by Gish Jen
“We have principles,” she said. “How can we counter Aunt Nettie if we are just like Aunt Nettie? Think about it. You are bugging our daughter.”
“All parents bug their children,” I said.
She did not smile.
Would she now not agree that the news about the single on top of the appearance of the SwarmDrones made for extenuating circumstances? Perhaps. In any case, I chose not to find out. It was my responsibility, I felt, to do everything in my power to protect Gwen. Let Eleanor hold forth about in which direction lay true north. I was a father.
I was prepared in that I had secreted a bug in Gwen’s backpack before she left home, and let me hasten to note that I did not listen to her transmissions all day. I did not mean to intrude on her privacy. Indeed, I was aware that this was the age when she might, as my mother would have quaintly put it, have a suitor. If so, the last thing in the world I wanted was to be privy to the developments, for my own sake as well as for hers.
I therefore put bounds on my surveillance—thinking of it as a kind of radio show and imposing on my activities a schedule. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. I was clear with myself, too: I was listening for signs of distress. Of course, the house was soon wise to my patterns. Headed down to your special spot again? it started to ask. To counter which, I was sure to play music while I worked downstairs—making for a good narrative, I thought. He’s down in his special spot playing Bach, again. He’s on a Glenn Gould kick. As for whether the house was indeed fooled, I had no way of knowing.
* * *
—
Most of the conversations I picked up were reassuringly mundane. The touchiest were with Ondi, about whom Gwen had written to us, Yes, it is nice to have someone from home here. Someone who knows what it means to be Surplus.
But the truth, as we might have expected, was more complicated.
“I’m sick of answering their questions. It’s like they’re Aunt Nettie, and we’re their data,” said Ondi one week, for example.
“Which is not malicious,” said Gwen.
“But you must admit: we’re specimens.”
“Maybe they’ll stop asking when they get used to us.”
“Ha.”
“And in the meanwhile, we can gather data on them, right?”
That did make Ondi laugh. “Why not?”
“I think we should make a big mural about them. Starting with how their hair all looks the same.”
“We could take pictures and organize them by hair color.”
“I don’t think anyone even has brown hair.”
“I saw someone with light brown hair the other day. But you’re right. No dark brown and definitely no black. And no frizz, either.”
“We could stop and ask, ‘Do you mind if we take a picture of you?’ ” Gwen went on. “ ‘I mean, Only if you’re comfortable with it, and I’m not going to post it or anything.’ ”
“ ‘I just want to send it to my mom,’ ” said Ondi. “ ‘Because, you know.’ ”
They both laughed.
But when Gwen brought the mural up again the next week, Ondi’s voice was dismissive.
“Where is that going to get us?”
“It doesn’t have to get us anywhere. It’s just about feeling like we can gather data, too. That they are specimens as well.”
“That’ll make us a lot of friends.”
“Think so?”
Ondi set what sounded like a glass down loudly. “And you are not going to get anywhere being like that.”
“I thought you always hated the way your father talked.”
“And don’t you sound like your smartypants mother. Who has gotten so many people in trouble. Resisting and resisting the way she has.”
“Sugar and spice and everything nice,” said Gwen. “You should be grateful to my mother. To our whole family, in fact, after all the trouble you caused.”
“So why did you help me get in here if I’m so ungrateful and have gotten so many people in trouble? So I could be your sidekick and catch literally whatever you throw me?”
“Exactly,” said Gwen. “And what a great job you’re doing. You make me rejoice every day that I am stuck here with you.”
Something banged; something scraped. Predictably, a door slammed. I turned off the receiver, but was not surprised to read in Gwen’s next GreetingGram, I can’t wait for baseball to start.
* * *
—
Happily, a lot of the Netted kids were kinder to Gwen, especially Pink and Sylvie. As Gwen GreetingGrammed,
They have so little in common that it is easier to grill me than to talk about themselves. I’m the conversational icebreaker.
And, indeed, from what I heard, that seemed to be the case.
“So what’s it like?” Pink would ask.
Or Sylvie would say, “I actually played soccer with some Surplus kids, if you can believe I used to play soccer.”
And if Eugenie the hockey goalie from across the hall, joining them, added something like, “I did, too, and wow could they play. Having nothing else to do but practice, I guess,” Pink and Sylvie would pounce on her. Then they would say things like, “We’d actually like to do something about this whole Surplus-Netted thing, but what can we do?”
Indeed, Eugenie’s roommate, Anna, was so upset about what she called the Surplus Question that she sometimes couldn’t sleep and good-hearted Gwen would end up consoling her. “It’s not that bad,” she would say. And, “Actually I come from a really great family.” And, “As an only child, I got lots of attention, maybe too much attention. I mean, it’s kind of a relief to get away from it.”
A relief to get away from Eleanor and me?
How hard it was not to tell Eleanor that Gwen had said that; ordinarily, we would have turned it over and over together, until it had acquired a veritable parental patina. But instead I had to keep it to myself. I kept to myself, too, the way that poor Gwen was peppered with questions, and the way that every answer she gave led instantly to another question as if to the next step of an algorithm.
“Like what do your parents do all day if they don’t work?” someone asked.
