“Right here,” Agatha said. She led us up the walkway and brushed her hand over a silver box next to the door. The door swung inward. “Come on in. Make yourselves at home. I’ll get us some lemonade.”
The hallway was cool and dark. It was painted a pale blue and lined with pictures. Pictures of bees, of scientists in lab coats, of Old Harmonie in the old days. Then there was Baba, looking right back at me. Smiling. I wanted to believe that she was telling me I was safe here. That we all were.
Mouse, Amnah, and Tommy were already in the kitchen. I could hear their voices coming down the hall. Tommy told her that they were from South Concord, and Amnah said that yes, lemonade would be great. With Theo and Ilana in front of me, though, I couldn’t see the kitchen until I stepped into it. When I did, my vision swirled.
Yellow walls. White cabinets. Tile floor.
It was exactly the same as the kitchen in number 9. Exactly. Right down to the bright curtains on the window above the deep, white porcelain sink. My legs tingled and then gave way as the lights went out around me.
Ilana’s and Theo’s faces were inches from my own. My retina camera whirred as it tried to bring them into focus.
“Too close,” I mumbled.
They sat back a little bit. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“It’s this room—” I began, then shook my head. I still felt groggy.
Ilana looped her arm around me and pulled me up to a sitting position.
Dr. Varden squatted down next to me, gently pushing Theo out of the way. She put her hands on my cheeks and stared right into my eyes. “I’m afraid this is all a little too much.” She turned to Ilana. “Help her into a chair.”
Ilana carefully tugged me to my feet and guided me over to a chair.
Off to the side, Amnah, Mouse, and Tommy stood silently. Of course I’d gone and embarrassed myself in front of them. And Dr. Varden. She opened a bottle of water and placed it down in front of me. “Sip slowly,” she instructed.
I did as she said.
“So you’ve been in my house on Firefly Lane?” she asked.
I nodded. I was sweating all over. Cold sweat from head to toe.
“She always wanted to go in,” Theo explained. “We told her not to, but then—”
“And what did you find in there?” Dr. Varden asked.
Theo and I exchanged a look. “Mori found a robobee,” Ilana told her.
“Prince Philip, yes,” Dr. Varden said.
Theo drummed his fingers on the table.
“Did you go onto the computer?” she asked.
I sighed. Theo said, “Yes, we did.”
“I know we aren’t supposed to use other people’s technology, but Julia booted it up and we started looking and—” I glanced over at Ilana. I couldn’t say out loud what we had found on the computer.
“Official files rarely tell the whole story,” Dr. Varden said.
“So what is the whole story?” Ilana asked.
Dr. Varden, though, shook her head. “In time. Look at you all. You’re filthy and tired. We already had a slump from little Mori. Plus, my goodness, is that a bandage on your hand? Have you been hurt?”
I squeezed my hands shut. “It’s fine.”
“Well, it ought to be cleaned. I think I can find some clothes for you all.” She looked at Ilana and Theo. “Even, perhaps, for the giants amongst you. There are bathrooms on the second and third floors—a shower in each of them.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I told her, my voice sounding far stronger than I felt. “We need to make sure Ilana is safe.”
Dr. Varden rose to her feet. “I’ll gather those clothes and you get cleaned up and then we can talk about our plans, okay? There’s no sense making a plan when your brain isn’t at full capacity.”
I shook my head. This didn’t seem right. But Ilana said, “She’s taking care of us. We need to do this her way, all right?”
Since Ilana was the one in real danger, I agreed.
The shower felt like summer rainstorms, cool and warm and strong and soft all at once. It stung my open blisters and the cut on my hand at first, but that gave way to a low ache, and the clean wound really wasn’t so bad. I let the water rush over me and watched as brown pooled at my feet. I had been covered in sand and silt and even old charred coal from the train tracks. With my skin clean, I could see the insect bites that dotted my skin like red, raised freckles.
