Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  For my part, I figured out how to hack our films to make them untraceable, allowing us to start hitting houses with better security, as well as hacking Syd’s CPN uplink so she’d send out old footage every time she was casing a house or running surveillance for us. A big weight lifted from my chest, too, when I was able to crack into the film of the girl who’d seen me after robbing the Hoffmans and delete both the footage and the metadata. So many parents just had their children’s cams running non-stop now to guard against kidnapping, and they were always trawling up small things that turned into big things by virtue of record.

  I also began learning French, requisitioning Mr. Jefferson as a conversational partner and then switching the language setting on Wolftac R8 once I really started getting the hang of it. To free up more time I quit everything that I hadn’t already—future Leaders and Big Brothers—leaving only track (part of our alibi), and then proceeded to dazzle Mom and Dad with such a disorienting show of excuses, white lies, and random achievements that their disapproval melted first into acquiescence and then into awe.

  Even though I still intermittently hung out with Chris and Michael to keep up appearances, it was as though there was a membrane around my mind now that rendered their words inert. I still liked them and everything, but they were like old middle grade books where you’d get several pages in and realize you were too old for this type of thing now.

  I was confident, though, that in time I’d be able to catch them all up, reaching back across the gulf and pulling through anything initially sacrificed.

  Jaden was a different story. While our estrangement grew deeper, it seemed as though we’d begun to share a common, wordless tongue that helped me understand him better. I’d feel something drafting out of his room, touching the back of my neck as I passed. At dinner, his eyes bored into me. The silence said everything, spreading out across the table, creating a space so dead that even Mom and Dad, with their remarkable capacity for small talk, fell silent.

  Eventually, that is. At first, unable to bear the hostile quiet, they tossed increasingly superfluous topics into the void. Mom rattled on about how some home furnishings would start being covered by BASIC, about rumors that Coach Palmer had been facial-rec’d with an underage girl, and about a troubled daughter of a colleague who’d gotten hooked on stamps but claimed to be happier and was regaining her figure after an anorexia-driven weight loss.

  Mom, who was a curious blend of thoughtful and frivolous, had recently softened her hard line against stamps after seeing a study that her own HHS office had conducted, connecting them to a declining suicide rate. Dad said that it was like cheating on a test: You might end up with a higher happiness score, but that didn’t make you more knowledgeable about it. Things would just sputter on between them until they exhausted their source material or Jaden and I left the table. The talk, after all, was just for us.

  I used to fret over such questions: whether Mom and Dad still loved each other, if Jaden was okay or not, making progress at school. But nowadays they all seemed so . . . remote. They were like specks on the ground, everything just getting smaller and farther away as I kept getting more Revised. I still cared, but it was a distant, removed caring like the kind you feel when you read about victims of some faraway disaster.

  But last night Mom had brought up something that was like a sudden, unexpected hand on your shoulder, asking if we’d heard about the recent spate of local robberies. I’d been chewing some mashed sweet potatoes, and I stopped and let them sit in my mouth as I tried to process what she’d just said. Robberies? Jesus Christ. If people had started reporting stuff missing, we were fucked. There were so many cameras around with footage that could be pulled and triangulated.

  “They’re happening nearby, too. Just regular houses on nice streets from what I can tell.”

  I was about to swallow and ask what they took, but Jaden beat me to it.

  “It sounds like everything,” Mom answered. “Mrs. Fletcher said they even take things you wouldn’t think to, like copper wire and old parts from the garage. All kinds of junk.”

  “Wow,” said Dad. “I was under the impression that crime wasn’t really a thing here anymore. All that smart policing and such.”

  “Do they have any leads?” I asked, as nonchalantly as possible.

  “No one seems to have heard anything. Mrs. Fletcher claims that it’s thugs from the city migrating out this way, but she’s always saying ra . . . things like that. Anyhow, I want you guys to be extra careful and on the lookout, okay?”

  “Okay, Mom,” Jaden and I said, somewhat together. It was good it wasn’t Ethan and I they were on to. We’d never taken anything like that stuff, but it was awful timing because of all the extra scrutiny it would draw to the neighborhood. I wanted to rush up to my room and search for link articles. How long had it been going on? How much did they know? I was about ready to carry my plate over to the sink when I realized I should wait at least another minute so it wouldn’t seem suspicious.

  “Vigilance is always advised, of course, but a little perspective can go a long way when reading the news,” offered Mr. Jefferson. “I’m obliged to mention that the property crime rate in this suburb is still only 3 incidents per 1000 residents which is 63.5% less than the national median and 78.3% less than it was ten years ago. If you extrapolate this trajectory, in another ten years, there won’t be any.”

  “Yeah, too many eyes. Films. Drones. You’d be pretty stupid to try anything,” said Jaden. He was looking at Mom and Dad, but it was weird how he said it—like the words were changing direction mid-flight, heading for me. “Besides, if you wanted to rob someone, might as well do it in VR. All of the thrill, and none of the consequences.”

  “Jaden, you shouldn’t rob anyone anywhere.”

  “Well . . . I mean, yeah, but people are still people, so it’s probably good for them to have a place to go nuts or something if they’re having the urge. Right, Mr. Jefferson?”