And when Gwen explained, someone else asked, “So your mom actually does work? Only for free?”
And, “So when people say we do all the work while the Surplus do nothing, that’s wrong?”
It was hard to believe Gwen could answer such a question without heat. At home, she would have probably said something like, What kind of an asshole question is that? But here she conducted herself as if giving testimony in a highly publicized trial.
“Yes. In fact, a lot of them used to work and would still be working if they hadn’t been deemed Unretrainable. My mom’s just lucky she was a lawyer before Automation, because while she’s like my dad and can’t work with immigrants anymore, she did have the training to do other stuff.”
“So why isn’t the new stuff a job?”
“Because it’s Surplus advocacy, and you Netted aren’t exactly going to define that as work.”
One might have reasonably thought they would take offense at the phrase “you Netted” or at having a finger pointed at them, but they simply went on—more attuned to the press of their questions, it seemed, than to the answers.
“And what does your dad do?”
“All kinds of stuff. I mean, he isn’t as engaged as my mother.”
Ouch.
“But he definitely keeps busy. Like he homeschooled me in all my subjects and makes all these gadgets besides.”
Wasn’t she going to describe, say, my emanation meter and its significance to the Surplus Fields case? But the flow of questions went on.
“And what did you do all day?”
Gwen described concerted consumption, but also how she studied and knit and pitched and fenced, a
nd how because we had inherited a land right from Eleanor’s parents, we did not live in a houseboat but a real house, and even had a garden where we grew our own food.
“We’re sort of the luckiest of the unlucky, if you know what I mean,” she said.
“Actually, it sounds, like, insanely great,” said Pink.
“It would be if we didn’t stand to get Cast Off or winnowed,” said Gwen calmly. She explained what those phrases meant. “And if people around us could go to college and work and didn’t beat each other up instead.”
She explained about the Flotsam Towns, an example of which Pink had visited and which Sylvie had definitely heard of, and about having to live in AutoHouses. Of course, they had AutoHouse functions in their houses as well. But it was with control switches for everything, they said, and if they let their activities and consumption be monitored, it was just about service and sales.
“It’s to personalize our services, not to control us,” Pink said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sylvie. “My parents say there’ve been problems.”
“Like what kind of problems?” asked Pink.
“Like problems with voting,” answered Sylvie. “Like when Facebook became a utility and gave all that data to Aunt Nettie? That’s where all those DelectableElectables came from. Those perfect candidates they learned to design.”
Pink was quiet.
“Candidates who sure enough got voted in and then approved expanding the Autonet,” Sylvie went on. “It’s like the Autonet gets voters to vote for itself. And who knows if the Autonet’s taken everything over at this point or if there are even people behind it.”
“Like what people?” asked Gwen.
“Like Big Tech,” said Sylvie. “That’s what my parents say. Though they think maybe even Big Tech has lost control.”
“Wow,” said Pink.
They were all quiet.
“So does anyone know?” asked Gwen.
“I don’t think so,” said Sylvie. “But I can ask my parents.”
It seemed a distinct relief for them to return, after a few moments, to the subject of surveillance and whether there really were no cameras or heat and motion sensors sending data about Netted movements and communications. Could that be true? Gwen could hardly imagine it, she said, but Pink and Sylvie said that they were pretty sure that was all against the law. Sure, Net U security did wear ScanID glasses, for example, but only in public places. Private places were off-limits unless they had special permission.
“Like we could have a virtual assistant in every room, if we wanted,” said Sylvie, “to tell us stuff like, Is Cyb A still meeting in E-Hall? And, How reliable is that article I just read? But we can also just decide not to.”
“Especially since we have assistants in our handphones already,” said Pink. “Like we can already just scan the article and ask if we should believe it or not.”
“Hmm,” said Gwen. “And you trust it to be right?”
“Sure,” said Pink, but Sylvie wasn’t so positive.
“And as it is, if we say anything that suggests we could use a product the assistant will auto-alert our parents, who then order it,” Sylvie went on. “Like if I say, Brrr, it’s cold, I could find a new coat being DroneDelivered. Or if I say, I wish Cyb A was closer, I could find an AeroBike outside.”
“I never use HowDoILook for just that reason,” agreed Pink. “Because as soon as it figures out what looks good it starts sending hints to my mother for Christmas.”
“Sounds kind of creepy convenient,” said Gwen.
“Forget Big Brother, it’s Big Mother,” said Sylvie.
A pause.
“I read that book, too. 1984, right?” Gwen’s voice was the voice of someone who had never had that happen before—who had never come across someone who happened to have read something she had.
“Hasn’t everybody?” asked Sylvie.
“Well, no,” said Gwen.
“Actually, it was on a special shelf in our library, too,” said Pink.
“Wow,” said Sylvie. “Really?”
“A lot depends on what state you live in,” said Pink.
Gwen went on to explain about how SurplusVille was practically a surveillance laboratory. She told them how Aunt Nettie could read your emotions from afar, for example—“Like she bounces waves off you and tracks changes in your heart rate and breathing”—and how she could identify you by your gait and your mannerisms, and how if she got you to wear this little headband, she could read your subvocalizations, too.
