“So first we’re going to your appointment,” Ana is saying. “Then we’re taking you to grandma’s house. And you’ll be there for two sleeps. Did you pick the toys you want to come along?”
“This one.” A four-year-old’s hand holds up a plastic dinosaur, and I realize whose perspective it is and why the web was so small. “I love it.”
“Good choice, honey,” Ana says. “I love that one too.”
When she reaches down to ruffle her son’s hair, her eyes are swollen and pink and she’s trying really really hard to smile.
I take the Ottawa via Portage bus back across the border. I’ve got Ana’s work ID in my hands and I keep looking down at it, at the solemn black-and-white photo of her that was taken straight on and does not hide her crooked nose. Once I put the child-sized web back where I found it, it wasn’t hard to figure out the rest. I saw the bouquets on the counter again, the pamphlets for some support group, and a bunch of scrawled notes on a pad of paper from a conversation with a specialist that made it clear the chances of her kid making it to six years old are vanishingly small.
A message from my avatar pops up. Hey, how was it? She’s fun, right?
I swipe it away and check the address Ana gave me, find the right stop on the bus map. I can’t help but think that it knew, somehow, about her kid’s echo and that’s why it sent me on a date with her. It makes me want to smash my phone against the seat in front of me. The hangover is coming now, drumming into my skull.
Ana messages again. Want to see a movie this eve? I think we talked about doing that and I’m free!
I start composing my blow-off, something about how fun she is but how I’m in town for only a couple more days and have family stuff to do. I can’t see her again, because I’d spend the whole time feeling sorry for her, imagining her five years from now talking to the echo of her dead kid about his favorite dinosaurs. The reason I spent last night with her was to forget things; the reason she spent it with me was to forget way worse ones.
I delete the message. I don’t know what to tell her. I don’t know anything about anything. My thumb works through my contacts and finds my grandma. It hovers for a second. Two seconds. Pushes.
“Hello?”
“Hey, grandma. It’s me.” I turn the video on and her deep-lined face shows up on my screen. “How are you?” I ask. “How’s your wrist?”
“Oh, you know. Some days are better, some days are worse.” She squints. “Where are you? Are you on a bus?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t remember grandpa.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember him,” I say. “I was little when he died. I pretend I remember him. I like the photo of me and him playing Legos. But I don’t remember him.”
“Sure you do. He made the swing set for you and your sister. You spent all day with him while he did it. You handed him tools.”
“I know,” I say. “I just don’t remember. I still love him. But I wish I remembered him.” I swallow hard. “When I visited here last year, at the end of it Mom drove me to Montreal. We stopped at the cemetery. We saw his tombstone. And the spot beside it. Your spot. And I just started crying.”
“Oh,” she says, faintly, looking over my shoulder. “Oh, my darling boy.”
“And when I looked over, so was Mom.” I wish I hadn’t put it on video. I can feel the tears creeping up my ducts again. “Just from thinking about it. From thinking about not having you around anymore. I know you feel like you’re not yourself anymore. Like you’re already an echo.”
She gives a wet laugh. “Did I say that?”
“But we’re all echoes,” I say, thinking about all the people my avatar and Ana’s avatar churned through to put us together for one night. “We only exist when other people let us. When they need us for something. And we all have things we do over and over. Some good things, some bad things. So we’re all echoes.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asks.
“I don’t think anything makes it better,” I say, picturing Ana’s puffy pink eyes in the holo. “Not really. But the reason Mom wants you to wear the web, the reason we all do, is because we’re not ready for you to die. We’re not ever going to be ready. We’ll look at photos and old letters and we’ll tell stories, but it won’t be enough. We want to hold on to as much of you as we can. The echo won’t be enough either. But we want it anyways. Even just an echo of an echo.”
She’s quiet for a long time. “Maybe it just makes it harder,” she finally says. “Maybe it’s better to forget.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know. But people aren’t that rational. We want to hold on. So please, just wear the web.”
She squeezes her eyes shut. Her liver-spotted skin looks as thin as tracing paper. “I love you, you know. I’m ready to go, but I don’t want to leave you all.”
“I love you, too.”
“I’ll wear it,” she says. “I’ll wear the dunce cap. We’re having supper at your mom’s tonight, I think.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. I’ll see you there.”
The bus drops me on Bank Street and I walk to the CRA building from there. It looks as if they share the high-rise with a few other government offices: the lobby is big and shiny and has a lot of signage, along with a surprising number of people just milling around. I send Ana a message, then go and sit on one of those weird backless couches.
I watch workers going up and down a double escalator and start wondering about their private lives, wondering how many of them have secret miseries like Ana or not-so-secret ones, how many of them care about someone who’s not long for this world. It’s overwhelming, that feeling you get from realizing everybody has their own little universe of hurt and happiness. I understand why we keep people compartmentalized and let our avatars sift through them and talk to them for us.
Before I can get too existential, Ana shows up on the escalator. I watch her walk through the scanner and say something to the security guard, who laughs. In heels she’s as tall as me and her hair is immaculate; she moves precisely, her chin held high as if nothing could possibly bother her. It’s hard to imagine her in her hurricane-messy apartment. It’s hard to imagine her walking with her four-year-old to the liquor store and trying to cope however she can with the fact that he’s maybe turning five, never turning six.