When I got out, I wrapped myself in a warm, thick towel, then put on the oatmeal-colored linen sundress that Dr. Varden had left for me. I did feel much better, more like myself, but also like I was in a play. My skin smelled odd to me, like the lemon soap I had used to wash myself. The dress was a strange costume, made all the more strange because my friends were clad in similar flowing, washed-out-colored clothing. Theo looked the most out of place in his sleeveless shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons and pants that fell just below his knees, all in a pale avocado color.
Ilana, of course, looked like the clothes were made for her: a simple sundress like my own, but in a pale blue-green that matched her eyes and made them flash.
They were all in Dr. Varden’s living room: Mouse and Amnah on the couch in matching short-sleeved shirts, Tommy on a chair that reminded me of Theo’s furniture back home. Theo himself stood by the window, his gaze trained outside. Ilana sat on the floor next to Agatha. Together, they looked at a photo album.
“There she is,” Agatha said. “I worried you drowned.”
“It’s a nice shower,” I said. Then, because no matter the situation, I knew to be polite, I said, “Thank you for letting me use it. And for the dress.”
“Your great-grandmother always loved dresses. She always had a new dress or skirt. Pretty ones with big, bold patterns.”
“Flowers made her happy.” Baba had always loved fresh flowers. She kept her small apartment full of them, and every time we came to visit, Dad and I would make a bouquet for her. I remembered sitting in a KritaCar, holding the vase carefully so the water didn’t spill. And I remembered the smile that came over her face when she opened the door and I peeked through the flowers at her.
Dr. Varden turned the page, then activated a holopic of Baba. She stood right in a field of wildflowers. Beside her, a small child—my grandmother, I realized—blew the seeds of a dandelion. Behind them was a chain-link fence woven through with ribbons whose tails fluttered in the breeze. On the other side of the fence were tall trees, oaks and pines. “Wait,” I said. “That’s our fence. Out in the woods past Firefly Lane.”
“More or less,” Agatha replied.
“She’s standing in Oakedge,” I said to Ilana. “But where are all the trees?”
“Beneath her feet,” Agatha said.
I shook my head. The topsy-turvy feeling was coming over me. “No way,” I said. “Those are old-growth trees. And that picture was taken, when? Sixty, seventy years ago, max.”
Amnah stood up and started walking along the edge of the room. She pulled back the gauzy curtain and peered out the window.
“Sixty-seven, to be precise,” Dr. Varden said. “And you’re right. They are old-growth. Cut them down and you’ll count a hundred fifty rings, maybe more. It was a side project of your great-grandmother’s. Reforestation. Trees would grow more quickly at first, then level off. She made it work, too.”
“Like the sculptures,” I said, thinking of the smiling trees.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Theo challenged.
“You’ve probably never heard of a lot of what we did.”
“But that’s major,” Theo said. I stared at my baba, young and happy in the field of wildflowers, the trees ready to push their way through the soil below her. As always, it filled me with a mix of awe and insignificance. She’d done so much. Theo kept talking: “Rapid reforestation could be global. Even right here in Boston. If we planted more trees down by the flooded areas, they’d absorb the excess water. And in the rainforests—everywhere. The trees could’ve slowed down climate
change.”
“That’s exactly what Lucy thought,” Agatha said.
“So what happened?” Tommy asked. “Did something go wrong? Did the trees grow so mammoth that they swallowed whole cities?”
“Nothing like that. It worked very well. I’m sure Mori can attest to that if she’s been out in that forest. If anything, it worked too well.”
“How can something work too well?” Tommy asked. “Let me tell you, when my spit solution takes off, there will never be enough spit.”
“It worked and so Krita tried to take advantage of it, right?” Amnah asked from the window. “What? Did they set up whole forests of it just to cut it down?”
“Precisely,” Dr. Varden said.
“How’d you know that?” Tommy asked.
“Because that’s how Krita operates.”
