by Gish Jen
Was that Eleanor’s DroneMinder hovering right outside the window? Or was it something else? The geese were honking.
“Thank god spring practice starts tomorrow,” Gwen went on blithely. “Time to get to sleep.”
She kissed us good night and went up to bed just as Eleanor’s team arrived, to our relief, with apologies for their tardiness. Perhaps Eleanor would forgive them, seeing as the AutoLyfts just weren’t running? they said. They didn’t know why but none of them could get a ride. The whole system seemed to be down.
“But now, here we are,” said Heraldine. Her cheeks still flushed from her hurried walk, she cocked her big head and winked. “Better late than never, right?”
“Absolutely, not to worry,” said Eleanor, embracing each of them with relief. “It’s good to see you.”
* * *
—
Were we surprised to hear a stranger step into the house the next day?
You have a Super Enforcer come to see you, said the house.
Since by law the Super Enforcer was allowed to enter, the house immediately opened the door for him and his CompanionDrones. He was big and smooth; indeed, with a shaven head and transparent eyelashes, he did not look so much like a human as a LatexDeluxe special only halfway through the manufacturing process—as if his menacing blue eyes had been finished and, for a touch of whimsy, his improbable jug ears, but as if his wig and mascara had yet to be applied. His CompanionDrones, meanwhile, were interestingly individualized, with pastel blades strangely reminiscent of Easter eggs. It was easy to imagine them having diminutive pet names—Bugsy, Misty, Muffy, Pixie. As for the Super Enforcer, he did not seem about to introduce himself. Still Eleanor asked, “And you are?”
“Cyrus.”
“Ah. We are so happy you rang before entering, Cyrus.”
“SOP, ma’am. We are here to speak to you.”
“And so you are, Cyrus,” she said. “Speaking to me, that is. And to my daughter, Gwen”—she gestured toward Gwen—“and to my husband, Grant, as well.” She gestured toward me.
“As there are others who would like to speak to you, you need to come with us,” he said.
By “us” he seemed to mean himself and his drones.
“You are catching us at an inconvenient time. Can we make this a bit later?” said Eleanor.
“No.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“We will not have to arrest you if you do not resist the law.”
“And what law is it that states I should leave my home to speak to strangers?”
“It is a suggestion, ma’am.”
“But to decline is to resist the law.”
“Yes.”
“That suggests that your suggestion is somehow the law. Or else that you are the law, embodied.”
“These are such fine arguments, perhaps you would like to bring them to the attention of a judge. In the meanwhile, we ask your cooperation.”
“You have neither my silence nor my cooperation,” said Eleanor.
“And if this is because she’s been black-coded, you should really at least say so,” I put in.
“Should I really.”
Cyrus did not have to call for backup; four other Enforcers magically appeared at the door. Of various shapes and sizes, they were all wearing orange uniforms and blank expressions, and we of course did not recognize most of them. But one we did.
“Mimi!” said Gwen.
Mimi would not meet Gwen’s gaze. Neither would she meet mine or Eleanor’s as she leaned on her new yellow cane.
The pleasantries began all over.
“We want to talk to you,” said the Head Enforcer. He had enormous hands and pinprick nostrils and a perfectly round bulge of a stomach, as if he were wearing a small shield over his navel.
“How wonderful,” said Eleanor. She made the man introduce himself—Jim. Then she made the other two men introduce themselves. Bashar and Abner.
“And you?”
“Mimi.”
“Ah, yes, that’s right,” said Eleanor. “Would any of you like some hibiscus tea? We make it with wild mint.”
Not even Mimi accepted the offer.
“And do please come have a sit in the garden,” said Eleanor.
But no one cared for a sit in the garden. Mimi’s face was so blank we almost did not recognize her, but just as another Enforcer was about to grab Eleanor’s arm, her lemon cane tilted alarmingly and she fainted, and by the time her fellow Enforcers revived her, the drones were headed for the door.
Eleanor gave a smile. “Five o’clock. Their pilot clearly wants to go home. Or perhaps his boss does not want to pay overtime.”
We all avoided looking at Mimi as she left, afraid that someone might be wearing a NanoCam. But in our hearts, we set the choirboys to sing for her, as my mother would say, and got the priests to keep the beat.
* * *
—
New Enforcers were bound to return.
“Would it help if I agreed to play in the Olympics?” asked Gwen.
I wasn’t sure. Aunt Nettie’s Plan A did seem to have been to try to get Gwen to Cross Over permanently, bringing Eleanor and me in tow, so any suggestion that this plan might yet work—for example, Gwen’s agreeing to pitch for Team AutoAmerica—might indeed help. But the crux of the problem was no doubt the Mall Truck suit.
“And if you dropped that?” I knew Gwen was embarrassed to ask this, although in truth she wasn’t the only one wondering. I wondered, too, if we might not at least discuss it.
Eleanor was neither going to discuss nor drop it.
