he whispered.

  “Can we talk again, Mr. Caspi?”

  For a long while, he did not move, his fingers shutting his eyes tight. Finally, he looked at her, and there were tears in his eyes, “God damn you, you’re so grown up now.”

  “Can I call you, again, Mr. Caspi? Can we talk?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We can talk again.”

  Glynis Cheshire-smiled.

  “One thing,” he said. “She’s going to have a fit if she finds out about this. Let’s keep this between us for the time being, okay? Let’s... Let’s not tell her.”

  “Okay,” she nodded enthusiastically.

  “Keep in mind that this means I can’t call you. Because she’ll know about it. So let’s have you call me.”

  “You’re saying she monitors my phones?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that, Gly—” He sighed. “Yeah, yeah. You’re intelligent, damn you. Yes, Glynis, she monitors your phones. She probably doesn’t listen to all outgoing conversations, but she’s sure to at least check all incoming calls.”

  “How do you know this? Maybe things have changed since—”

  “I have to go. Call me some other time, okay? We’ll... talk.”

  “Good. Bye.”

  He turned off the phone. Glynis immediately switched to the PubliCam view of his window. Steve was coming right to the window, his hands on the pane, his breath short.

  “Olivia... Olivia... What have you done?” the AdLip program jumped into action. The voice was now unfamiliar to Glynis, so different from his real voice. “She’s a person now. She’s intelligent. She... She cries, for god’s sakes! Oh, god, Olivia, I told you this would happen. I told you...”

  For five minutes, he looked out at the city, and tears slowly fell down his cheeks. Finally, he straightened and faced the wall, where the phone was, his profile to the window.

  “Phone,” AdLip dubbed. “Instructions. If the last caller calls again, play the following recording. Begin. Glynis, I’m sorry. I thought it over. I can’t talk to you. Phone, end recording. Phone, do not inform me of any calls from this caller. Delete all records of her calls.” He then pressed a few buttons, took a bag, shut the lights, and left the apartment.

  Glynis stared at the empty apartment, and did nothing. Her face fell, her heart sank, and her world became black.

  After a few minutes, she asked her phone to call him. She saw the message, his face filling the screen, saying the message in his own voice. The message having played itself out, his phone then cut the connection. She called again, and this time saved his message. Once disconnected, she played the message again and again and again. She played it about twenty times before she heard her mother’s car in the driveway. She immediately ran to the bathroom to wash her face.

  “Glynis!” her mother called. “Are you decent? We have company!”

  ‘Company’? Meaning not Ron or Elizabeth? We never have company!

  “Just a minute!” She shouted, as she ran from the bathroom to the door, slamming the door behind her. “Just a minute!” She was already dressed, but she had forgotten to turn off the computer – and Steve’s frozen face from his phone message was still on it. Her hand hovered above the ‘off’ button, when, despite everything that’s happened, she decided that it was not over. She quickly programmed ISpy to monitor Steve from the time he had left th
e apartment, a few moments ago, and to do so on the Net. She then turned off the computer and was about to open the door.

  She stopped. “I’m coming!” she yelled, as she ran to the window of her room and looked outside. Only her mother’s car was parked in front of the house. So whoever this ‘company’ is, s/he must’ve gotten a ride from mom.

  She straightened her clothes, wiped her eyes, put on a smile, and went to the living room.

  Her mother was waiting there with a small, bearded man, probably in his sixties.

  “Hi, honey,” Olivia hugged her, and then gestured towards the man. “This is Professor Von Strauss, he’s one of the most important theoretical psychologists in the world today, if not the most important. He’s come to the Institute to see my research, and I suggested he come and have dinner with us. Charles, this is my daughter, Glynis.” She shot a look at Glynis, “Say ‘hi’!”

  “Hi,” Glynis smiled hesitantly.

  The man seemed thunderstruck. “You are... Glynis?” He said in a heavy German accent.

  “Shake hands!” Olivia ordered.