“You’re not wrong about Krita, Amnah,” Agatha said. “But cast your net a little wider. Greed goes beyond one corporation, however large it may be.”
Ilana sat curled up with her knees to her chest. She stared at the holopic of my great-grandmother, too. All of us sat so still in our simple clothing, sipping lemonade like this was a weekly visit to our relatives. It was so easy to fall into complacency, but the little twitch-tap of Ilana’s foot on the floor reminded me that this was not the truth. “This isn’t why we’re here,” I said. “I can learn about my great-grandmother at home.”
“Why are you here, little Mori?”
“You know! We need your help.”
“Ilana needs my help,” Agatha said.
“Yes,” Ilana said. “I do.”
I stepped closer to Agatha. “They want to scuttle her. She didn’t work out the way they wanted and so they want to get rid of her. But that’s not how science works, right? That’s what Baba always said. That when it doesn’t work, it’s a chance to make it better. It’s a responsibility. And anyway, that’s not what people do to each other. You don’t get rid of people because they’re inconvenient to you.”
Theo stepped away from the window. He came up next to me and put his hand on my arm. “We need someone to convince them that they’re making a mistake. Or someone to take care of her,” he said. “We need someone to help her.” His voice cracked. His hand slipped down, and I clasped it in my own. With my other hand, I reached toward Ilana. She stood, and took it.
“Just look at you three,” Agatha said, and shook her head.
We must have looked odd, standing there in her living room holding hands, but I wasn’t letting go until I was sure Ilana was safe.
“It’s best, I think, to go back to the beginning in cases like this,” Agatha said. She stood up herself and went to the bookshelf, where she removed another album. “I’m not sure you even understand what you are, child. I’m not sure any of you do.” She put the album down without opening it. “Lucy always said that scientists needed open minds to dream big, but common sense to hold themselves to the ground. It’s actually a hard combination to find. I didn’t always have it, but she kept me in check. If you don’t have someone to keep you in check, then you muck about and make messes you can’t clean up. Even when you think you’ve cleaned them up, they come back.”
Ilana stiffened, but she didn’t look away from Agatha.
“She’s not a mess to be cleaned up,” I said.
Dr. Varden turned to look at me. Her eyes were bright and flashing. “Isn’t that why you came to me? To clean it up again?”
“She’s not going to help,” Amnah said. Her voice was low and quiet. Beside her, Mouse shook her head. She knew, too.
“Of course she’s going to help,” I said. “She has to. She owes Ilana and she owes me.”
“Owe you?” Dr. Varden asks.
“Yes. Because of Baba. You broke her heart when you left. So I think you owe me this much.”
“Perhaps,” Dr. Varden agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I can do whatever you need me to. You might as well have shown up here and asked me for a unicorn.”
“You could make a unicorn if you wanted, I bet,” I said.
This made Dr. Varden smile, and I saw the woman I had studied in history books and in the museums. “Would you like a unicorn, then?”
“No,” I said. “I want you to help Ilana.”
“I already have,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve been trying to help all along, for what it’s worth. They never listen.” She spun the ice cubes around in her glass and watched as they clinked together.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“My parents,” Ilana said. “My so-called parents.”
Dr. Varden shook her head. “Your parents actually did listen to most of my advice. They were the most reasonable. That’s the first way I helped you. I chose them. Other people on the project were less reasonable.”
“If she’s a Krita project, why were you involved?” I asked.
“Not everyone who works for Krita lives in Old Harmonie. There are contractors. Special projects. A back-and-forth. Things that need to be out of sight.”
“A pipeline,” Amnah said, glancing at Tommy.
“People at MIT?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, the university, wisely, was not involved in this project. It was just me,” she said. “I went to Krita’s lab in Boston.”
Mouse tugged on one of her curls. Tommy said, “Hold up. Start from the beginning. Who are we talking about? What are we talking about?”
There was a buzzing noise and Dr. Varden pulled a round disk out of the pocket of her apron. Her face darkened. “Bah,” she said, dropping the disk back into her pocket.
