it at the next group meeting. I mean, I’m bringing the link cables and the hard drive anyway for Carlton.”
“What’s he talking about?” said Joey.
Jeanette said, “Okay. Joey and I will discuss this..,” she turned to her sister and nodded very slowly as she spoke, “and we will get back to you. I’ll text you. Or call, maybe.”
“Yes, sure, whatever! Any time! Have a good trip — or at least as good as is reasonably possible given the circumstances..,”
She grinned out the window. “Thanks. We’ll be fine.”
“Can I see you before the next meeting?”
“If you’re sure you aren’t mad at me anymore.”
“No, not at all,” Milton said, haltingly. “I overreacted. I owe you a big mea culpa on that. And I’d like to see you again, as soon as you’re up for it.”
“—What’s he saying?”
Jeanette batted her hand at the air. “I would too. For sure. But, Steven, can I ask you something?”
“Yes?”
“You promise this back-up thing won’t hurt her? Like, there’s zero risk she’ll lose anything?”
“Back-up?”
“Absolutely. This procedure is completely safe. Again, LifeMedia has no access to, nor control over, the contents of a client’s mind. All I can do is check the hardware and get it running better. And that’s what we’ll do. She’ll feel so much better, I promise.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you. I’ll text you,” Jeanette said, and tapped her phone off.
By then Joey was glowing red-orange like an ember and demanding to know what was going on. She spoke in a crackling, severe voice that sounded more automated than usual.
“What was he saying? What does he want to do?”
Jeanette explained as they crossed the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
Lily whispered in the periphery of Joey’s consciousness.
She was fuming with anger. Joey could feel it, churning like stomach acid in her esophagus.
she messaged.
Joey released a few private LifeMedia emails to Lily’s drive. They had automatically downloaded into her own hard drive earlier that morning.
From:
[email protected] To: [BCC]
Subject: Peoria Samples
Hey everybody,
I just ran a fresh diagnostic on the secondary consciousness samples at the Peoria and Baltimore warehouses and it looks like there are some marked cognitive declines, particularly as regards cognitive fluency and task-shifting, though as we all know the recall problems are the same as they were before. Maybe a little worse, definitely there’s slower retrieval times and less overt recall (recognition seems to have not declined? I’ll have to talk to the Doc’s about how to measure that).
Accordingly, I for one propose that we move these folks into external vessels or something. Giving them some external stimulation should stave off the deterioration and might help allay some of the emotion-regulation issues we’ve been anticipating…thoughts?
-Ted
From:
[email protected] To: [BCC]
Subject: Re: Peoria Samples
No, we can’t take the back-ups outside. As Ted just mentioned, the ancillary minds are not emotionally regulating properly. Look at the doctors’ reports, everyone, and you’ll see how disturbed these samples are getting. It’s a major liability to let them loose. We can’t risk it just for the sake of salvaging some of their rudimentary memory skills and etc.
-Dani
From:
[email protected] To: [BCC]
Subject: Re: Re: Peoria
Dani, by ‘rudimentary memory skills and etc”, don’t you mean those people’s SANITY?
-M
From:
[email protected] To: [BCC]
Subject: Re: Re: Re
What I mean is that these back-up consciousness’s would prove insufficient replacements in the event that any of their BrightBox users suffered a terminal hard drive failure. Read the doctor’s report. Honestly, I think it would be best and most humane to terminate this wing of the project, but obviously we are bound to hold onto these subject’s records just in case. It’s highly unfortunate, though. We’re wasting an immense amount of space and effort attending to the needs of some miserable, corrupted files.
-Dani
From:
[email protected] To: [BCC]
Subject: Skeletal-Augment Peripherals for Peoria Samples
Dani, et al:
Why don’t we just put these corrupted files into the skeletal samples or the holograms? Our beta-testers can obviously speak to the utility of such a tactic. We might be able to make some questionably drinkable lemonade out of these lemons, still.
I think we should talk to Carlton about this.
-Ted
Lily said.
Joey said, and sent another file. Lily’s temper immediately cooled and her attention pulled away from Joey, into the documents.
From: [redacted]
To:
[email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected] Subject: Network
Hey guys,
So I’ve been having some issues with my Box-to-Box networking upgrades. Namely, there’s a lot of interference. What I’m wondering is… are the ancillary minds hooked up in some way? I know we have a lock on them and they’d have no way of navigating the interface since we didn’t install them with drivers…and since they’re kinda bonkers…but it sure seems like they’re making an attempt to access our network.
We’ll have more and more issues the longer this goes on. Myself especially, for obvious reasons. I think a meeting is in order—when will you all be at our branch next?
And, by the by: I’ll tell Ted to leave Carlton alone. I’m sorry about that.
-[redacted]
In the car, Joey’s BrightBox had cooled to a bright blue and Jeanette had finished explaining Milton’s proposition. After a long pause, Joey said, “That sounds like a good plan. Tell Milton we’ll give it a try.”
23.
Jeanette pulled the rental car onto a hill behind the church and stepped over the wrought-iron fence into the cemetery. Finding the grave was easy; it was as though no time had passed since the funeral at all.
She sat Joey and the box of ashes on a headstone and knelt before a rectangle of dark blue marble. There was no one in the church parking lot. The community wasn’t the type where people walked from place to place— not anymore. Sinnamahonig’s native population had aged in their cabins and trailers, and withered, and been carted off by relatives to hospices and senior care homes all over the state. The community was all campers now— people who drove in wide SUVs to newly-built lodges, who didn’t walk or explore the gravesites.
Jeanette had bought a spade with a floral handle from a Kmart fifty miles back. She darted her head around the cemetery once more before kissing the grass with it, and Joey began playing Regina Spektor’s “Lacrimosa”.
“We keep on burying our dead. / We keep on planting their bones in the ground. / But they don’t grow, the sun doesn’t help. / The rain doesn’t help.”
Jeanette was afraid of digging too far. She’d been there, she’d seen the coffin edged into a hole the height of a grown man, but she doubted the stability of the wet dirt and the hills that hugged the earth, serpentine ridges running along the Appalachias. It seemed anything could have disturbed the turf and pushed their mother out. Jeanette’s eyes itched and she rubbed them with the elbow of her blouse.
Joey was tracking the atmospherics. “Won’t rain for hours, take as long as you like,” she said when the song was done.
“Oh sure, I’ll really savor it then,” Jeanette said.
Sinnamahonig had rattlers. It had bears and elk. They would have loved the town as children. They could have spent summers scissor-kicking in the creek, building dams from rocks and fallen logs, catching crawfish and tadpoles and carrying them around in plastic buckets. These were all acti
vities their mother had raved about when she was in a wistful mood.
Once, she had promised them a vacation in the hills. Once, she had promised them her childhood home. But she hadn’t left it to them.
“Do you think he comes by here a lot?” Joey asked. Jeanette knew that she meant their mother’s husband.
“I bet he promised to visit every day,” she said. “But that probably didn’t last, you know?”
“Well, I wouldn’t begrudge him that. It doesn’t make any difference if he stopped coming.”
“Sure it does. If he doesn’t come, that means…he doesn’t need to come.”
“But what difference does it make?”
“None, of course. Of course none.” Jeanette pulled a worm from the hole and sat it in the grass a few feet away. “But I’d like him better if he was so overcome with grief that he needed to be near her. Doesn’t that mean something? Just a smidgen?”
Joey’s white surface was glowing a faint yellow the color of the sun. She said, “But you won’t be close to my grave. What’s the difference?”
All she could see of Jeanette was her feet and her shoulders leaning into the hole. “It’s different. Having it close would,