  Von Strauss offered his hand. Glynis shook it. He laughed nervously, then pulled it back.

  “Can she understand everything I say?”

  “Of course she can, don’t be ridiculous,” Olivia answered quickly.

  “Can she do math?”

  “She’s right in front of you, why don’t you ask her.”

  “What’s six times seven?” he immediately turned to Glynis.

  Glynis looked at her mother. Who is this nutcase? Olivia shrugged.

  “It’s forty-two,” Glynis answered and immediately asked, “What’s the square root of 2222?”

  “I—Uh...”

  Glynis turned to her mother, “He can’t do math.” Olivia laughed.

  “See that as a warning, Charles. Not only can she do math, but she can embarrass our guests, too. Now, look,” she put her hand around Glynis, “the fact that she has a condition that prevents her from going to school doesn’t mean she’s backwards in any way. Me and the computer, and sometimes Ron, we teach her math, literature, history, science – everything. In fact, we just finished reading ‘The Merchant of Venice’. And tests show that she’s smarter than I was at that age.”

  “Really?” the Professor was impressed.

  “Really. So enough of these questions. Glynis is as normal as you or I.”

  “I... I... I have one request,” he said. “I... uh... I would like to see her tonsils.”

  Glynis looked at Olivia, who said, “Charles, you’re embarrassing me.”

  “Please,” he said. “Her tonsils.”

  There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, until Olivia finally said to Glynis. “Say ‘ah’.”

  “What?!”

  “Humor him,” Olivia waved her hand dismissively. “He’s old and senile.” Professor Von Strauss gave her a stunned look. “Behave like that,” she told him, “and that’s what people are going to say.” And to Glynis, “Humor him.”

  Glynis said ‘ah’, and the Professor peered in.

  “Amazing,” he said. (Later, Glynis snuck to the bathroom and looked down her own throat, to see if her tonsils were red or something. Everything seemed fine.)

  “Yeah, yeah,” Olivia said. “She has eyes, she has hands, organs, dimensions, senses. She eats food. Prick her, she’ll bleed. Tickle her,” she sent a quick hand to Glynis’ armpit, and Glynis doubled over, “she’ll laugh. Poison her, she’ll die.”

  “That’s right,” Glynis said. “And if you wrong me, I will revenge.”

  They stared at her, stunned.

  “What?” Glynis said innocently. “That’s how the quote ends, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Olivia said, then clapped her hands once. “Let’s eat.”

  Olivia prepared the food. Glynis and the Professor sat in front of the television, and watched the news. The most interesting item was about a team of scientists in Japan that created an intelligent human-looking robot. The robot had authentic-looking human skin, it had all the organs and ‘bones’ a human had, and theoretically it could move only as a human could. It could maintain its balance and walk an obstacle field, but its movements still seemed clumsy. Definitely not human. And its intelligence was quite astounding. It could answer questions and form sentences. Glynis and Von Strauss were mesmerized.

  “In a few years,” Von Strauss said, “we’ll have robots so advanced, we won’t be able to tell them apart from a real person.”

  “Not in our lifetime, Professor,” Olivia yelled from the kitchen. “These artificial intelligence and neural-net research people may be able to create intelligent neural nets. But no one has ever been able to artificially create consciousness or sentience or any of that. We’re as far away from that as we’ve always been. Eventually, we’ll probably get it. But not in out lifetime.”

  During dinner, Olivia and Von Strauss mainly talked business.

  “The problem with psychology today,” Olivia said, “and you’ll forgive me, Professor – but the problem is that it’s not really a science.”

  “Now, now, now, that is a baseless attack on our profession.”

  “Please, Professor. We’re worse off than doctors were five hundred years ago, when they didn’t know about the cardiovascular system and bacteria, when they gave anemas and drained people of blood to cure them, and didn’t know they should wash their hands.”

  “Now, now, now. That’s ridiculous and you know it.”