“What was that?” Theo asked.
“One of the students at the lab,” she replied. “Wanted to know if she should go ahead and sequence the DNA on a flower we’re developing. She couched it all in concern about how tired I must be and how surely I needed rest.” She shook her head. “They can’t comprehend how someone as old as me can function.”
Amnah leaned in. “So that was a work message?”
“Yes.”
Amnah and Theo exchanged a look.
Dr. Varden sipped her lemonade and said, “I think I made this a little too sweet. My honey was a little richer, a little less sugary. You’ve tasted it?”
I glanced over at Ilana. “The Firefly Five in the Honey Hangout,” Ilana said.
“I figured you’d find my stash.”
“It’s all gone now,” Theo said, his voice icy. “They burned your house down.”
Dr. Varden hesitated, but then she put her glass down on top of a marble coaster on a small table. It was next to a dish full of sea glass. Condensation dripped down and pooled on the coaster. Silence filled the room.
Finally, she sat down on a high-backed chair. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at each of us in turn.
“Here’s the story. Listen closely.”
21
“Alana started as a lark. I suppose you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.” Dr. Varden sat back in her seat and spoke more to the ceiling than to us. Ilana and I took seats on the sofa, still holding hands. Theo stood behind us.
“I had been working on AI for so long, focused on the animals. I kept dancing around human intelligence. People used to joke that if the computers could think for themselves, they would take over, and I wondered if that was true. I wondered if the computers could ever think for themselves or if our programming would always show through. I considered what we had: the AI that could have conversations, those that could diagnose health problems, those that could do basic things for you by voice commands. I started to build the brain. And once you have a brain, you need a vessel. It was just supposed to be a doll. No more than the chat machines. But the thing is, when you’re in the project, when you’re in the middle of it, it becomes all about solving the problem in front of you, or figuring out the next thing you can do.
“Well, what if, I thought, what if she could do more than just respond? What if she could start a topic? And then came memory.
Computers have always stored memories, but it became about accessing them, all the connections that people have so that one memory leads to another, not like a chain of dominoes or a series of commands, but like a web that she could access at any point. Could I do that? And it turns out I could. I did. I got the memories from the daughter of one of my colleagues. First it was something simple. I got her to tie her shoes. And then from there, other memories. A birthday party. Jumping waves at the beach.”
Ilana nodded. Were those memories that she had?
Dr. Varden took another sip of her lemonade. “What else? What else could I do? What else could she do? Could I fool someone into thinking she was a real girl? That would be a feat, wouldn’t it? Maybe even prize-worthy. So I worked on and on.
“Lucy told me I was in too deep. And I told her she was being small-minded, and of course I’d considered all the negative consequences. So I brought Alana to a real birthday party. With real kids. And she didn’t last ten minutes before those kids knew something was up. They wouldn’t talk to her. And I tried one-on-one groups. And I tried her with adults. No one could get past the uncanny valley.”
I remembered the file on the computer, the other projects that had been abandoned because they were almost perfectly realistically human—but still a tiny gap, and that gap was creepy.
“I was thinking I was a failure. That my project had sunk. All that time. All that money. But then I was sitting in the lab with Alana and she says to me, ‘Aggie, I’m lonely.’”
Next to me, Ilana shuddered.
Dr. Varden glanced at her, then kept telling her story. “The worst of it was, my first thought was, I did it! She feels. But then almost immediately, my heart sank because I realized what I had done. And I had to shut the project down. That’s when I moved out to Old Harmonie full-time.
“I was happy there for a while. I worked with animals again, and the food supply, and my bees. Those bees, they confounded me. Where were they all going? Were they really all dying? And if so, how? I dug right in. Deeper and deeper. I tried to keep perspective. Lucy had the idea of the robobees teaching the natural bees what to do. I didn’t even think about what the problems might be. I was in too deep again.
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