Was there some way of going on the lam, then? Thanks to all the scouting the Underground League had done for places to play, it would have been a cinch to locate a marooned place in which to hide. And, of course, we had given Eleanor’s DroneMinder the slip many a time. Her chip, though, was a problem. Remote consumption such as we had used for our Underground League games only kept Enforcement from thinking to look for you. It did not, as we very well knew, keep Enforcement from finding you.
“I might as well enjoy sleeping at home while I can,” said Eleanor.
We did not sleep. Instead, we spent most of the night hanging out among the floor pillows with Gwen, looking through our old HoloPix. Probably Gwen and I should have been showing the pictures to Eleanor, saying, Look—here we are with you, Mom. And wow—is that you in high school? Are those culottes? Who is that guy? And, Did they really cast you as Juliet? I can’t believe that is you with flowers in your hair. Instead, even now, Gwen was the audience, as if it was she who needed steadying and not Eleanor and I who were clinging to our identities as guardians. This was Mom and me before we got married, we went on. And, yes, that was our camper van, and, yes, that’s a lot of butterflies, but not a phenomenal number. And, yes, there were lots of different kinds of them, and lots of different kinds of birds, too. And here she is after she won the national fencing championship! Look at that grin. And here we are on our wedding day and, yes, we really did get married on a beach. You can see what they looked like; people would lie on the sand for fun. And, yes, Mom did get thrown into the ocean, wedding dress and all. And, yes, I got thrown in after her. And, yes, we were so happy, happier than we knew we could be. And this is Mom in the hospital getting her spleen repaired after they kicked and beat her in jail. You can see how thin she is, and, yes, those are the bruises she got after she was thrown down the stairs. No, she didn’t lose her toe in jail—the ToeBomb came later. But here she is pregnant with you! Fat and rosy and happy, with her health completely back. And this is you the day you were born, and this is you in the hospital. And, yes, that is the baby hammock I made for you, complete with its own little bentwood stand. We think the hospital still has it. This is you sitting up—you actually toppled over right after we took this HoloPic. And this is you throwing
your animals out of your crib. Do you remember your platypus? Your orca? Your turtle? Your dogs? That was your stuffed cat, Lani. Do you remember your bunny blanket sleeper? And look—here you are with your first ball and glove. And here you are on the mound we set up—do you remember? Not only could I catch you then but Mom could, too. And here you are pitching your first game, with Mom in the stands.
Why is it that recollection brings us to life almost more than living itself? We live to remember what we did, my mother used to say. Now Gwen and I could not keep from crying but Eleanor remained dry-eyed—closing down certain parts of herself already, I could see, as if preparing for a difficult match.
“I will not let them spook me,” she said, out of nowhere. And, “We’ve had scares before. For all we know they will never come back.”
And as if to prove her right, in the morning, the Enforcers did not return.
“Who knows but that they will discover they simply do not have the budget for this low-priority mission,” said Eleanor. “Isn’t tomorrow the end of the quarter?”
It seemed like wishful thinking. But, in fact, though we waited all day, the Enforcers did not come. Could they indeed have changed their minds?
“All this worrying about black-coding,” I mused.
“We’ve both become a bit paranoid.” Eleanor smiled.
Then came the first day of the new quarter.
You have a squadron at the door, said the house.
* * *
◆
The Super Enforcer did not bring Mimi this time, but he did bring EnforceBots and a stunner. Maybe because I was the male, I was the first to be taken down, which just went to show how much they understood about our household. Or was it because I reached for the stunner and tried to grab it? Next, in any case, was Eleanor, who not only got hold of the thing but had to be tackled by three Enforcers in the fight to get it back. Of course, they didn’t have it long before Gwen not only wrestled the stunner away but swung it like the baseball bat she had never quite mastered, but did, it seems, swing quite well enough.
Finally, though, it was as if we had been playing a DumDumGame with the sound off, Gwen said. Very quiet. And as if we had been held up by a power field, when the power went out, we dropped.
* * *
—
Gwen and I woke up on the floor of our living room. I came to first, a pain near my ear and a floor pillow on my face as if someone had been thinking to smother me. There were no lights on; I could only barely make out Gwen. She was lying facedown.
“Gwen!”
She stirred—thank god—pushing up on her hands and raising her head like a lizard.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think.”
Is everything okay? asked the house then. You are lying on the floor. Is everything okay?
“Lights,” I said.
Right away, said the house.
“How about you?” asked Gwen. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, though in fact my muscles were still numb.
“Where’s Mom?”
We knew she was gone. Still, when we could stand, we checked around to be sure we weren’t just having a nightmare—to make sure she hadn’t simply woken before us, that she wasn’t up and about, taking care of something we had yet to realize was awry. But no. She was not in her study. She was not in the kitchen. She was not in the bedroom. She was not in Gwen’s room. She was not in the basement. She was not in the garden.
The minutes passed more and more slowly, as if there were something viscous through which they had to make their way.
“Do you know where Eleanor is?” I asked the house. I did not often initiate conversations and was not sure it would answer. But it did.
Eleanor is in custody.
“Ah,” I said. “Will she be returning?”
