We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  David nodded, as serious as Julie had ever seen him.

  “Your friends may have told you it lets you concentrate on multiple things at once, but that isn’t quite true. What it does is it lets you approximate functional multitasking.”

  “How?” Julie pressed. That phrase was verbatim out of the brochure.

  Dr. Jordaan pointed to her Pilot. “Stimulation of the right temporoparietal junction, behind here. The rTPJ is associated with reorienting attention in response to unexpected stimuli. What we’ve discovered is that rTPJ stimulation results in the ability to get as close to actual multitasking as a person can currently get.”

  “So it’s not actual multitasking?”

  “Functionally so. As close as a person can get. Closer than anything you can imagine until you have this in your head. I would have killed to have this in med school, let me tell you. You don’t even know how distracted you are until you feel the difference. Speaking for myself, it’s a powerful, competent feeling.”

  David had told Julie his questions in the car on the way over, but now he just looked at the doctor’s Pilot with open longing. Julie had to admit the description sounded glorious, but she tried to ask the questions that careful Val would ask. Will it change his personality? Not his personality, only his mood, and only for the better; people with Pilots reported they were happier, less stressed, less tired. What’s the youngest age you recommend it for? It doesn’t affect brain development; it’s been successfully installed in children as young as thirteen. Julie probed for flaws, to make it more real and less miraculous. In the end she settled on the one boy’s B grades: no perfection, only improvement.

  What was so wrong with perfection, anyway? She thought of David sitting at the dining room table, running his hand through his hair as he worked on math problems until it all stood on end, the hair and the math. She wanted all the good things for him, the happiness and the wakefulness and the stress reduction. She wanted him to succeed, though she’d never say it out loud; she didn’t want to put it on either kid that they had to be world-changers, even if she believed they had the potential to do special things. If it had to start with David getting a Pilot to keep up, she didn’t have a problem with that.

  Dr. Jordaan ran through the procedure details, the science, the finances. “So what do you think? Do you need to talk with the rest of your family, or do you want to go ahead and schedule this?”

  David looked at Julie, all hope. She sighed. “We still have to talk it over at home.”

  She made the decision and waited for Val to come around. Her own parents had been so paralyzed over choice she’d ended up making decisions for them, too. Things she had to justify in her head, so later she could justify for them when they asked why the power was off (“because it was a choice between the rent and the electricity”) or the cat was gone (“he was sixteen and in pain—I took him to the vet”) or whatever other big thing they’d forced her to take on when she shouldn’t even have had a say.

  It wasn’t fair to make that comparison. Val was careful, not indecisive; a brake on Julie’s own tendency to keep issues from dragging out. Julie gathered her own information to complement David’s brochures, read clinical reports, wrote a position paper and bullet points to counter her wife’s fears, like it was another issue for Representative Griffith to consider. She’d prefer Val’s support, but she’d settle for a grudging endorsement until Val came to understand that Julie had David’s interests at heart.

  CHAPTER SIX

  VAL

  Val drew the line at attending the procedure, then erased it, then drew it again, then erased it again. In the end they all went, a Saturday-morning outing for the modern family. From the passenger seat, she counted how many pedestrians they passed without Pilots before they passed somebody with the implant, about seven to one. The blue lights were eye-catching advertisements, if nothing else.

  David drummed his fingers on the window as Julie drove, a massive sound in an otherwise silent electric car. Val would normally have told him to knock it off, but she was perversely happy that at least he had the sense to be nervous. Sophie slept in the seat next to him, though she had just woken an hour before. Another side effect to weigh against benefits: no seizures yet today, but a comatose ten-year-old.

  Julie had been the one to meet with the doctor and make the arrangements, so this was Val’s first visit to the Pilot Installation Center. She’d expected something more hospital-like outside, and the inside didn’t match her expectations, either. Private waiting rooms, warm and inviting, full of comfortable-looking armchairs and couches rather than the metal and plastic torture devices where they’d spent so many hours waiting for Sophie’s doctors. It didn’t even smell like the hospital; it smelled like fresh-baked cookies.

  “That can’t be hygienic,” Val muttered under her breath. “And what’s with ‘Installation Center’? Is it a clinic? It sounds like someplace you get your computer set up.”

  Either nobody heard her, or they ignored her. Sophie broke away to investigate a shelf overflowing with children’s books. Val kept an eye on the kid as the nurse explained everything they’d already read and heard, trying to nod when she thought she was supposed to. Maybe she needed an implant herself, so she could watch Sophie and listen and process without losing anything. She had definitely missed something, because David looked crestfallen.

  “It’s okay,” Julie said to him, putting her arm around his shoulder. “It’ll be ready by the time you have to study for exams.”

  Val remembered something from the brochure, though she couldn’t recall having pointed it out to David. They would do the installation that day, but the device wouldn’t be activated for another month.

  “Your head has to get used to having something else in there,” Val said, pleased to have something to contribute to the conversation. “Plus you have to attend a couple of orientation sessions to learn how to use it. If that’s a sticking point, it’s not too late to change your mind, you know. Ha.”

