by David Brin
Windy had been careful not to touch us physically, but I felt sure she’d changed something.
Ginger must have felt the same, since she asked, “Is this smart?”
“Rich people have drones that watch their kids.”
“But they have guards, too.”
“You have me.”
Her response was a warm laugh and a quick brush of her lips across my cheek. She got up. “Good night.”
I listened as she shepherded the kids to bed, her voice soft and firm. My cheek retained the burning memory of her lips for some time. I didn’t expect the drones to do any real good, or even to last for long. Still, they might offer hope for a few days. Out of all the evils in street life, the grinding loss of hope was the hardest thing.
* * *
At first, we all found the drones fascinating. Ginger wouldn’t let Emil touch hers, so he threw small pebbles at it whenever she wasn’t looking in order to force it to avoid them. Its capabilities fascinated him. I didn’t let him shell mine, but he and I learned together how to make it move in certain directions with hand signals. When I rode my old beat-up bike to the grocery store, I used my remote to thumb it off while I shopped, keeping it close to me in a fanny pack. I tested its speed on the way back. The drone kept up fine, even downhill.
I knew a man who lived two streets over, a deeply damaged but sweet veteran named Griff who had fought ISIL and lost. He got a drone, too. Unlike me, he kept up with electronics, and he had a pad with an app that showed the student’s drone-driving schedule and also had a manual for the tiny fliers. He came over every morning to share information with us.
A blue light gave away the telepresence of the invisible pilots, Shahid and Madison, who apparently only used them for about an hour a day, usually in the early afternoon. The rest of the time, they were ours.
By day three, the buzz of the little machines clawed at my spine. Ginger turned hers off for six hours before Emil talked her into turning it back on. After that, she took to glaring at it over her shoulder, the look on her face a dagger that I hoped the cameras weren’t recording.
Ginger’s drone followed her when she took the kids to school on the city bus, flying after the bus like an overgrown neon bumblebee. It went with her to the library for homework sessions and hung in a corner of the ceiling except for one day when an older librarian asked her to call it down and hide it. It went to free dinners with us, and for bus rides to the park, and it watched me sell homeless newspapers in front of Seattle Foods.
By the time we’d had them a week, the tiny copters had become almost invisible. Ginger rarely glared at hers anymore and Emil stopped throwing things.
In late August, we saw Windy again. She and her drone handlers came while the kids were in school. Griff, Ginger, me, and the outsiders sat around a mosaic table at the SeaTown Bakery and ate soup and sandwiches under a blue sunbrella. After we finished, Windy sat back in her chair and casually said, “There’s a contest in town. A social hacking event where people get together to work on a problem.”
I had forgotten she didn’t know I had started in Silicon Valley. The story was there if you looked far enough back in social media, but it hadn’t been the most famous tech fall ever. It hurt me and my investors more than it hurt the rest of the world, but then they all do. You risk. You lose. You get up or you fall. I stayed fallen. “I know what a hackathon is.”
“The first Hack for Homelessness was in 2014, right here in Seattle. It did a little good, but of course the housing-price crisis and then the minirecession both made it worse. But the tech community doesn’t give up.”
I didn’t say anything.
Windy continued. “I met with the woman organizing it. I told her what we’re doing here, and she’s going to pull people from a green building group in town and lock them in a room with some techies and an open-data vendor. She’s also going to use human-capital sourcing and pull in volunteers from India, Australia, and China. I want them to see some film from your drones.”
Ginger looked thoughtful. Her hair was down, shining gold and red in the sun, and she combed through it with the fingers of her right hand. “Will anybody else see it?”
Windy answered carefully. “We’ll try not to let anyone else see it. But to be honest, we can’t promise privacy.”
Ginger flinched.
Madison leaned forward, excited. “We need the footage. It shows people what your lives are really like. It shows them you aren’t that different from them. We’ve put together a draft of a short movie we want to show.”
Ginger’s eyes got angry and her jaw tightened. “Are my kids in it?”
“Will you watch it? Please.”
“Sure,” I spoke for us all. “Put it in the middle under the umbrella.”
The opening credits explained the drone program as a personal way to learn about homelessness. It cut to an older woman who was part of a tent community in a copse of trees deep in Discovery Park. As she walked from her tent all the way to the bus stop to get food, my feet hurt in sympathy. I glanced at Ginger and noticed a finger near her eyes, as if she’d just brushed away a tear. We were almost last, me and Griff together looking like friends, which I suppose we were at that point. It made me smile. It was dignified, the video. They hadn’t made us appear pathetic.
The last picture frame froze on Ginger’s kids doing dishes at the soup kitchen while the credits rolled. Salate’s hands were deep in a chili pot that was half as tall as she was and full of soapy water. She smiled at the camera, looking proud of herself, like a kid playing house. It made a perfect closing shot.
We all looked at Ginger, letting her think.
It took her a while, but she said, “You can use it. We just won’t go back to the soup kitchen for a while.” She was like a momma bear, my Ginger. It cost her to allow any risk at all.
