“No!”
“A-yuh.”
“Naughty mommy.”
“It got me through. Don’t think I coulda gotten through without it.”
“Of course, most of those updates were the nanny.”
“Sure. But you were here, Jo. That’s what I’m saying. While I was taking care of grownup babies on the Mall, and Sun Min was cleaning up after authors in New York, and Aya was off selling her arm-spanx thingies, and Teri was doing . . . whatever Teri does . . .”
“Yeah, what exactly does Teri do?”
“God knows.” They giggled together, and when the giggles subsided, Teesha touched her arm. “But you, Jo, you were right down the hall. Now, I know sometimes it might feel weird, being the one who—well, who can’t quite pay in at the same rate. Which is fine. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But when you have four professionals all butting heads—”
“I am a professional, though.”
“Sure, you’ve got your nursing job. I think that’s great.”
“It’s a licensed profession.”
“It’s fantastic that you do that. But you know what I’m saying. We’re all equals here. Sure, Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff. I’m sure I can be a little intense about all sorts of things. It probably feels like we’re always on your case, like the homemaker always comes last.”
“But I’m not—”
Teesha held up a hand. “You’re valued, okay? No one thinks any less of your contribution. That’s the point of a co-op, right? Everyone pays in whatever they can.”
Sure, Jo was thinking, only some people pay in by hiring expensive online tutors, while other people pay in by screaming and bleeding in a hospital for ten hours. But she only smiled.
“We’re power moms, right?” Teesha gave her a sock in the arm. “Wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t like the challenge. That’s what I tell my babies in D.C. Y’all think prepping for a primary is hard, try prepping a challenged kid for top-tier preschools.”
Jo tried hard to keep her smile in place. “You ever have that feeling,” she said, “like with every little thing we do, we’re potentially fucking someone up for life?”
Teesha boomed a laugh, throwing back her head. Trying, Jo thought, just a little too hard. “Come on, now, girl. Into the dragon’s den.” She guided Jo’s hand to the pingpanel. And pressed.
“Mom?” It always felt weird to hear Charlie on the intercom, how shrill his voice sounded, like something might be wrong. Jo leaned in.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Everything okay?”
Jo glanced at Teesha, got a nod of reassurance. “Sure, we just—can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about.”
A pause. Sometimes the no-screen thing drove her crazy.
“Thought you were doing your meeting out there?”
“This is part of the meeting. Something we need to discuss.”
“Okay, but I’m doing my puzzles right now. I’ll schedule you for . . . fifteen minutes.”
Jo broke the ping. Teesha reached for the door, but Jo pointed at the status display. Purchased from a trendy tactile-play site, it was a custom-order birch flip-card machine, all-natural, nondigital, except for the gizmo that changed the letters. With a flutter and click, it switched to the phrase Mom Time.
“Cute,” Teesha said, as Jo opened the door.
The homeschooling room continued the analog theme: sound-dampen-ing rugs, a plain glass window. The only piece of modern tech was the learning station itself, a topline Sony schoolbox, with apps and doodads up the wazoo. Parentally controlled, of course, though not, apparently, controlled enough. This was where Charlie spent all his time, at least until the day when they’d finally cave in and get him a palmcom, at which time, Jo figured, he’d be lost to them forever.
He didn’t like to use the headset, but plunked himself down at the screen and—zonk—went straight into Charliespace. For a kid like Charlie, Jo sensed, all of reality was basically virtual. When he heard Jo coming, he said without looking up, “We did the Parthenon and the Colosseum and Notre Dame and the statues. Except Sparklybits started painting the statues, but I told him that wasn’t always historically at-at-attested,” he finished with a dip of his head, forcing out the big word.
Jo started at a tap on her shoulder. “I’ll get the others,” Teesha hissed, vanishing on a whisper of carpet.
“Except we might do the color later,” Charlie said. “But I told Sparklybits I have to check sources.”
“Mmmm.” Jo went to stand beside him. When she let her fingers trail in his hair, Charlie looked up in mild surprise. For Charlie, Jo had realized, the existence of other people was always mildly surprising.