  She knew she shouldn’t have added those last bits, and David responded with a vicious shake of his head, punishment for both the pun and the implication he might not be fully committed. “I want this, Ma. Mom understands.” He looked to Julie for support.

  “Your ma knows,” she said. “She’s here, isn’t she? You’re allowed to change your mind, but we’re committed if you are.” She shot Val a glance that Val read as back off.

  “Mom is right,” Val said. “We’re here. Ready when you are.”

  The nurse had apparently finished her checklist, because she beckoned to David and pivoted on her heel.

  Val watched their boy disappear through a mahogany door. “That’s it? Off he goes?”

  “Looks like,” Julie said. “Feels odd we aren’t supposed to follow, but I guess they’d tell us if we were.”

  “I can’t believe it’s an outpatient procedure. Since when is brain surgery so easy?”

  They settled near the corner where Sophie sat reading in a beanbag chair. Val picked up a celebrity gossip magazine and was amazed to discover it was the current month’s issue; another difference between the hospitals and this pay-to-play “Installation Center.”

  Julie pulled out her tablet and started typing. Her fingers moved quickly and surely. As always, Val was impressed by her wife’s ability to put aside the things she couldn’t affect and concentrate on something else. Val flipped the magazine open to a random article.

  She was still on the same page ninety minutes later when a nurse emerged to invite them into a recovery room where David dozed under mild anesthesia, his boyish face looking younger in slack-jawed dopiness. They’d shaved a patch of honey brown curls from the right side of his head. He looked lopsided. A bandage above his ear was the only evidence of the surgeon’s trespass. Beneath that bandage was a hole, raw and neat, and in that hole, a tiny bio-LED.

  Behind the light, a gross intr
usion on his perfect brain. How could the positives have outweighed the risk? How could they do so much so easily? When the neurologists had considered surgery for Sophie they’d removed the top of her skull. They mapped her mind, gridded it with electrodes in a silk-based substrate that settled into the curves of her brain like it belonged there, all to discover her seizures were not the kinds that could be safely ablated or removed.

  David’s new implant, threaded in through one small hole, would settle into his head, relax, get comfortable, put its feet on the coffee table. In an hour they’d be on their way home.

  * * *

  • • •

  Val ran dozens of extra miles over the ensuing weeks in a futile effort to assuage her fears, though most of them had proved unfounded. No infection, no seizures, no noticeable change. David, whom she had started calling “Ze Brain” in her best Hervé Villechaize, did not act any different, except for an endearing tic where he raised his hand halfway to his head, realized he shouldn’t poke at it, and raised it in a fake stretch and yawn instead.

  He did a lot of stretch and yawning. He dutifully attended the online follow-up classes, learning to access something that was still only theoretical. As his access date grew nearer, he began drumming his fingers on all available surfaces.

  One night, while they all watched a movie together, the finger tapping got to be too much for Val and she tossed a pillow at him; he surprised her by bursting into tears. Sophie leaned over to wrap her arms around him. He hugged her back.

  “What’s up, Brainy?” Julie asked him, lowering her tablet. She’d made it only a few minutes into the movie before pulling it out to see what she’d missed in the dinner-sized connectivity gap.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” He lifted his hand to his head and then forced his arm down, clutching his sister to him. “What if I don’t like it?”

  Val wanted to say, It’s not too late! Instead, she told him what she thought he needed to hear. “It’s what you wanted, kiddo. You’ll be able to keep up with your classes and spend more time doing stuff you like.”

  “It’s natural to be scared, Davey,” Julie said. For all Val’s creative nicknames, Julie was the only one he allowed to call him Davey.

  “I swear I want this. I really do.”

  Sophie sat back. “You know what I do when I’m scared? I pretend I’m somebody who wouldn’t be scared. Like a superhero, or Mom.”

  Val glanced over at Julie, who caught her eye.

  “This is going to be great, David,” Val said. “You’ll see. Hey, I’m not into the movie. Who wants to play a game?”

  “Ooh. Me! Spoons!” Sophie jumped up from the couch and returned with three soup spoons and a deck of cards. She had been obsessed with the game since Julie had taught her a few months before.

  A game was a good solution. With the activation looming, David would do anything either mother wanted, and even Julie would have to put work aside to play.

  “Those aren’t in the center,” David said, reaching for the spoons Sophie had spread on the table.

  Sophie pulled them back in her direction. “My arms are shorter than yours.”

  Val leaned over and positioned the spoons so two were in the center, and one angled slightly closer to Sophie. She was all for fairness in sport, but Sophie’s argument was valid.

  “Jules, put it away.” Her wife tossed her tablet on the couch and joined them.

  Val dealt first. She memorized her own hand, then started passing cards off the deck to the left, trying to keep an eye out for the remaining two jacks. To her right, David focused on his cards; she’d positioned herself on this side so she wouldn’t have to look at the strange little spot on his other temple. Julie tilted her head, one eye on the cards, one on the spoons. On Val’s left, Sophie passed cards along at a surprising speed.

