We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  She shoved them into her empty pocket, where her own change should have been. The other two people handed her more coins.

  She tried to gather her mind back. First check: Bladder okay? She shifted in her seat to check. Yes, thank goodness. That had happened only once, but once had been enough. Wallet? Yes. ID bracelet? Yes. Keys? