tell him all the problems you’re having”
“Fuck him. Fuck all of them,” Joey said. “They know what they’ve done. They did this shit on purpose. Why would you keep someone’s motor cortex intact when they don’t have a body to use it on?”
Jeanette thought back to the LifeMedia paperwork. “But you don’t have a motor cortex…They said they don’t upload that.”
“Well they goddamned did!” Joey sputtered, her voice diving down a register, gaining an edge. The BrightBox flickered between red and purple. “I can feel my fucking legs and arms and— shit! Did you get some crap on my camera? It’s all…smeary.”
“What?” Jeanette reached for a towel. “I don’t see anything on there— are you maybe hallucinating?”
Joey’s light blinked out. “That’s the problem, I’m not seeing shit!”
“You sound funny, Jose.”
“Well I feel fucking hilarious!”
Jeanette took her phone from the nightstand.
“Oh my god, get off his dick for one minute,” Joey yelled, “He can’t help you. Jesus, you people are so inefficient—”
“You people?”
“Yeah bitch, ‘you people’,” Joey said with an artificial-sounding snicker. “You slow, inefficient, emotional people.”
Jeanette pressed the phone to her cheek. It rang several times and delivered her to LifeMedia’s automated system.
“He’s not gonna help you! He did this to us! You people did this to us! You locked us up. You gave me motor control and no body to use it on. Why the shit…,”
“Stop,” Jeanette whispered, turning away.
Joey inhaled. “Unless they need beta-testers for the bodies they’re making. Holy shit. That must be it.”
Jeanette dropped the phone to her waist. Blue light was pulsing from the BrightBox again.
“Joey?”
“That’s it. They’re building a body. They’re keeping our brains’ intact so we can take it for a spin.”
Confusion rippled across Jeanette’s face. “What?”
The phone stopped ringing and Milton’s voice drifted from the speaker.
“Hi, Jeanette?”
“Steven, hey!”
“I’m so glad to hear from you. What’s up?”
“Uh. Yeah. Joey’s acting really weird…”
“Don’t tell him anything!” Joey shouted, a red light flaring across her surface.
“Weird how? Any personality changes?”
“Yes. Definitely yes. But also she just kinda, shut off? And then all her lights went on, in a big rainbow, and she screamed this crazy, piercing scream, like so loud they probably heard it down the hall…” She stared at the BrightBox, brow furrowed. “…and I think she can feel physical sensations. Like phantom limbs maybe?”
Milton was quiet. “What did she say?”
“She— I don’t know. She’s being crazy. But she can feel things. Her arms and legs. I know that much.”
“You fucking Cain,” Joey said in the strange, husky voice. “You fucking traitorous cunt.”
Jeanette held her breath and pulled the receiver close. “She’s not herself.”
“Jeanette, it’ll be okay. Just get her back as soon as possible, alright? I promise I’ll do everything I can.”
“Okay.”
Milton persisted, “But let me know if it gets any worse. And call me— don’t hesitate to call me— before you do anything rash.”
“What do you mean?” Jeanette said.
“I should tell you,” he said. Jeanette heard a door slamming on the other line. She listened to Milton’s feet hitting concrete and air rushing from his mouth into the receiver, like he was bounding up stairs. Finally he stopped and whispered into the phone, “Thompson killed himself this evening.”
“Huh?”
“Well. He was having a rough time adjusting, as you know…and he wasn’t good at dealing with adversity in general, as you’ve heard… And, yeah. He convinced his kids to dump him in a bathtub.”
“He’s gone?” Jeanette asked. “His Box—he’s ruined?”
Milton exhaled into the receiver. “Unfortunately, yes. The Box was completely obliterated, everything’s shot. We tried to recover his data, but it was submerged for too long…”
“So that’s it?”
“That’s it for him. Yeah. So sad…We’ll be doing a whole review in our offices, you know, documenting everything, but it’s pretty clear in this case. The guy always had suicide ideation, even before his upload. What a nightmare though.”
“Jesus.”
“Ask him about their backup files,” Joey said “Do it. Ask him if there’s another copy of Thompson they’ve got hidden somewhere.”
Jeanette ignored her. She said, “Okay. I got to go. I’ll let you know when we get back into town.”
“Take it easy.”
“Yeah. You too. Night.”
