was saddest when those efforts were no longer needed, when the house was empty, the children grown. Jeanette imagined the woman baking all day, chatting amiably to a dead man who didn’t speak back.
“How are the grandkids?” Joey said.
Andrea seemed flustered. “Well. Doing great! We just got some new photos from school. That’s Henry, he’s the oldest. He’s going to a new boarding school…Smart like a whip, that one; we’re so proud. Aren’t we Carly?”
She tilted her head to Carlton.
“Oh, how sweet,” Jeanette said, looking at the photographs.
Joey cut in, “My my my, look how much little Moira’s grown. Spitting image of her father. And Tad’s little apple cheeks. What a squishy little fella, look at ‘em.”
Jeanette patted her sister and pulled her close, saying, “Uh, sorry. Joey, maybe you should give it a rest.”
The old woman’s eyes crinkled. They looked watery, but then old people’s eyes always seemed to Jeanette to be on the verge of leaking tears. “You’ve been doing a lot of research on us, I see.”
“I don’t. Know them.” Carlton said.
Jeanette looked over. “Your grandchildren?”
He fizzled with faint light. “Strangers,” he said.
Andrea leaned forward and spoke into Joey’s Box. “It seems you think my husband can help you. Obviously, you know who he is.”
Jeanette looked down. “I don’t know,” she said. “My sister just told me we needed to come here…”
“Carlton worked for LifeMedia,” Joey explained. “He was a big shot, wasn’t he?”
“He’s no use anyway,” said Andrea. She rose and brushed crumbs from the table into an open palm. “He can barely remember our children’s names. Let alone our grandchildren. His work?— forget it! Can’t remember a whit of it, not any better than he can our honeymoon.”
Jeanette read the woman for signs of bitterness or hurt, but found none. Some people were so matter-of-fact about loss. Like their father had been. Like Joey, even. It seemed impossible to Jeanette that a person could carry grief so easily and still be human.
“You went to an Akron Astros game,” Joey said suddenly, flooding the room with blue light. ” Your honeymoon, I mean. It was $5.75 a ticket, $4 for two hot dogs and some orange sodas.”
“Sodas?” Jeanette said. Joey had always said ‘pop’. Andrea pursed her lips and waited.
“It was a gorgeous day,” Joey continued, “They were playing the Toledo Tornadoes. They lost. You drove all day to get there— you eloped in a courthouse in Mansfield, I think? Your dress was lace, Andrea, and it was lovely.”
“Until the grass stains got all over it,” the old woman added.
“Still…pretty,” Carlton said. A sliver of yellow light buzzed across his surface. “Go. Keep.”
“When you moved here,” Joey continued, “it was for the forest reserve. It reminds me of the woods in Mansfield, where we grew up. I could do a mean hillbilly stomp back in the day, let me tell you.”
Joey’s voice was dropping, growing huskier.
“It’s too bad we didn’t get to raise the kids out here. The grandkids love visiting, but gosh damn it, they don’t come see us enough. No time. Their damn parents got no time.”
Andrea shook her head. “No, certainly not. They work too hard.”
Jeanette whispered, “What’s going on?”
“Woods aside, you’re the first…and last thing I remember, Andrie,” Joey said.
The woman made a small squeaking noise and took Jeanette’s hand from the box.
“Tell us more,” she said, kneeling at Joey’s surface. Now she really was crying. Joey’s light darkened and covered the full surface of her box.
“I was writing a letter to Moira, to send to her summer camp. Nobody uses mail anymore, but she didn’t have internet out there…I was looking at the letters and trying to get them perfect; my cursive is so rusty…”
Carlton’s light flickered and went out.
“And it got hot in my throat and neck, and these big specks of dust flew into my eyes— and I realized— I wasn’t writing the proper words. Not the words I meant, you see. Andrea, you were in the garden and I went over to ask for help, and then it all came rising up. The ground just socked me in the face—”
Andrea reached for the Box. “Sweetheart, when you fell over I just took off running—”
“And that’s nearly the last thing I saw. Except you at the hospital,” Joey said in her new, gravely voice.
Andrea marveled at this. “You were alive in the hospital?”
“Just…moment,” Carlton said, his Box sputtering yellow.
Joey continued, “And I can feel it. The mud on my face, the blood in my throat, running from my mouth, your hand, with your wedding ring on the wrong finger, running through my hair.”
Jeanette looked over and confirmed that Andrea was wearing her ring on her index finger. The woman looked completely open, marveling at every little revelation. Jeanette felt uneasy, invisible.
“But you couldn’t move,” Andrea whispered. She turned to her husband’s Box. “We tried to set you up as fast as we could, but your brain hemorrhaged up top, and you couldn’t move—”
“Or speak?” Jeanette guessed.
Andrea nodded.
Lily said.