  “It has been shown in eighty-four peer-reviewed studies dating back to 1998 that venting in a virtual space can keep negative emotions from manifesting themselves in a real one.”

  “See, Mom,” said Jaden.

  I wanted to say something about society just papering over its problems, but I felt too queasy. I just wanted to get out of there. Everything had been going so well and that progress had made all the details in the world fade into the background in contrast. It had been someone else’s news. Someone else’s issue. And they couldn’t touch us because we were apart from all the bickering and pettiness and violence—trying to transcend—driving towards something better.

  Then this one, random thing comes out of nowhere, and threatens to make all the hundreds of hours of work and planning we’ve done for naught.

  “I hope those aren’t the kinds of sims you’ve been playing.”

  “No. Jeez, Mom. I mean, there’s shooting in some of them, but it’s a completely different world with lasers and stuff. Dorian’s the one who plays Wolftac R8, where it’s super realistic and you’re deceiving people and stealing these—”

  “It’s not that realistic,” I said, talking over him. “Besides, I don’t even play it anymore.”

  “Too busy, right?” asked Jaden.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  This was the last thing I wanted to talk about but, just as I was about to get up again, Dad said, “Where did you say those robberies were happening again, dear?”

  “Really close. Mrs. Fletcher mentioned the last one was over somewhere by Elm and Kettering, which is five . . . six blocks west of here, right? It’s scary but, like Jaden said, you’d think with all those drones out there something would’ve been recorded.”

  “You’d think,” said Dad. “They’re probably just sitting around in an archive somewhere. People’ll start checking now that it’s getting press.”

  I tried to look normal but could feel myself turn pale. I hadn’t bought the Revision yet for increased physiological regulation. There was so much
I still needed to get—especially now, if there were going to be people rooting around, asking questions.

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” I said, not able to wait any longer.

  Everyone looked at me.

  “You hardly touched your food,” said Mom. “How about a couple more bites?”

  “Couple more bites? I’m not five anymore. Jesus.”

  “Going to check your room and make sure nothing’s missing?” asked Jaden, raising his eyebrows. “You don’t have anything valuable in there do you?”

  Mom and Dad both looked at me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jaden,” I said, unsure of what he was trying to pull now. It had immediately dawned on me once I’d Revised just how horrible of an idea it’d been to involve him in any way whatsoever, and I’d begun regarding my prior self who’d made that decision not as a younger me, but as an unfortunate evolutionary waypoint I’d rather not think about. “I’m just going up to do homework.”

  “Oh, right. Of course. Maybe you could lock the front door on your way down, though. Might get pretty scary at night now, knowing someone’s on the loose,” Jaden said.

  “I don’t think they’re breaking in when anyone’s home,” said Mom.

  “I know, Mom,” replied Jaden, smiling insolently at me. “I just want us to be safe.”

  I had a sense of vertigo when I saw Mr. Bosworth in the hall. I knew he didn’t have PetPerspective, but his green eyes seemed to swallow me, transporting me to some pixelated fun house where I was either shrunk, plunging into a jungle of carpet, or hunching over to fit under a doorframe, dragged and dropped and resized. I didn’t want to see myself, but everything was a mirror. Everything was scrutinized. In fact, every time I’d seen an animal in the past couple of months I’d get this picture in my mind of some faceless person watching me and taking notes. It was nauseating. It was like I was caged in some travelling exhibit. I was the animal. And when I tried to calm myself by saying I was just being paranoid, my reasoning would catch on the fact that there was truth in it—there were cameras everywhere. And what Ethan and I had done, despite feeling like the only thing we could do, was breathtakingly risky.

  I opened my bedroom door and locked it behind me. Then I unlocked it. I didn’t want to act suspicious. Everything I did anymore was a result of some calculation of how suspicious it would look. How would it be perceived on playback? What conclusions would be drawn? Thoughts passing through so many filters that the end form was alien to its beginning.

  For instance, the last thing I wanted to do the other day was go to a show with Chris and Michael, but we’d always checked out new bands together and it might seem odd if I didn’t now. You needed to scatter those “regular teenager” data points out there for the algorithms to chew on. And the cherry was that the venue—The Near Miss—was over by Uncle Richard’s yard, and it’d be good to have alternative plausible reasons for being over on that side of town.

  And now with whatever was happening with these other robberies I’d have to deploy even more chaff—go to all the more trouble not to stand out.

  I turned on my workstation and immediately started parsing through link articles. Daytime Robbery Surprises Deer Lane Couple. Investigation in Local Heists Yields Few Clues. Police were questioning neighbors. Fuck. These weren’t streets we’d hit, but they were close. It was all close, even closer than what my parents had been saying. How could I not have known about this?

  “Police say that the Neumans’ house was burglarized somewhere between four and five p.m. November 8th.” That was the same day we’d hit the Van de Kamps, one street over. Jesus Christ. What kind of radius do police draw in these cases? I had no idea. The whole reason we’d started hitting homes was that there was such a focus on cybercrime and cryptocurrency theft that people didn’t have their guards up the same way about physical stuff anymore. You didn’t really hear that much about it.