Jeanette flung herself onto the bed and into a fetal position. She peered at the Box. She tried to reflect on the things Joey had said, but found no pain. No will to cry. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe the alarm-clock-like contraption before her was losing its ability to emulate a person, or Jeanette was just losing her ability to feel the person dwelling in it.
“Joey, you’re sick,” was all she said.
She was nearly asleep when Joey’s voice returned, clear and high. It was the voice of college and adolescence and childhood; the voice of their mom and their dad mixed together, scrubbed of years.
Joey said, “There’s someone else inside me. We need to put him back where he belongs.”
25.
Carlton. Surname Avers. He’d been 76 when it happened, though he would’ve turned 78 the previous May. He worked for Samsung, then Skywalker Sound, had a brief stint at Google, and finally settled at LifeMedia, where he stayed for eight years before he kicked it. Had a big house on the edge of the forest reserve. From LifeMedia’s map program, it looked like a towering McMansion with two or three acres of long grass, dotted with trees.
“This is the place,” Joey said when Jeanette pulled into the drive.
Joey had seen thick oaks and bristly crabgrass. She’d smelled the sun tea and oil on Carlton’s hands. In her dream, there were birds in the sky, and hunting dogs in the neighboring yards, hounds with loose ears and faces that did better in big yards than in cities. There were branches dripping with honeysuckle and crab apple blossoms.
Joey recognized a boat lulling back and forth in a shallow backyard pond, which she had spied in the corner of her mind’s eye when Cartlon dropped to the ground, convulsing in her memory. Seeing it now, vomit and blood seemed to slosh up Cartlon/Joey’s throat.
Death was death was death. It didn’t matter that this death didn’t belong to her.
Andrea answered the door, barefoot in an apron, her hair tumbling down. When Jeanette had called her a few hours prior, she’d been unfazed.
“You girls are plenty welcome here,” she’d said.
Now with them standing in her doorway she seemed no more put out. Flour dusted her milky skin and the lap of her apron. She led Jeanette by hand into the sunroom.
Andrea kept Carlton on a windowsill, too. It was a remarkably bright day. Freshly-fallen snow was kicking extra light up from the ground. Carlton’s pyramidal BrightBox was illuminated by the sun but cast none of its own light.
“Hello again, Carlton,” Jeanette said as she eased into a high-backed chair.
“Hi there,” Joey said. Then she messaged Carlton.
He didn’t respond to either of them.
“Oh, Carly, come on now, why can’t you be cordial?” Andrea said. She brushed flour from her face and looked to Jeanette. “I swear, he’s so morose these days. Maybe you two can tease a word out of him.”
Jeanette pondered his box, Joey cradled in her arms. “Does he ever talk?”
“Oh sure, sure. He always was the stoic type. Strong and silent, you know.” Andrea’s eyes narrowed. “But now he’s impossible.”
&nb
sp; Jeanette said, “But when does he talk? Has anything else been bothering him that you know of?”
Andrea studied the ceiling, pulling her thoughts together.
“Carlton, we don’t mean to be talking about you as if you’re not here,” Joey said.
“Oh no,” Jeanette cut in, “Definitely not. Maybe you can tell us what’s troubling you. Sir. ”
“Mouth like molasses,” Carlton said. He spoke in thick, throaty manner that was hard to parse. His Box gave off a dim spark.
Jeanette straightened. “Oh, you too? Are you having motor— motor control problems?”
“Nuh uh. Mouth. All…stuck up. Shit.”
“He doesn’t have any physical sensations, dear,” Andrea said carefully. “But I’m sure you know that.”
“Well ma’am, that’s what they told me and my sister, but she—well, she can totally feel things.”
“Oh honey!” Andrea said, throwing up her birdlike hands. “It’s impossible for him, though. When he had the stroke it ate all those parts up.”
“Ah. Okay then.”
“Yup, it was a real shame. Say, would you like some tea? Maybe a Coke Nano? I think I have some Mountain Dew Thrust, from when our grandkids were over…”
“I’m fine,” Jeanette said stiffly. “Thank you though.”
Andrea sat. Her fingers fidgeted across the hem of her apron and found their way into her front pockets. Her gaze darted from the kitchen to the sun room and back, floating over potted plants and baking ingredients left on the counter, no detail ignored. It reminded Jeanette of their father, who couldn’t sit through a whole movie without getting up to empty the dishwasher or run a fresh load of laundry. Years of constant domestic maintenance had made it impossible for him to fully relax; he was always at work, even at home. It