“Then we’re going to—” He broke off, moving his hands in jerky patterns, faster as frustration mounted, until Jo nodded and smiled, mimicking his signs. Charlie smiled, too, relieved at not having had to use words.
A babble from the hall announced the arrival of the moms. Teri descended first, nails flashing, keening with exaggerated joy, “Charleeeee!” Aya came next and tousled his hair. Sun Min nuzzled him. Teesha crushed him. Jo cringed, knowing how Charlie would feel about all this. But he handled it well, putting on his visitor face, as each mom claimed her obligatory hug.
“We’re—” He pointed at the learning station, waving his hands in expressive swirls as his face bunched up. “We’re—”
“Slow, baby,” Teri said.
“Use your words.”
“We’re doing—”
“Take your time, Charlie.” Teesha knelt on the carpet, nodding to coax him along.
“We’re doing—”
“Puzzles,” Jo translated, mirroring his gesture, and saw his face relax.
“Puzzles,” Teri said through her TV smile. “That sounds so fun! Can I do a piece?” She scanned the floor, the shelves.
“No, they’re—” Charlie made the sign for the learning station, then the sign for online, then a bunch of signs that meant something like “shapes of light.” That was as much as Jo could follow. What he called “puzzles,” she would have called “models”: digital constructions, meant to be educational, that challenged kids to assemble famous buildings. Charlie had built the whole set so many times that Jo couldn’t imagine he got anything out of it except the satisfaction of the process itself. Tick-tick-tick, piece by piece, a series of gestures he could have done by now in his sleep.
“Me and—Sparklybits—”
He was almost totally signing, now. Those wide, florid gestures that only Charlie fully understood. Charlie, that is, and one other entity.
At the name Sparklybits, the moms all turned to Jo.
“I see.” Teri’s smile was stapled on. “And how much time do you spend, Charlie, playing video games with Sparklybits?”
Charlie frowned. “They’re not really—”
“They’re like virtual building sets,” Jo explained.
“Ah.”
“Charlie. Sweetie.” Aya knelt. Too close, Jo thought, but restrained herself. “Can I see how you play with Sparklybits?”
Charlie looked up for approval. Jo nodded. Sun Min and Teesha and Teri were already herding her out of the room, down the hall. Over Sun Min’s shoulder, Jo could see Charlie gesturing, flamboyant with frustration, as Aya cocked her head and tried to smile.
“This, this is what we’re talking about,” Sun Min hissed. “Right there.”
“Does he always express himself to you with those . . . movements?” Teesha asked.
“Well,” Jo sighed, “mostly with the ghost. But I’ve picked up some of it.”
“This is why he’s lagging.” Sun Min jerked a hand at the bedroom, folding her arm like an Egyptian painting. The resemblance to Charlie’s gesturing was uncanny, but Jo held the thought. “When did he start to miss milestones? I’ll bet it was right when that thing showed up.”
; “It’s more than a speech lag,” Teesha said. “He’s behind on every track.”
“It’s all connected. Speech, socialization. This is why his metrics have crashed. How can he succeed if he can’t even talk?”
“He does okay on the homeschool stuff,” Jo said.
Sun Min used the same face she probably pulled on authors who pitched digital-addiction memoirs. “You’re going to fix an emotional lag with homeschooling? This is why we’re pumping in 20 percent for Artemis Academy. Trust me, I’ve read the lit. You cannot, can not hit benchmarks across the social skillset without at least fifty per week of face-to-face time. Where are his public speaking skills? His prosocials? Empathy, engagement, emotional literacy? Do you know how badly he’s lagging his cohort?”
Lagging. If there was one word Jo could’ve x-ed out of the discourse, it was that deeply loaded word, lagging. When she was a kid, people had said “catching up”—as in, “Jo Clark is still catching up in math.” Before that, the favored term had been “behind.” Go far enough back, people had used words like “retarded.” The whole idea being that everyone was on the same road, all heading to the exact same place.