“Hey, handsome,” she says. “You got it?”
I hand it over stealthily, pretending it’s a drug deal.
“Thanks,” she says, slipping the lanyard over her head. “So stupid we have to wear these. They scan our faces anyways. Government, right?”
“Government,” I echo, and for a second I want to tell her what I found in the pantry, but I don’t. “I’m only in town for a couple more days,” I say instead. “Don’t think we’re going to catch that movie.”
She nods, blank-faced. “Yeah, my avatar said the same thing. One night only. It was fun.”
“Let me know if you’re ever out west.” I take the squashed banana bread out of my coat pocket and hand it to her. “My grandma baked this. It’s really good.”
She raises an eyebrow, but also does that smirk. “Okay. Weird. But thanks.”
We hug, and she smells good, and I figure I’ll never see her again. But that’s life, and in a way I’ve already got her echo and she’s got mine. That’s better than nothing.
4
Sparklybits
Nick Wolven
The contractually mandated monthly meeting was never exactly a relaxed affair, but this one, Jo decided, promised to reach superlative levels of awfulness. All morning she’d been marching upstairs to Charlie’s room, standing at the door with her finger on the pingpanel, then chickening out and clumping back to the other moms. Failure. That was the message they sent with their silence, staring up from the table with their diamond-hard eyes. The ultimate modern middle-class hazard: a public exhibition of parental failure.
“You’ve gotta do it, Jo,” Aya said after the third attem
pt, sipping the latte she’d been nursing all morning. “You just have to prepare him.”
While Teri, at the ovenex, turned, nails glinting, and said in a voice that sounded concerned without actually being concerned, “It’ll be easier on him, in the end.”
Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do. Wedging herself into the chair by the dynawindow, Jo blinked away the backyard view and called up the scheduler.
Ten-thirty.
Half an hour to go.
Sun Min came to the table, blowing holes in the foam on her third cappuccino. “Sooner you get started, easier it’ll be. All the forums rec-ommend the same thing. Groundwork.”
Jo gnawed off a piece of bagel. “I’m just not sure this is the best thing for him.”
The atmosphere tightened. Looking around the kitchen suddenly felt like staring into a stranger’s frozen smile. Today was more than a family meeting, Jo reminded herself. More than a test of her mommying skills, more than a battle for Charlie’s future. It was a performance.
Naturally, it was Teesha who spoke next. Gentle Teesha. Supportive Teesha. Political-candidate-advising Teesha. If Aya was the perfectionist of the group, always playing CEO; and Teri the consummate TV exec, with her pore-rejuve treatments and her million-dollar hair; and Sun Min their literary sophisticate, then Teesha was . . . well, what could you say about Teesha? She had the skills to handle lobbyists and congressional candidates, the biggest tantrum-throwers in town. Surely she could have handled kids, too, if she’d felt like blocking out the time. Instead, she’d taken it on herself to handle Jo, playing the helpful grandmother to Jo’s perennially flustered mommy. Which was nice, to be sure, and not to be scorned. But Jo could never figure out the best way to react to all this meta-mothering.
Teesha took Jo’s hand. In this family of megamoms, this clique ofaccomplishers—the Queen Bee, the Glamatron, the Editrix, the Matriarch—Jo was just Jo, the standard model. The person who pulled slop out of the ovenex, switched on the evening TV stream, and took a slow dive face-first into the loveseat. Not much to say about good old Jo, except that she was here. Always here.
“You scared?” Teesha used a voice that had probably helped trailing candidates through poll-number crashes, brought congressional aides down from caffeine-pill binges, coaxed suicidal interns off hotel ledges. “Worried you might blow it? Jo, let me tell you something. We’re all scared. We’ve seen the therapist reports. We’re watching his numbers. Yeah, we’re worried about Charlie’s progress. But that’s why we’re here. To tackle this together.”
“But you—” Jo checked herself. “You don’t have the relationship with him I do.” Big mistake, she thought, looking at their faces. “What I’m trying to say is, it feels like I’m always the one who has to—”
Teesha eased back, using little plucks of her fingers to resettle her Yoruba-patterned shawl. A trick of hers, the gesture was saturated with authority. “We’re a family. That’s what we agreed. Equal partners. The contract says—” Teesha broke off, lips spreading in a secretive smile, as if she’d thought of a dirty joke she was almost too embarrassed to share. “Look, you know what? Forget the contract. What I’m saying, Jo, we’re all in this together. If something’s gone wrong for that sweet little boy, that’s on all of us. You want me to go up there and talk to him, say the word—”
Jo shook her head. “Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not me. It’s Charlie. You really have to understand Charlie.”
“Well, if you feel that way, you can’t blame us for being concerned. He’s been up there all morning, doing—but you know what he’s doing. If we’re going to get through this, as a family, then—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Sun Min clacked down her cappuccino. “Look. You may not care what the contract says. But I do. We paid enough to have them write the damn thing, exactly for situations like this. When it comes to the home environment, we all get a vote. And you’ve been outvoted, Jo. You just have to deal.”
