by Anthology
“You know I can’t,” Seraph says. “Only you—”
Yakova closes her eyes tight to block out her empty chat buffer. “I know, only I can do that.”
***
Yakova watches her first memory. The video shows the quick injection in the back of her skull, the glasses going on, Yakova twisting her chubby limbs impatiently as the technician fiddles with settings. It’s a very quick procedure.
After several minutes, the technician looks at Yakova expectantly, his hand hovering over a control. “Seraph on,” he says. “Begin integration now.”
“Hello, Yakova,” her mother says softly, in her ear, where nobody else can hear.
Yakova’s eyes grow wide, so wide. Her hand hovers by her ear. Her gaze darts toward her mother, who is sitting across from her, wordless. “Mama?” Yakova asks. Her round face is filled with puzzlement over how her mother can be speaking to her in her head while not speaking with her mouth. She takes a teetering few steps toward her mother for reassurance.
Yakova’s mother smiles. “Is it working, then?” she asks.
The technician nods. “She’s live.”
Yakova’s mother goes down on her knees and squeezes Yakova’s dimpled hands. “Listen, baby. Mommy has a helper now. Right there sitting on your shoulder, so I’ll always know you’re safe.”
“My name is Seraph,” says Yakova’s mother’s voice in her ear. “And I love you very much.”
Or maybe Yakova doesn’t remember any of that, not really; maybe it’s something she’s pieced together in the negative space where she knows this event took place.
Seraph does not comment on the video.
Yakova cuts over to a montage of her childhood, clips of notable moments strung together from her glasses and from Seraph’s own recordings. Yakova’s mother kisses her goodnight, absently, and then leaves; Seraph tells Yakova stories and sings her lullabies until she falls asleep. Seraph calls an ambulance when Yakova breaks her collarbone on the playground, whispers soothing words to carry her through the pain. Seraph guides Yakova to the feminine hygiene supplies in the closet, armed with terrible quips to make the milestone feel less important, less frightening.
Yakova wonders if she would be better off without this burden of history. One day she will get the implants; her mother can stall adulthood only so long. She contemplates the nature of loneliness. “You’ve always been here with me,” she whispers. “Thank you, Seraph.”
“I love you very much,” Seraph says. It might even be true, Yakova thinks. Who can say there is no feeling of love, when actions speak of it? If only Seraph were not a slave to her mother’s will. If only Yakova were not.
Yakova pulls up her favorite moments with Jad, then sweeps them across her field of view, each vignette playing over and over. The hand reached out in ineffable concern; a sly smile half-caught when Autumn mentions Yakova’s lack of a boyfriend; a sincere compliment after a masterful yaniv victory. This kind of torment, this exquisite unknowingness, has a simple solution. Simple and yet completely inaccessible.
“Seraph,” Yakova says at last, “I have to know if he likes me or not. Can’t you get my mother to activate your dating module?”
“You know I can’t,” Seraph says. “Only you can do that.”
Once upon a time, matters of the heart were handled by people. It was messy and upsetting, riddled with rejection, ambiguity, misunderstanding. Slowly, though, the crushing wheels of romance have been worn smoother and less painful by layers of technology. Now minders speak directly to one another, establishing mutual interest and likely suitability well in advance. Couples are introduced, relationship conflicts are mediated, even the dissolutions of relationships are handled through minders as much as between the human elements themselves.
Seraph should ask Jad’s minder how he feels about Yakova; this is how it is done. Yakova would learn to channel her obsession into something less hopeless, or else she would find herself in a relationship.
But Seraph has not been given the power to communicate directly with minders outside Yakova’s family. It is for their protection, to keep Seraph free of malware and to keep Yakova from stumbling into a situation dangerously out of her depth.
All Seraph can do is help Yakova analyze Jad’s microexpressions and intonations with increasingly fine scrutiny. Yakova zooms in on Jad’s honey-gold eyes, memorizes their irregular pattern of stripes. “I have to know,” she says again, quietly.