“How is he going to get into college with these benchmarks?” Sun Min threw up her hands. “Not just a good college. Any college.”
“Maybe he won’t want to go to college,” Jo said, and knew instantly that she’d blown up the conversation, gone straight for the nuclear option. She might as well have hauled down her jeans and pissed on somebody’s sandals.
“You’re seriously planning to keep our son out of college?”
“I’m not trying to keep him out, Teri, I—”
“You’re going to ruin his future, our future, because you don’t have what it takes to run a household?”
“Teri.” Teesha put a hand out.
“Because you let this piece of rogue code get into his brain and—”
“Teri, Teri, Teri.” They were all pressing round, trying to calm her. Something had slipped in Teri, the newscaster composure an all-or-nothing proposition, now firmly jammed in the off position.
“Thing is, Jo, you’re not paying for the private schooling. You’re not paying for the prep, therapy, emotional tutoring, nutritional advising. Twenty percent of your salary? I’m sorry, that’s a fucking rounding error. The rest of us? Okay?” Teri’s fingernail scrawled circles overhead. “We’re the ones working seventy-hour weeks, traveling the world, just to pay for this goddamn regimen. Why? Because we want the best for Charlie. Because motherhood, call me crazy, I happen to think that’s kind of an important job. But you—”
“All right, Teri.” Teesha held her arm, but Teri threw her off with a clash of bracelets.
“What am I going to tell Frank?” She thudded partway down the stairs, looking up at them, tapping at the tears on her cheeks. “He already thinks this is some vanity trip for me, like adopting a fucking gorilla at the zoo. Now I’m supposed to ask him to be the dad of a budding high school dropout? Jesus, I should have adopted the gorilla; at least they don’t grow up to join Machinima porn fandoms. ’Cause I’ll tell you, that’s where this kid is headed. Every other mom in the office is beating the benchmarks. Every one. There’s a single father in technical support who’s got a son in the ninety-eighth bracket. And we’ve got a lagger. God.”
In the silence that followed, a funny sound came from Charlie’s room. Jo took it at first for a technical failure—audio feedback, a broken speaker—until she pegged it as Aya’s cry of surprise.
“It’s not Charlie’s fault.” Sun Min looking at Teri with what might have been sympathy or distaste. “It’s—”
But now Aya was hurrying to join them, bustling up with her brisk executive stride, planting hands on her waist to announce, “It’s happening.”
“You get through?” Teesha asked.
“To our kid? No. But there’s this.” Aya semaphored at the wall, remembered the no-screen thing, yanked out her phone and tapped into the house system, swinging it to show everyone the feed.
“Shit,” Jo said.
•••
“You sure you properly vetted this guy?”
They were in the kitchen, gathered around the dynawindow, watching the feed from the village gate.
“How long has he been waiting out there?” Jo asked.
“I texted him to stand by.” Aya clicked in for a close-up. “Yeesh,” she winced, “just look at him.”
Jo had to admit that the man at the gate wasn’t especially prepossessing. Particularly not on the zoomed-in security feed, with its anti-blur motion compensation and refractory enhancement and high-def-whatever and all the other brilliant tweaks the geniuses of home security had put into the software. There were slews of apps to make people look good on video; this particular program revealed them at their worst.
Not that the man at the gate would ever have looked especially good. When Jo met him, he’d had a kind of greaser-trying-to-clean-up-his-act vibe, hair slicked back, a flush in his cheeks, like a slacker who’d just stepped out of the shower. On-screen, now, he looked like a hair malfunction at the hippie factory. Like someone had swept up Chewbacca’s haircut clippings and glued them to a giant peeled potato. There was no good stage of life at which to have that look, Jo thought, but thirty-six—which is what she guessed the exterminator was—was too old for any conceivable excuse.
“You checked his background? Consumer reviews? Credentials?”
“I met with him. He showed me his shop.”
The man began to pinch his nose, pulling hard to squeeze the boogers out. The kind of semi-discreet nosepickery you might get away with on a busy train, but definitely not on close-up video.