* * *
People wanted to help us, and Windy showed up with phones and mentors. They had access to our video feeds, which made me nervous at first. I’d known the students were studying us, but at least we’d met them. To my surprise, Windy paired me with a woman in her eighties named Musia who lived in New York City.
Help started out small, like grocery money showing up on the phone. Mostly we used it to buy delivery food for all of us, which we ate on Ginger’s steps.
Ginger’s helper was a college student named Kelsey who looked about five years older than the twins. She used Ginger’s drone to watch the kids from her dorm, which was just over at the University of Washington. They all did homework together.
One day Musia asked me if I could read.
“Of course,” I spluttered, shocked that she would even ask.
“Would you read me books? I can’t see well enough any more.”
I didn’t like it. It felt like an obligation, and I hadn’t signed up for obligations. Besides, I hadn’t read fiction for years. At least she didn’t want romance. By the time I had sat out on the stoop beside Ginger’s house for three nights, I decided I liked the book, which was a fantasy about a female shape-changer who worked in a car repair garage. She looked poor, but she had real power.
Salate and Emil both got all As. Griff found a friend dead of a heroin overdose in the street, and hid somewhere for a week before he finally came back and sat in my office with me sharing a joint like nothing had ever happened. All the rest of that year, Griff went away for days at a time. Sometimes I found him lost in the deep fears of his memories, unable to recognize me.
I finished four books for Musia and started thinking about getting a way to write myself. Not whole books, but maybe a few articles for the homeless paper. I’d had half a college degree once, after all.
It didn’t feel as much like we were alone and the kids didn’t go hungry as often. Ginger and the kids might be safer in some ways because of the drones, but Ginger and the kids were beautiful, and I worried about the stream of pictures going out to people over the Internet.
* * *
I expected Windy to come
back and tell us about the hackathon. She didn’t, although there was an article about it in the homeless newspaper. The piece didn’t mention us, nor did it say much about the outcome except that there would be an unveiling in the fall. It did mention the movie, which set us all on edge a little bit.
There was good news as well. I had a small article in the same issue about how to eat on five dollars a day. It was the first thing I ever got published anywhere except tech blogs (in my old life), and I was so proud of it I carried the issue around until it turned into pulp.
We made the news for something worse two weeks later. Not just the homeless paper, either.
The bullies showed up. They hunted me and Griff, claiming it was all about the movie and how they didn’t want homeless enforcers like us in town. We managed to whip them, and they ran. But that incident isn’t the one that got us in the paper. The next week, the same guys started in on a friend of ours named Sol.
Sol came through the neighborhood every summer. We shared meals. He spent summers in Seattle and winters in Mount Shasta City. His whole life was walking up and down the 101 with his shopping cart full of books, blankets and survival gear. Sol’s a happy guy, not all there, and friendly to everybody.
The bullies found Sol one Saturday night just before the 4th of July. They put firecrackers in his cart and knocked him over, scraping his face bloody on the pavement. One kicked him so hard he cried out. Griff and me chased them down. Griff was faster than me, and he caught the youngest one and broke his nose before I could get him off the kid.
The next morning, Patricio rolled by in a cop car. They almost never used cars in our area—they walked or rode bikes. A car was bad news. Especially in the crack between night and dawn. That was the time they came after people they thought might be dangerous, so they could startle them awake and contain them.
When they passed me going the other way, Griff was hunched in the back, his drone following the car.
They must have had an alert set on the raw-footage stream for cop cars, since Windy called me about a minute later. By that afternoon, she’d found me a pro bono lawyer.
There were reporters in the courtroom when I showed up with footage we had spent two weeks stringing together. It started with Sol and his cart, and us talking. Sol was asking how we’d been that winter, and talking about a cat he’d adopted for three weeks. He had a heart the size of the sky, and we were able to show that. We cut to the firecrackers, and then to a great shot of the same kid Griff had beaten up knocking Sol down.
It didn’t get Griff all the way off. He’d assaulted a rich boy, and not even Seattle is fair enough to ignore that. But the judge only put him in County for twenty days, with a work detail at Alki Beach. I took the bus and sat where I could watch him a few days, just so he remembered he had friends. Even so, he kept to himself for a week after they let him out.
Ginger’s college student dug up enough money for the kids to have new backpacks going into fourth grade. Her room-mate sent them pens and paper.
Two buildings got knocked down in the neighborhood, but they weren’t any of the ones we were living in, so mostly we enjoyed watching the big wrecking balls and the twisted rebar and tried not to breathe too much of the dust.
* * *
Fall in Seattle is mostly yellow-orange leaves, light wind, and cool drizzle. Windy had told us to be free on the second Saturday in October, and so me and Griff and Ginger and the kids all waited in front of the warehouse in our warmest and driest clothes.
Windy Smith picked us up in a huge car, big enough for all of us, Madison, George (Griff’s student) and Shahid. We hadn’t seen them in person in months. Madison and Ginger greeted each other like old friends, and George acted so still and uncomfortable that my suspicions about Griff not quite bonding with a stranger became certainty.
Shahid looked like he’d swallowed a sugarfly, almost bouncing in his seat, which faced toward us. His enthusiasm affected the kids, who started bouncing as well, and earned Shahid a thick look from Ginger. They took us to the Arboretum by Lake Washington.