  A seven went by, then another, and Val wished she hadn’t hitched her chances entirely to jacks. Too late, unless they came around again. David grabbed a card, then she palmed the third jack. The fourth jack showed his face. Val darted a hand out and quietly pulled a spoon into her lap, even as she kept passing cards with her other hand. Sophie dived for the spoon nearest her, not bothering with subtlety. Julie grabbed the third.

  David looked up and frowned. “But I just got my last ten.”

  “You snooze, you lose,” said Sophie. “You don’t win with just cards. You watch the spoons.”

  “But if everyone does that, nobody will ever win. Somebody has to get four of a kind, or we’ll go round forever.”

  Sophie shrugged. “Grabbing a spoon is more important. Where did your cards get you? You’ve got the s in s-p-o-o-n-s.”

  David sighed.

  They played a few more times. Each won a round or two, and each got left without a spoon at least once, except Sophie, who took the second spoon every time and declared herself victorious.

  * * *

  • • •

  At breakfast the morning of David’s Pilot activation, Sophie had a tonic-clonic seizure. Heartbreak city after a seizure-free month; another failed medication. David, closest, lowered her from her chair to the kitchen floor before she could hurt herself. Val wasn’t sure when he’d gotten big enough to do that so easily. He pulled his sweatshirt off and placed it under her head, then turned her on her side. Another piece of Val broke off and caught fire and burned out under its own fuel; she wished his actions hadn’t looked so routine.

  Julie took David to the activation. Val stayed with Sophie while she dozed, updating her online seizure log, checking in with her doctor to say the seizures had broken through again, reading through various epilepsy parent groups to learn whether anyone had anything new or different to say. Those were her only social media interactions, on those private groups, and even there she lurked; she hated the idea of companies monetizing and tracking her.

  She browsed BNL’s website for the millionth time, looking for information on postactivation life, and this time stumbled upon a section she hadn’t noticed before: a Pilot parent forum. There were only a few dozen posts, all of them positive, which made her all the more suspicious. Everything got at least some negative reviews, from peanut butter to puppies. If she posted something negative, would it be deleted? She was tempted to try, just to test that paranoid theory.

  Julie and David were gone for three hours, returning with a clatter of groceries.

  “Celebration!” Julie announced, sliding an ice cream cake box onto the table. Val wished she had thought of it. “Where’s the young ’un?”

  “Still sleeping.” Val turned to David. He didn’t look any different. “So, Extra Brainy? Are you solving world hunger yet? How does your new improved brain feel?”

  He grinned. “Enormous. Electric.”

  “Are you doing the exercises now?” Val caught his chin with her hand and gently turned his head to see the light marring his perfect skin. He grunted and nodded.

  “So you’re talking—well, grunting—and unpacking the groceries and doing what?”

  “The exercises, Ma. I’m doing times tables, like they told me to. They said it’s like rubbing your head and patting your stomach.”

  “Rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Keep practicing.” Val pointed him toward the groceries and turned to Julie. “Cake now, or cake later?”

  Julie glanced at the clock. “Lunch cake, in an hour, if Sophie’s awake. Otherwise, after dinner. Maybe by then the boychild will be doing quantum physics.”

  “I’m not deaf, you know. Soon I’ll be paying better attention than ever, and you’ll have to be extra careful what you say when you think I’m not listening.”

  “What have we doooone?” wailed Julie, mock horrified. “Back to the doctor, quick!”

  He finished unloading the groceries, tossing a head of purple cabbage like a basketball between his hands. “Do we really have to wait an hour for lunch? I coul
d eat a horse.”

  Definitely still the same kid.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DAVID

  David knew what it meant that his parents had agreed to get him a Pilot. Money when they had none to spare; elective brain surgery when his little sister had seizures. As long as he could remember, he’d always felt the responsibility of being the one who didn’t need anything from them, who could do what was expected of him without being asked. He’d really, truly waited until he was the only one left in his class without a Pilot before asking, and they’d seen that, too, and even then he’d felt guilty.

  Which was why, whenever anybody asked, he said he loved it. Those words came easily enough. There were parts of it he did love. The feeling of doing two things at once, three things, of attention smoothly shifting, carried a euphoric energy that didn’t fade. Nobody had told him it felt good, but it did. Powerful. Electric. Capable, or more than capable—competent. Studying was less of a chore when you could do other stuff at the same time, and it turned out studying actually made school a little easier. Those were the good parts.

  All of which made the weird sensation harder to express. David didn’t know how to phrase the thing he needed to ask, or who to ask even if he did. He didn’t want to bother his mothers, not when he couldn’t say for sure something was wrong. Not when he’d sworn he needed this; that it was safe, tested, something to give them fewer worries, not more.

  His best friend, Milo, was the most obvious choice of confidant. They were supposed to be studying for their bio exam, which meant they were alternating five minutes quizzing each other with twenty-five minutes of Forger Heist. Forger Heist had been designed to teach people getting used to new Pilots how to maximize the implant’s potential. You were supposed to play it while a certain podcast droned in the background and afterward answer questions about the podcast and the game’s details. It wasn’t a great game, but on the plus side it counted as studying.