But Joey wasn’t listening. She wasn’t there.
26.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Andrea said.
She had served little sandwiches and cups of Coke Nano and lit a vanilla candle for the Boxes’ benefit. Jeanette picked at the food but kept attention on the old woman, who sat in the kitchen with hands folded in her lap.
“This wasn’t supposed to be possible. Why would they put my husband’s mind into somebody else? I just can’t figure it.”
“Musta been a mistake,” Jeanette said. There was a thick clot of dread hanging at the bottom of her stomach, twisting inside her, reminding her every few seconds to worry that Joey’s transformation was permanent.
“Why would they do such a slap-happy job on him, of all people!” Andrea said, and tsked.
“I don’t understand?” Jeanette said.
Joey was shining with a dark, inky blue light, propped on the table. She said, “I helped set up the network for these damn things. You think they’d have some loyalty to me, but no..,”
“By ‘you’,” Jeanette said, “you mean Carlton?”
“Course.”
Jeanette frowned at her plate.
Joey continued, “They’re building a body, Andrea. They’re stuffing these new Boxes with everything— using the whole brain, physical-control stuff and all. Reflexes. Sensations. Everything. I think that’s why I can feel all our old memories now, clear as day.”
Andrea smiled sadly and said, “Even I can’t do that.”
Wind rushed around the house and made an awful howling sound. Chicago had the reputation for being windy, but it got worse farther west, where the gusts continued from the lake unabated by tall buildings. The noise set Jeanette on edge in even the best circumstances; she detested visiting the distant, flat suburbs for work. The open space. The wind whipping around the emptiness, with no direct line back into town. It made her feel lost.
“So what do we do now?” she spat at Andrea. “You’ve got to know some higher-ups at LifeMedia, right? If your husband was so invaluable to them.”
Andrea gazed out the window, clearly pretending to think. Jeanette tried to figure out what Joey saw in her, tried imagining the profile of the Andrea’s face as a young woman, but she looked like she’d been old forever. Time was irreversible on her.
Andrea said, “Your little buddy Steve Milton wants to restore Carlton after making a back-up. But now, I guess it would be best to plug your sister into to him.”
Joey flashed. Her light dimmed and paled. “I think that’s a good idea,” she said, her voice returning to its normal, high, crackly tone.
“Back-up?” Jeanette said. She shook the thoug
ht away. “Ok. So…Yeah. Do you think it would make my sister better too?”
“Well what’s wrong with her?”
Jeanette rolled her eyes. “You know, would it make her more like herself?”
Andrea shrugged. “One less person to share her brain with. Ought to do some good.”
She reached into her apron and removed an old flip phone. It was similar to one Joey and Jeanette had used in middle school. She tossed it across the table, where it landed with a crash against the side of Joey’s BrightBox.
“Give your beau a call about it,” Andrea said. “Maybe at the next meeting he can fix us both up.”
Jeanette forced a tight smile and punched the keys.
Joey messaged. She expected to feel a rush of relief coming off Lily in waves and warming her own mind. She was met instead with a chill and a rush to her pulse. Her lights shifted to red against her will. Lily’s words rose up in her mind, drumming over and over in a harsh rat-tat-tat, the connection between them unseverable.
27.
Lily screamed.
Joey said. She and Jeanette were standing outside the rental car in the Avers’ driveway. She was ignoring Jeanette’s nonverbals as much as possible, an increasingly easy feat.
Edwidge said. She’d been listening along for a while.
Joey said.
Joey said.
Lily said,
Joey said.
Edwidge said,
Lily said, her voice taking on a new edge.
Joey messaged.
said Edwidge.
Joey was about to protest again when she felt a tug coming from Lily’s mind. The driveway, the rental car, the crisp blue sky, the smell of the cold air, Jeanette’s worried face; it all fled from Joey’s awareness.
Suddenly she was in a pale pink suburban room with narrow windows obscured by curtains. There a dresser and bookcase covered in ceramics and stuffed tchotchkes. Joey detected Lysol in the air, and a heavy, cheap-smelling floral perfume. Nothing smelled organic or fresh; it was as if the room had been locked away from the outside world for years. Paper plates with grease stains sat on the floor and bed.
She scanned the room for several seconds, spotting photos of Lily at sleepovers, in robes at graduation, sitting on a mall Santa’s lap. She wasn’t certain how she recognized the yellow-haired girl in the photographs as Lily, but she was certain nonetheless. Joey noticed spelling bee trophies and beaded bracelets on the nightstand, and a Hello Kitty clock on the wall. Lily’s mother sat cross-legged in the center of the room, folding laundry with her head bowed.
Lily said. She turned her microphones up.