Teri and Aya both opened their mouths. Before anyone could talk, the lights winked off, the dynawindow blanked, and every counter, clock, display, and status window began to twinkle with inscrutable symbols. Chairs scraped, dishes clinked. The moms sucked hisses of surprise through their teeth as the bowels of the house thudded with mysterious operations. The ceiling projector whirred. Light returned, purplish, unsteady, as the walls filled with flickering images. Maybe mouths, maybe eyes, maybe fleeting faces, they reminded Jo, above all else, of rapidly gesturing hands.
Not now, she thought. God, please, not now.
“Sparklybits,” Jo said out loud, “this really isn’t the best time.”
Strokes of brightness lit up the dynawindow, slashing upward, bending outward, like hands uplifted in a shrug.
Jo tried to remember the lingo. She thumbed on her sema and sketched a sign in the air, a series of slashes and chops that she hoped meant “cut it out.” The light throbbed. The ovenex displayed a series of dots and carets, an emoticon row of blinking eyes.
“I mean it, Sparkly.” Gesturing as she talked, Jo repeated the sign for stop. The dynawindow blinked. The walls displayed a now-familiar icon, an open circle with dashes on the sides, which Jo figured was supposed to resemble a bowed head.
“That’s right, Sparkly. This is adult-people business. You go back up and wait with Charlie.”
Fizzle. Wink. There were no words for the series of icons that glimmered and faded in the walls. When they were gone, the lights came back, the ovenex showed its default display, the dynawindow reverted to the rainbow tiles of the scheduler. There was no sound throughout the house except the swish of a bathroom-cleaning subroutine.
“Now that,” said Sun Min, “is exactly what we’re talking about.”
With the ghost gone, the moms twitched into motion. Hands lifted to tuck hair behind ears, brush crumbs from slacks, adjust rings and necklaces.
“Sparklybits,” Teri said.
“Really.” Aya sighed. “You named it?”
“Well,” Jo said, “Charlie did.”
“And you let him?”
The tone of Aya’s voice let Jo know this was about more, much more, than a simple name. It was about major failures of smart-home management, serious lapses of parental discipline, epic errors of motherly judgment. The frustration of a world-bestriding CEO at seeing a job badly done.
What could Jo say? What could anyone say? It was a pretty big deal, after all, letting the house get haunted.
Teesha gathered up Jo’s plate and mug and brought them to the dish slot, ignoring the kitchen whiz as it scrambled at her heels. With the mess dispatched, she turned, drying her hands, and locked eyes with Jo, saying with a little nod, “I think it’s time.”
The stairs to Charlie’s room were at the back of the house, between the self-care parlor and the door to the village commons. It was a screen-free zone: once you stepped into the hall, all devices automatically went on lockdown. Something they’d voted on ages ago. For purposes of stress management.
Yeah. Like that had worked.
The whole wing was tweaked-out for sensory modulation. Carpets, warm colors, floor-level lights, even a few pieces of hotelish wall art. The style reminded Jo of her mom’s house, all the inert clutter and d
ecor people had brought into their lives back then. As if they felt some anticipatory lack, a need to make up for the absence of technology.
The homeschooling room was at the end of the hall. Privacy checks clustered round the door: intercom, peephole camera, the pingpanel. All pretty silly, given that they’d equipped the place with round-the-clock monitoring. How many times had Jo logged in at the talkshow hour, zoomed in on nightvue to watch her son sleep? His face so placid as it dreamed, free of anxieties, until she could almost forget what went on during the day.
She slipped down the hall, aware of Teesha’s heavy stride behind her. The other moms were still downstairs—scared, Jo supposed, of spooks and little boys. She lifted a finger.
Hesitated.
“It won’t get any easier,” Teesha said.
“I just . . .” Jo turned. Performance, she reminded herself. This was all a performance. “I feel like I already screwed this up.”
Teesha’s smile softened. “We all feel that way. Hell, we did screw it up. But we’re fixing it now.”
“Yeah, but I’m the live-in, you know? The one who’s here. I don’t want to say I feel closer to Charlie—”
The smile disappeared.
“—but I feel like I should have been on top of this,” Jo hurried on. “As the person who actually, you know, stays in the house.”
Bing: the smile came back. “We all had access to the logs.” Teesha touched her hand. “We see the status reports. Any of us could’ve punched up the module, run a diagnostic. Hell, I knew the house had viruses. I just didn’t know it was—I mean, I don’t think any of us understood—”
“How attached Charlie was to it?”
“How bad things had gotten.” Teesha’s mouth pulled down in an expression Jo often saw on TV, an empathetic frown, acknowledging profound, shared wellsprings of emotion. “Know what I used to do? When he was little?”
“What’s that?”
“I’d be in meetings, okay? Back when we were steering Senator Ramirez through his hot-mike hack. Sitdowns with the campaign manager, fundraisers, everyone completely losing their shit. So I’d have my specs on, y’know, scrolling feeds, saying I was keeping up with the reaction. Meanwhile, I’d have your updates on the periph. Diaper blowout. Major bed puke. Mystery crash at 3:00 a.m. Cake-face takes the trophy. All day.”
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