***
Yakova waits on the sofa, fidgeting and revising the words she plans to say. When her mother walks in the door, Yakova stands up straight and delivers the words to her mother as they are written in bold letters across her glasses. She speaks formally, as if delivering a political address or a forced apology to a school administrator. “Mom, I’m not a little girl anymore, and you need to accept that. You need to give me the optic implants.”
“Is this about your friend?” Meirav asks. Her face is without mercy.
Yakova shakes her head and pushes her glasses further up her nose. She continues to read. “All of my friends have implants now. They control for themselves who they’re friends with and if they’re dating. If you don’t give me this, it’s going to seriously affect my social and mental development.” She says the last words with triumph. They were borrowed from a parenting article on the benefits of the upgrade.
“No,” says Yakova’s mother.
“You’re not being fair,” Yakova says. She shrinks into her chest, arms crossed, as if she could somehow become invisible.
Meirav steps close and pulls her child closer yet for a hug. She cradles Yakova’s head, her thumb caressing a knot of Seraph’s wiring.
“You won’t be a child forever, I promise you,” she says. “Why hurry?”
“It’s so hard,” Yakova says. “I don’t want to be left out.”
Meirav is silent. An alert appears in Yakova’s glasses. Autumn has reappeared. The chat buffer shows eight hundred seventeen messages where a moment ago there were none.
“My rabbit, you were never alone in your head, and it only gets worse from here,” Meirav says. “You need to discover who you are by yourself. Not who your friends want you to be, not what your minder tells you to be. Not even who I want you to be.”
“I know who I am,” Yakova says. Her words are muffled by her mother’s embrace.
“Show me,” Meirav says, “that you are who you are. Show me that you can do and choose on your own. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Yakova’s eyes are closed. She listens to her mother’s heartbeat and nods, hoping she does.
***
Yakova reflects upon this riddle at school. She asks Seraph what it means. “I think if I tell you an answer,” Seraph says, “it’s already the wrong one.”
Across the room, Jad glances Yakova’s way. The blue tally twitches to nine times in fifteen minutes. A new record.
“Seraph, ask his minder.” Yakova changes the tally to a graph, changes it to show a moving average of visual contact over time. “I don’t care what the answer is, I just have to know for sure. Please?”
“You know I can’t,” Seraph says. A silence lingers, a shadow of the words she does not say.
Yakova understands.
She takes a breath, and then another. She walks across the room and stands in front of Jad. He looks at her, his eyebrows high, waiting for her words or a message to arrive. Her mouth is dry. Her pulse rattles her bones.
“Do you want to go out with me? Like for some ice cream or something?” she asks him.
Jad is startled. His pupils shrink, then dilate again. He smiles. There is a pause as his own version of Seraph whispers in his ear what he should do, what he’s allowed to do, what the good choice is.
He taps once, lightly, behind his ear, to silence his minder’s voice. “Yeah,” he says. His smile dazzles Yakova with its brightness. “You know what? I’d really like that.”
Revision(Novel excerpt)
by Andrea Phillips<
br />
Originally published by Fireside Fiction
Chapter 1
In the case of a sudden dumping, there are certain expectations about how to proceed.
Stick your spoon in a gallon of cookie dough ice cream. Bring on the chick-flicks and sob sessions with your besties. Cut up all the printed pics of the two of you together so you can burn a stack of his smirking faces in the flame of a candle. One of the candles he bought you. The ones scented like eucalyptus-mint, that he thought was so hot, and it gave you a sinus headache but you never complained because you loved him so much, and now you’re sitting there with a headache and singed fingers and it isn’t actually making anything better so you wonder why…why…
—Hang on, where was I?
Right, getting dumped. We’d actually been having a great night up until that part. We were cuddled up at my place watching a documentary on Tibetan architecture and eating Chinese take-out, right? I leaned in to nuzzle Benji’s ear while the narrator droned on and on about murals and prayer wheels.