Joey heard faint sniffling and saw that the mother’s chest was heaving. The mother folded very slowly, shaping the shirts into tight, perfect squares and stacking them immaculately in the laundry basket. She gave the stack a soft pat every time she added an article to the pile. Through her sniffles, she seemed to be humming, but the tune was incomprehensible.
Joey asked.
Lily said.
Her mother stood and slung the laundry basket onto her hip. She looked frail for her age, not unlike Thompson’s ex-wife or Edwidge’s mother. Joey watched her leave the room with a blank expression. The house was oppressively quiet. A few minutes later she came back with a stack of magazines, a thick binder, a glue stick, and scissors, which she splayed out on the carpet before returning to her spot on the floor.
Joey asked.
Lily didn’t need to answer. The mother spoke, gazing up at the Box. “Honey, look at these pictures from when we went to Aruba. Look how darling your little swimsuit was.”
She held the binder up to the Box’s cameras, letting Joey and Lily take in the images. Lily had been a lithe, beaming blonde child, all curls and gummy white teeth. She wore a swimsuit with a ruffle and clutched a smaller blonde boy’s hand. The brother.
“Yeah, looks great mom,” Lily said. Joey barely recognized her tone.
“I’m just gonna snip up some of these Corona ads and put the palm trees and sand around the pictures, make a nice little border..,” her mom said, staring down into the binder.
Her pleasantness was cringing, grasping. A buoy she was clinging to. This was not how happy people acted. It was difficult for Joey to remember how they actually did act, though.
Joey messaged. She tried to check in with Jeanette, but found she couldn’t shift her attention to her own cameras.
Lily said,
Joey tried to cancel the connection, but it wouldn’t stop. She had no sense of where her own Box was, and couldn’t connect to its sensory input at all. A quick scan of her active software revealed no problems. Lily’s mother cut at the magazine with safety scissors, her eyes darting up to Lily’s BrightBox every few seconds, a nervous smile forced out of her face each time. The grin fell slack as soon as she looked down and returned to her work.
Joey said.
Lily said,
Thea said,
Joey had thought she and Lily were alone.
Lily messaged back,
A cool chill ran down Joey’s arm. She could taste metal. Lily’s mom wiped at her nose and stifled a tear.
Edwidge’s voice chirped in.
Joey couldn’t place why this was so terrible, but it was. She sensed that Lily hadn’t been a genuine member of the family in a very long time, not for ages before she’d offed herself. None of the photos were recent.
Lily said,
Edwidge said.
Edwidge took control then, and showed them her room. It still looked like a hospital. Her BrightBox sat on a white-sheeted bed, next to an empty IV and boxes of medical equipment. Rubber gloves and plastic tubes were strewn about with opened packages of bandages. The door was shut and locked, the windows drawn. There was nothing on the walls.
Joey scanned the room and saw that the floors were particularly neglected, especially in the corners where dust had amassed into dark puffy clouds. She suspected that if the closets were opened, piled of baby clothes and old toys would come tumbling out.
Lily said.
Joey’s mind was fully plugged into theirs, lingering in Edwidge’s environment with the rest of them. She wondered where Jeanette was and what she was doing. Maybe returning the car. Maybe taking the park route into town, driving slowly with her lips quivering. Maybe just pressing her face into Joey’s box and trying desperately to find her inside. Time moved strangely, in the Box; sometimes she pulled away and engaged in a deep discussion or detailed internet search only to return and discover that no time had passed; sometimes she removed her attention from the external world for what seemed like a moment, but found instead that eight or ten hours had flashed by unnoticed.
Joey withdrew her attention from the room, tried to dive within herself, but found there was no escape. She could feel all of them accessing her, sharing and taking freely, almost entirely aware of everything that she was. It wasn’t just Carlton anymore. They were all connected and vying for control. It was both terrifying and freeing, in a way. People’s mental and emotional states were becoming so difficult for Joey to comprehend that it was something of a blessing to be given such a clear window.
Thea said.
Joey sighed.
Thea added.
Lily emitted warmth that Joey could feel in her toes and fingertips.
Edwidge said with a whine.
Lily said.
Joey said,
28.
The outside world came to Joey in intermittent flashes out of her control. There were pastel shapes and the thrumming silence of Lily’s bedroom. Thea’s husband sitting in their den doing a crossword in an old newspaper, asking Thea to look the answers up. Edwidge’s bedroom was always dark, with blackout curtains and a UV light that had been unplugged, her mother passing through the space wordlessly like a specter.
Joey also saw moments of Cartlon’
s reality. She caught Andrea dusting the house, replacing the grandchildren’s school photos in their frames on the wall, and installing a new 3D television with a holographic projector.
The shifts from place to place were soothing. It gave Joey perspective on things. All of her sister’s concerns seemed inconsequential against the swathe of the other breather’s similarly vapid lives. Lily said this was exactly the point. Interconnectivity and boundless knowledge would be