  “What I’m saying,” Olivia insisted, “is that if you really want to be a science, then once you create theories you have to be able to check them. You have to be able to perform an experiment twice under the same conditions. You have to then be able to perform the experiment again, changing some little thing here or some little thing there and see if that changes the result. Without that, all your theories are conjecture that can’t be taken too seriously. That’s not science, that’s guesswork.”

  “But to do what you say you have to bottle the human mind, or put it in a test tube. And you can’t put the human mind in a test tube.”

  She put her fork down, looked at him, and said with arrogance, “I can.”

  Professor Von Strauss then looked at Glynis, and something in his eyes caused chills to run down her spine.

  “And,” Olivia added, having missed Von Strauss’ stare, “I’m almost ready to publish.” Oddly enough, that ended that avenue of conversation.

  The dinner over, Von Strauss said he had to return to the Institute. Olivia told him she’ll spend some more time with Glynis, and that she’ll join him in a couple of hours. Von Strauss left the house, and almost immediately, Glynis heard the sound of a car being turned on and then leaving. Olivia went to her room, when things clicked in Glynis’ head. The only car in the driveway was her mom’s! And the sound was the same familiar sound. She ran to the window, and removed the curtain. There it was, her mother’s car, parked in its usual place.

  “So,” her mother emerged from her room, wearing something less work-related. “I’m all yours for the next hour or two. What do you want to do?”

  What Glynis wanted to do was ask about the car. Or about her conversation with Steve. But she was still under the effect of her mother’s reaction yesterday when she enquired on the record of her birth. Somehow, asking questions at this time seemed dangerous. Better to find the answers by herself.

  “You know, mom,” she said. “The Professor must be really important to your work, and he probably isn’t here every day. Why don’t you go and be with him. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  Olivia hesitated. Clearly, leaving was what she wanted to do. “Ah... Are you sure?”

  “Sure. I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe I’ll have Ron check in on you.”

  “No, really, mom, there’s no need.”

  Olivia looked into Glynis’ eyes, then said, “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  “And, you know, I’m going to make it up to
you. The day after tomorrow, on your birthday, we’ll spend all day together. Wait till you see what I have planned.”

  “Can’t wait, Mom.”

  Glynis watched through the window as Olivia got into her car and drove away.

  Almost immediately, she went to her bed and collapsed in it. She had never felt so alone. Too many things her mother had told her were wrong or baseless. She had an uncle, and the uncle had at least one son and one daughter – Barbara – which Glynis had never known. Olivia was maybe living somewhere else. Her birth certificate was gone. Maybe her disease is just an excuse to keep Glynis from going into the world. And Steve Caspi (her mother’s ex-husband, yet another fact she didn’t know) refuses to talk to her. And who was this Jonathan Hatch whom Steve confirmed was her father? And that Professor Von Whatever, as crazy as he seemed, somehow only strengthened the feeling that her mother was not telling her everything.

  There was no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one to ask.

  Determination rose within her. Fine. No more kid gloves. They’re keeping stuff from me, I’ll sniff it out, detail by detail. I’ll piece my life together. And I’ll work from all directions at once.

  She sat by the computer and turned it on. It was time to play dirty.

  It was time she stalked her mother.

  She produced an overview of a map of the city, and asked for a display of all PubliCams in or around the McCourt Research Institute. There were none inside. And there weren’t any within half a kilometer. It was, after all, a security area. But by viewing each and every one of the remote Cams, she discovered that one PubliCam could actually see the entrance in the corner of the screen from 1200 meters away. It was enough.

  She copied an image of her mother out of the online family album, and asked the computer to search for all images looking like the image within the last 72 hours. Glynis then searched for a PubliCam across the street from where her mother had ‘moved’ to five years ago, and, growing impatient, she gave the computer orders to alert her as soon as the first image was found.

  This would take a few moments at best. She hesitated before recalling the ISpy that followed Steve. His betrayal still hurt. But this wasn’t about betrayal. This wasn’t about friendship or fatherhood or anything like that. This was about who she was and why everyone was lying. This was about everyone knowing the truth at her expense.