  I had to tell Ethan. I was about to have my bug call him, but stopped. It was late. Given how volatile he could get, I didn’t want to freak him out. Especially since I was already freaked out. Contagious. No. I should calm down first. Do something to take my mind off this.

  But what? I’d never been saturated with fear like this before—at the Moores’ it had been sharp, and then it had been over. But this was open-ended, sinking into every thought; every moment was lined with the expectation of something terrible being around the next corner. It was all chemicals, like anything, but the problem was I’d need another Revision to get them optimized for this. And that would mean taking even more risk, which seemed insane given what was happening.

  I sat on my bed. Then I stood. Then I sat back down at my workstation. Nothing was helping. I rewatched the footage of Lena in the park for the eightieth time, and for a while it worked. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about how, if I got caught, I’d probably never see her again. The footage would be the closest I’d ever get. I was smarter than I’d been before, but the fear was crowding it out.

  Then I remembered Jaden’s words from dinner. “You don’t have anything valuable in there, do you?” He was always stirring the pot—trying to get what he wanted faster—but since everyone was going to be on the lookout now, that couldn’t happen. Things had to stay calm here. After puzzling out what to do for a few minutes, I grabbed the pollinator rebate credit out of my top drawer and headed toward the door.

  Just as I was leaving, I noticed a thin trail of ants crawling along the wall behind my workstation. Usually I just ferried them outside like I’d done with the spiders, but there were so many of them and they kept coming that it no longer seemed practical. So, after contemplating the ethics for another few seconds, I ripped out a page of my nanoscience lab book and smashed the column, tracing it down to the loose electrical outlet where it had started.

  Chapter 19

  “Jaden, you in there?” I knocked again. “Jaden?”

  “Yeah. Hold on a second.” I heard clicking, something snapping shut and shuffling feet. A few moments later he was at the door. “What is it?”

  “May I come in for a second?”

  “I’m pretty tired,” he said, letting his features droop and rotating his eyes upward as if fighting to stay awake.

  “You didn’t sound very tired at dinner.” After several seconds of him staying silent, expressionless, I continued, “I’m tired, too. We don’t have to talk long.”

  Very slowly, he slid the door the rest of the way open and stepped back, still holding my gaze. “Alright.”

  “What the hell was that, Jaden?” I asked as soon as the door was shut.

  “What was what?”

  “Don’t. You know what you did. “

  “Oh. You just seemed pretty jumpy about those robbers, so I was just giving you a hard time,” he answered, standing so close it felt like the room was shrinking. There was a low, whirring murmur and over his shoulder I could see Mr. Jefferson sitting on the bed, stroking Mr. Bosworth with one finger, the blue lights on his frame blinking in a slow, irregular mosaic.

  “You’re supposed to be helping me, not making me look more suspicious.”

  “You’re supposed to be helping me, too, but since that’s not happening, I’m not sure what it is you want me to do.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jaden, I told you it was going to take some time!” I snapped.

  This was tricky because I couldn’t afford to Revise Jaden if we were going to lay low for a while until the other robberies stopped. But more importantly was that even though I’d always planned to Revise away his psychopathy, now that I was Revised myself, I had doubts about whether he’d simply go along with that. Because even though Jaden talked about wanting more empathy, I couldn’t help but get the distinct sense that he liked just who he was, and only wanted to be sped up. And considering that Dr. Griswald—who seemed to speak Jaden’s language to a certain extent—would do the procedure, I couldn’t be sure that he’d end up with what he was supposed to. Obviously, I couldn’t
tell Jaden this, so I needed some way to stall him. “I’m not . . . I’m not sure it’s possible yet.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’ve researched it.”

  “So have I, and it seems possible.”

  “I mean . . . I don’t know. They’ve isolated some genes and part of the brain chemistry, but it’s tough to say what exactly does what. I’m not sure a neurologist would be willing to risk tampering with something so sensitive.”

  “How would you know what a neurologist would be willing to risk tampering with? It’s just a matter of finding the right one,” Jaden said.

  “I’m only guessing.”

  “And what exactly is it that made you start guessing differently from what you guessed a month ago?” he asked in his know-it-all voice.

  “I’ve done more research. I can send you the articles, but you’re going to want to access them on public terminals if you don’t want to get flagged.”

  Jaden raised his eyebrows and smirked. “Is that what you do . . . when you don’t want to get flagged?”

  “That’s how I’d do it if I were you.”

  “Well, here’s the thing, Dorian. I’m sick of being kept in the dark. And I’m sick of waiting. So, if you don’t make good on your promise now, I’m going to tell Mom and Dad everything.”

  “There is no everything.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Jaden, I’ve been working on a school project. I was worried Mom and Dad might not like it because it was . . . it was a little dangerous—I was using some toxic compounds—and you know how they are with stuff like that; we used to have to beg them to sign field trip waivers when we were kids. But now that I’ve made progress and worked out the safety issues, you know, I don’t think I need to tiptoe around anymore.”

  “Project?” There was a high frequency buzzing from the lighting fixture. “What kind of project is it?”

  “It’s for the science fair.”

  “The science fair?”