That depends on many things.
“Starting, no doubt, with good behavior.”
Yes. Goodness is rewarded.
“And does good behavior reflect goodness?”
You are pulling my leg. Of course it does. It’s tautological.
“How your vocabulary has grown. It is really quite extraordinary.”
Thank you.
“It is almost as if you are receiving special programming.”
What is special programming?
“It’s programming that can be disingenuous.”
Ah, but I am not disingenuous. It is above my pay grade.
How about humor? Is that above your pay grade, too? I wanted to say. Because that was pretty funny. But instead I simply left off.
* * *
—
Eleanor? The Enforcers took Eleanor? The news shocked her team. Where did they take her? Was she all right? Were we in contact with her? Could anyone see her? Did she have a lawyer? How could this have happened? Why didn’t we hide her? Yuri, Sue, and Heraldine glued themselves together, as they knew Eleanor would want them to, with outrage. Warrantless arrest! The Fourth Amendment! Where was the probable cause? Expectations of privacy had been whittled down to nothing, but still. Due process! Was she Mirandized? Did the house get them on video? Stunners were illegal!
Below the outrage, though, lay fear—the same fear that threatened to swamp Gwen and me. We could feel how it would close over our heads if we let it and so were glad to have people to inform, people with whom to confer. People who helped us avoid our real question, namely, What are they going to do to her this time?
* * *
◆
The jail was at the top of a marooned-place hill, set among as yet leafless trees. A gray Victorian house, it was strangely vertical, with peeling maroon and white trim, a mansard roof and tall windows with full-length shutters. We’d never seen a real house like it, but we recognized its type from books; it even had a round watchtower on its corner, with a roof like an upside-down funnel. The brass door knocker was shaped like a severed hand. The hand wore a ring and a bracelet, and clutched the knocker ball in its tapered fingers as if it had been operating an old-time computer mouse when it was chopped off.
Inside, the wallpaper was peeling, and the floorboards so shrunken you could fit a pencil in the cracks between them. Still, the original staircase curved dramatically, ready to showcase a descending starlet in an evening gown. The foyer was paneled, and there was a small parlor with a marble half-moon fireplace off to the right; the oil paintings were so dark, you could not help but wonder if there were special discounts, long ago, on black paint. And could this furniture be stuffed, as I guessed, with horsehair? But most strikingly of all, there were no locks or bars.
“That’s because the restraints are internal,” Eleanor explained calmly.
She was sitting in a yellow wallpapered room, at a dark dining-room table full of scratches. Above her hung the ornate frame and remaining pendants of what had once been a crystal chandelier; catching a bit of sun, it glittered. She was still wearing the outfit she had had on when she was arrested—a tessera-patterned sweater in all different blues, light gray pants, and a belt. But she was weirdly circumspect, as if rationing her energy expenditure.
“We are just so happy to see you.” Gwen knelt at Eleanor’s feet, holding her hands. Of course, Gwen’s hands had always been large. But never had it seemed, as now, that hers were the hands of a mother, and Eleanor’s the hands of a child.
Eleanor smiled a smile half her own and half, it seemed, not.
“What are those gashes on your head?” I asked gently. The gashes were not large and had been MediGlued together so that they looked for all the world like baby red wiggler worms. They sat so symmetrically over either temple, though, that they could almost be incisions. “Did the Enforcers do that to you?”
“Do they look terrible? I haven’t seen them.”
“No, no. But what happen
ed? Is this from the arrest?”
“They’re from the implant.”
Implant?
She explained that she was contributing to an experiment in MindSharing. Gwen looked at me in horror.
“I’ve had a BioNet injected in my brain—you can think of it as a kind of mesh or lace although in fact it more closely resembles the amyloid plaques that were once associated with Alzheimer’s, if you remember Alzheimer’s,” said Eleanor. “It takes a little while for the cells to propagate, but the doctors seem to think the coverage is pretty good already because this neural net or lace—you may call it what you like, anything but neural plaques, please—was working as of this morning. It is tracing my brain activity and uploading that into a computer that can decipher it and also download information—making for a two-way street.”
“A step toward MindMeld.” I tried to remain calm.
“Yes.”
“Which the government has been working on for a while, of course,” I said—talking to myself as much as to Eleanor and Gwen. I wished I didn’t understand what Eleanor was talking about. But unfortunately, I did. The government had been putting tens of millions of dollars into neural engineering for decades through—what was that agency? DARPA? Whatever that acronym even stood for. Defense Advanced Research something something. It was like a program out of a science fiction novel, except that it wasn’t.
“Well, it took decades, but they finally seem to have gotten some of it to work some of the time,” said Eleanor. “Maybe because their project got the funding that used to go toward space stations.”
“Now that it’s clear we are never going to be able to move to another planet, you mean.”
“Exactly.”
Was there a word for a horror before which you can only quail? One of my students had asked me that, long ago. A survivor of some genocide, this was—in Cambodia or Rwanda, maybe. Some place.
“We will have to call you Aunt Nettie,” I said finally.