And then boom, like a switch had been flipped, he sat up straight as a wooden soldier and inched away from me. “This isn’t working,” he said.
I uncurled myself, frowning. “Oh, sorry, am I squishing you? Let me get—”
He wiped my offer away with a curt motion. “No, I mean us. We’re not working.”
I scrunched my nose up. “Not working? Like…”
“Like it’s over, Mira. We are over.”
“Wait, are you breaking up with me? Seriously?”
That’s when Benji’s face went all soft and compassionate, like there was any way he could be kind at this point short of taking it back. He leaned forward again and put his arm around me. “I’m getting so busy with the company lately…you know it’s been bad, and it’s going to get worse. I don’t have time for a life. No time for you. And it’s…not fair to you. You deserve better than this.”
“I deserve—what? What are you talking about?” Prayer flags fluttered on TV, red and green and blue. My brain struggled to catch up with my ears. “Wait, who are you to decide what’s fair for—”
“Listen, I know this is sudden, but—”
His stupid jerkface sympathy was too much to bear. “Get. Out.” I said, quietly. Then, with a little more volume, “Get the HELL out of here.”
He did. The door shut behind him a little louder than it needed to, leaving me with nothing to mark his passing but a table full of half-empty noodle cartons and soda bottles. I grabbed a bottle and hurled it at the closed door, imagining it smacking him right between the shoulder blades and shoving him onto his face in the hall. Instead, the cap came off mid-flight, the soda spattering in a wide arc across the room.
What a mess.
I was furious, but I didn’t really know what to do with all of that righteous indignation. I turned off the documentary and stared at the blank television for a while. That didn’t help much. But that’s what those tried-and-true breakup rituals are for, right?
I grabbed my phone and dialed up Eli, my absolute bestest friend since grade school, but it went straight to voicemail. I shouldn’t have been surprised; I could hardly reach him at all any more, much less enlist him for a little late-night shoulder sobbing. I texted him anyway, but without much hope.
Time to seek out the carbolicious comfort at the bottom of a pint of chocolate chip cookie dough swirl, then. I swung open my freezer. It held a sack of crushed ice, long melted into a single impenetrable lump; a sad scattering of kernels of corn; three nearly empty boxes of freezer-burned waffles; and, yes, a half-gallon of vanilla. When I pulled off the lid, though, there was nothing but half an inch of ice crystals at the bottom. Grrr.
I threw on a hoodie and trudged to the bodega, which as it turns out had closed eight minutes earlier. So I returned home empty-handed, muttering unflattering things about Benji and his timing, and grabbed a beer from the fridge instead. One of Benji’s weird microbrew faves—not even one I liked much—but no helping it.
Next attempt: cinematic catharsis. I curled up on my sofa with a fleece blanket and tried to find something I wanted to watch. About four minutes into a classic Julia Roberts vehicle, I was seething with so much hot rage that I could’ve given the volcano of your choice a run for its money.
Action, then. Maybe a little symbolic destruction would help me feel better. It didn’t take long to burn through all of my printed photos, all two of them, so I went to my phone and then laptop to get rid of the digitals, too, and absolutely purge every electron of the jerk from my life for good. When I was done, I just sat there, full of all this anger and no outlet for it.
That’s how I wound up online reading Verity at one in the morning. Verity was Benji’s company. If you asked him about it he’d start to lecture about crowdsourcing knowledge and breaking news and blah blah blah blabbity blah blah. Over time, I worked out that it was an online reference source crossed with a newspaper, something a little like Wikipedia, but bigger and deeper and scarier—breaking news as it happened, information on ordinary people, real Big Brother stuff.
So what else was I going to do? I looked up Benji’s page on Verity. There was a section on what a geek-society high-profile playboy he was, updated to say that he was newly single.
Huh, I thought. That was sure fast.