I’d been before, and so had Griff, but Ginger, amazingly, must have never seen it. She walked around, one hand in each child’s hand, looking at everything: water and waterlilies, ducks, golden fall trees, the high arches of the 520 freeway. Salate skipped and Emil kept trying to look in every direction at once. The park smelled of water and of fall, and a cool wind pinked our cheeks.
Windy led us to a parking lot under a big banner with “Seattle Hack for Homelessness” in red words on a blue background. There must have been three hundred people there. We recognized the old woman who lived in Discovery Park from the video, and I was greeted by two of the reporters who had been in court the day we kept Griff from getting a felony conviction.
A band played the soft wailing folk that had become the new Seattle sound.
People introduced themselves to us like they knew us. News drones flitted everywhere. A young man handed us shirts with the event logo on it, which was a sort of tent strung between trees.
Ginger stayed near me and Griff. Even the kids stayed close. Madison followed.
So did our drones. That was good; I could watch the video later and catch things I was too tired or too distracted to remember.
We passed booth after booth. We found a game meant to teach homeless people financial acumen, free links to crowdsourced education that got Ginger all excited, a food and vitamin paste that tasted like oranges, and a wristband that promised to transmit our vital signals to a computer that would alert local nurses if we got sick. All of that in the first row of booths.
By midafternoon, the kids had worn down, and I left Ginger on a bench and went to find Windy. “Can we rest in the car?”
She smiled as if she had been waiting for the question. “I have something better.”
“What?”
She stood up. “Follow me. Bring Ginger and Griff and everyone.”
“Well, then stay here,” I said. “Don’t move.” It took half an hour before we were all in one place.
“This is the best part,” Windy said. “I can’t wait to show you.”
But then I was sure anyplace quiet would be the best part.
To my surprise, we got that. Behind everything, there was a table near a flat, grassy clearing. Two reporters stood at the edge of the lawn under a cedar tree, clearly waiting.
Windy looked full of import. She handed me a box the size of a lunch pail. It weighed about ten pounds. She talked me through opening latches on its sides, and giving it commands. Griff stood back, and Salate clutched his hand, watching. Emil had fallen asleep on his mom’s shoulder, so he missed the whole process.
A white tent as tall as me assembled itself out of the box. “It goes back in, too,” Windy said. “It takes about the same amount of time.” She held open the door. It looked gossamer thin but resisted the wind almost the way a sail did, resolutely and firmly. Ginger went in first. All of us fit inside. “It’s warm,” Ginger said, relief edging her voice.
“It’s solar,” Windy explained. “And it starts charged. As soon as you put it up, it’s warm.”
“I like it.” Salate bounced on the clean floor.
Windy poked her head in. “These are adapted from a set-up designed for mountain climbers at base camps. That’s why the weight and environmental control are so good.”
She ducked back out and then came right back in, handing in two smaller brick-shaped objects. “There’s been a team from the university working on these for almost a year,” she said. “It works kind of like the tent. See if you can figure it out.”
Ginger had her arms full of children, so Griff and I each took one. They turned into mattresses.
“How did you get all this stuff?” Ginger asked Windy from right inside of a tent door. “It’s so clever.”
“People like a challenge,” she said. “We gave away prizes for the best ideas. People had to watch the video and then they could help. You see all the people here?”
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br /> Ginger poked her head out and looked around. “Yes.”
“This is just folks from here and Vancouver that helped. There’s people from all over the world.”
Ginger’s eyes widened.
“Rest,” Windy said, laughing warmly, obviously still excited. “I’ll come get you for dinner.”
The tent felt too personal for Griff and me to stay inside, so we shut Ginger and the kids in so they could nap, and sat outside the tent like guards. Mostly we were quiet, both inside ourselves, thinking. I found the whole thing overwhelming and fascinating. Why did people in faraway places care about us?
Eventually, the sun sent slanted golden rays across the park and threw our shadows long behind us and made the tent look like a tower on the ground between our shadowselves.
The kids emerged, Emil crying for a bathroom. Ginger and I took both kids through the crowd to the park bathrooms. Right next to the traditional bathrooms, the kids found a pair of experimental portapotties that would—an excited-nerdy graduate student who made me wince promised—change human waste into pure water, then convert easily into a cozy shower. They said it would be great for people like us and for villages and campsites everywhere.
“Yuck.” Salate wrinkled her nose, hesitated, and then washed her hands with the reclaimed water. After, she pestered the eager student with questions. Watching Salate patiently ask the student to explain the whole process to her, I realized Ginger might have a budding geek on her hands.
Pulling Salate and her brother away—what is it with kids and their fascination with poop?—we found Windy by the fire. A feast had been laid out on two picnic tables. Windy helped Ginger manage three plates. I made one for Griff and took it to him out by the odd magical tent. When I got back and made my own plate, Windy asked, “What do you think?”
“I’m pretty amazed.”
She looked proud. “The model is extensible. We have thirty-five more people paired with drones and volunteers now.”
She swept her hand expansively toward the tables of offering. “Is this stuff useful?”
“Some of it is. You really did do a lot,” I said.