“You mean, like, your words before you say them?” said Sylvie.
“Yes.”
“But those are your thoughts.”
“Exactly. She can tell what you’re going to do before you do it, too.”
“Wow. That really is, like, Big Mother,” said Pink.
Sylvie agreed. “Though my mother can do that even without a headband.”
“Mine, too, actually,” said Pink.
Everyone was quiet for a moment. I shifted in my chair—quiet as well although, what with the Bach playing, I did not have to be.
“ ‘After Automation something had to be done,’ ” recited Pink. “That’s what they told us in school.”
“Because it was tens of millions of Unretrainables,” said Sylvie. “And because there were riots. And because the Autonet predicted that after the Automation Riots, there were going to be even bigger riots.”
“Aunt Nettie said that?” said Gwen.
“That’s what she calls the Autonet,” Sylvie told Pink.
“Oh, I love it,” said Pink. “Yes, that’s what ‘Aunt Nettie’ said.”
“ ‘Aunt Nettie’ predicted that production was going to boom thanks to her,” Sylvie went on, “which turned out to be right. So that there was enough to pay the Surplus some kind of basic income. But Aunt Nettie also said the Surplus should at least consume in exchange. You know, to deal with the oversupply and keep the economy going.”
“Because ‘equilibrium will be restored, but first there will be a period of disequilibrium,’ ” recited Pink.
“And in the meanwhile?” That was Gwen.
“In the meanwhile, something had to be done. To keep order,” said Pink.
“And let me guess. The chip thing had worked in ChinRussia,” said Gwen.
“Or that’s what they told us, anyway,” said Sylvie. “That it was more reliable than FacialID. And that’s why you now have this, what did you call it…?”
“This RegiChip. Thanks to which Aunt Nettie always knows where I am. And which could probably be used the way they’re being used in ChinRussia, to make sure workers never slow down and students never goof off, and that no one thinks things Aunt Nettie doesn’t want them to think, especially about rising up.”
“Wow,” said Pink.
“It’s really lucky you have that special arm and can go to school here,” said Sylvie. “So at least you can become a lawyer like your mom, if you want.”
“Or never go back,” said Pink. “Because, like, in what omniverse would anyone go back? It’s bad enough you were born there.”
“Well, at least I know what can happen,” answered Gwen. “While you think it can never happen to you.”
Silence.
I switched off the receiver and stood.
* * *
—
In a PigeonGram, Gwen wrote,
There are still plenty of people making comments like, “You must be really, really good at baseball.” And, “It’s like you put your hands down in flour.” And why do they call me Earl Grey? Is it because of my spy-eyes? Which make them think of tea? I’m not even sure who to ask. Maybe Pink and Sylvie? Who are really great. I’m not sure I could stand it here without them and Ondi.
It wasn’t clear that Gwen ever asked anyone
in the end. But I did hear her ask her roommates all manner of other questions. For example, Why were they so worried all the time?
“We have to get good grades so we can get a real job,” explained Sylvie. “Meaning a job and not a gig.”
“Are there a lot of gigs?” asked Gwen.
“A lot more gigs than jobs,” said Pink.
“Some of which people in other countries can do, too.” said Sylvie. Because it’s all virtual work.”
“Does that mean you have to produce?” said Gwen.
“Do we ever,” said Pink.
“And due to that, only one thing matters,” said Sylvie.
“What’s that?” asked Gwen.
“Do you get Aunt Nettie,” answered Sylvie.
“Do you get Aunt Nettie and can you work with Aunt Nettie,” said Pink.
“Like, Aunt Nettie isn’t too empathic,” said Sylvie. “So can you help her fake it?”
“And she has no common sense. So can you set her straight when she goes off track?” said Pink.
“Can you hold hands with Aunt Nettie. Can you make nice to Aunt Nettie. Can you troubleshoot Aunt Nettie,” said Sylvie.
“Can you troubleshoot Aunt Nettie, when you want to shoot Aunt Nettie?” said Gwen.
“Exactly,” said Pink. “We Netted really are netted, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean, you’re not exactly free,” said Gwen.
“Not exactly,” said Pink.
Pink’s engineer father, for example, apparently hated his AI weapons work. For what could be stupider than SmartArms, he said, except maybe a SmartArmsRace? Her urban-planner mother was happier, having been put in charge of relocating parking lots: once SkyCars became self-parking, there was no reason they had to take up room in the middle of towns, after all, and wasn’t it cool that they could stack themselves up?—even figuring out how best to allocate the available solar charge if need be? Sylvie’s mother could likewise see some good things about the Autonet. Like it did a great job identifying suicide risks. It sensed distress in people’s patterns way before the people around them did and could tell when patients had gone off their meds, and if they had, it could put them in lockdown until they were back on them. Dealing with the Digitally Traumatized, though—with the misAutoID’ed, misAutoDiagnosed, misAutoSentenced, or, yes, misAutoLockedUp—made her curse the Autonet every day. And Sylvie’s father’s Human Resources job flat depressed him. In his company, there were always gigs for humans. But the tasks had become so demanding that even Retrained, augmented, and autocoached people failed at them. And then they were AutoFired.