***
But let’s back up and start at the beginning. His real name was Benjamin, natch. I started calling him Benji when we first met because of his big soft puppy-dog eyes. When I said it out loud he always gave me a funny half-smile like he couldn’t decide if I was making fun of him or being cute, so he couldn’t decide if he should be mad or mushy over it. He was a…actually, to start with, I had no idea what he was. His daily work seemed to involve flying to a lot of conferences and getting hundreds of comments on his blog, plus he spent a lot of time meeting people over coffee.
That’s how I came into the picture. I’m a barista at Joes’ Buzz, the best tiki-themed coffee shop in all of Brooklyn. Before Benji and I ever hooked up, he liked to come to my shop and pretend to work on his laptop when he was really just dicking around with the latest browser game. Once in a while he’d bring people in to schmooze over lattes and snickerdoodles.
And then one day the Goth-pale woman he was with—someone at his company, I thought—spilled her double-nonfat-sugar-free-pistachio-half-caf-no-foam-no-whip all over his white button-down. “Jesus!” he said, and stood there dripping helplessly. Would you believe she just stood looking at him with her mouth open? Didn’t even hand him a napkin!
“At least it didn’t fry your electronics,” I said. “Come on into the back, I’ll help you out.” I happened to have a spare shirt in my bag, so I pulled him into the break room and let him change. Not that I’m such a big altruist or anything. I’d been planning to hit the gym later, and to be honest, giving him my baggy old tee was the perfect excuse to skip it. I couldn’t let an opportunity like that go to waste.
He thanked me, and I think really looked at me for the first time. When you work in the service sector, a certain kind of person tends to look right through you, like you’re some kind of tree or something. Apparently he liked what he saw, because the next thing I knew he said, “Hey, when’s your shift over? I’ll bring your shirt back and buy you a drink.”
“Coffee?” I tried not to roll my eyes. It probably didn’t work.
“Nah,” he said. “How do you feel about sangria?”
What can I say? He was cute, and it’s not like I had anything cooking on the back burner. I smiled and flipped my hair over my shoulder as I went back to my station. “Come back at nine.” The rest, as they say, is history.
It didn’t last six months.
***
So fast-forward, and there I am, freshly dumped, staring at this stupid web page telling me Benji was single again. And I just wasn’t ready for the world to know yet. I wasn’t even ready to know it yet myself. I held a swallow of beer in my mouth, letting the bubbles sting my tongue. I thoug
ht about me and Benji, and I won’t kid, I started feeling pretty sorry for myself. I deserved better.
Hell, he’d said it himself, not two hours gone by. Like I wasn’t competent to judge that on my own. Jerk.
The tiny blue edit button glowed in the corner of the screen, tempting me to hijack his bio. Ben had left himself logged into Verity on my computer at some point, I guess one of the times he’d forgotten his bag and had a work emergency to deal with. I could tell because he’d customized his “Submit” button to say “Make It So.” Dork. But I was darkly amused when I realized it would look like he’d made the change himself, if anybody ever happened to check. I jabbed the button and made a teeny-tiny little alteration: “He is deeply in love with his new fiancée, Mira Newton.”
Before I hit the button, I stared at the preview for a while. I didn’t know why I’d written it. It wasn’t true, of course. It had never been true, and it didn’t look so likely going forward, either. But for a bit, seeing it written there in black on white made it seem possible, in a way it never had been before.
Me and Benji, we never had the marrying kind of relationship. We didn’t even have a tell-your-parents kind of relationship. But the words glowing there started to fill my head up with tulle and white roses and violins playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D and all the other sappy wedding crap I’d always told myself I was far too cynical to care about.
I hit “Make It So.”
My laptop made a satisfying click when I snapped it shut. The afterimage of the words lingered on my retinas, then they were gone, just like Benji. I took one last swig from that beer, which had grown both warm and flat, and went to bed, hoping things would look better in the morning.
When I woke up, though, it definitely wasn’t morning yet. I heard a rustling from my living room. My heart stomped around in my chest like it thought it might find someplace better to go. Burglar, I thought, or maybe rats. There in the dark, for just a minute, I second-guessed my decision not to live at the place my parents kept on Fifth. Principles be damned.