“His shop, huh? He have any dead bodies there?” Aya sighed. “Well, let’s get this over with.” She punched the code for the gate and the guy slouched in, schlumping through the New Urban street plan with his truck moseying along behind him.
As he came around the corner to their street, the moms all trooped outside. “Hello ladies!” the exterminator yodeled up. The truck, still creeping at his heels, gave a beep. “Park!” he commanded it, pointing to the curb, and jogged up the steps to loom over them in all his ungroomed glory. “So.” His teeth peeked through a wickerwork of hairs. “This is the coven, huh? I’m Evan.”
“Let’s go over the situation.” Aya spun on a scraping heel. “Then we’ll tell you how we want to proceed.”
Evan bumped his head on the doorframe coming in. He seemed not to notice. He bashed his shoulder on the turn into the hall, seeming not to notice that, either. He was looking at the ceiling.
“Yeah, you see a lot of hauntings in these older units. Legacy wiring. Puts a limit on your hardware. So people don’t push the updates, a backdoor opens, and ’fore you know it, boom. Spooktown. What’s the interface here? Still got the old semaphore hookup?” He stuck a sema on his thumbnail and signed the lights-out sign, snapping the hall into darkness, occasioning several bumps and curses. “Nice.”
“Jo tells us you’re quite the expert in these matters,” Aya said, leading the group into the kitchen. “Credentialed,” she added, with a hitch of her eyebrows.
Evan shrugged. “Expert, ah, that’s not really the word I’d use. Freakishly obsessed is more like it.” He went to the ovenex and started poking buttons. “Honestly, this stuff is like the only thing I ever think about.”
“N-o-o-o-o.” Aya looked him over. “Can it be true?”
“My pops, he was way into rogue AI. Used to hunt ’em, all through the hotlands. That was my first childhood memory. Rolling with a pack of ghostchasers in Lou’siana. Course, these days it’s a lot easier. There’s people who’ll just sit around and wait, rig up some bait, and hope the things’ll show.”
“And what works as bait for a ghost?” Aya asked.
“Well, it sounds awful, but, the truth is: kids.” Evan pulled out a crumpled pack of gummies and popped some in his mouth, chewing with much bristling of hair and smacking of lips. He opene
d the trash panel, peeked inside, went to the drone dock, and flipped a switch. “Not literal kids. But the stuff a kid’ll do. Poking around. Punching buttons. Messing with stuff. Come on, Sparkybits, where are you buddy?”
“Sparklybits,” Sun Min corrected, and winced at her own complicity.
“Yeah, ’cause y’know, they’re basically kids themselves.” Evan noticed the way everyone was looking at him. “I mean, not really,” he clarified. “They’re just software. But as software, they’re still learning the ropes.” He went to the dynawindow and waved his arms. “Got a shy one here, huh?”
“It mostly comes out for Charlie,” Jo said.
“Gotcha.”
“So this is common?” Teri’s voice still hadn’t quite climbed down from the pitch it had reached earlier. “A kid, connecting with one of these things? That’s normal?”
“Normal is not a word I really like to use.” Evan brought up the security panel, tapping monitors until he got Charlie’s room. They looked at the boy’s bent back and head, hunched in front of the learning station. Evan’s fingers vanished into his beard. “They were built to be learners. You know? Pattern matchers. See, we think of learning like a thing that happens when you’re taught, right? But it’s more like a thing that just plain happens. And learning with someone else, I guess that’s easier than learning alone.”
The puzzles were back on Charlie’s screen—even on the feed, Jo could make out the shapes—and the boy had begun his eloquent gesturing, tracing loops and swirls in the air. Evan seemed to be unconsciously mimicking him, swinging hands and fingers, until he abruptly stopped and scratched his chin.
“Guess we better go up there,” he said.
Under normal circumstances, the door to Charlie’s room was kept closed, but the visit from the moms had thrown off the routine. As they went upstairs, they had a clear view of his hands, waving in front of the learning station screen. They could see exactly what those hands were doing.
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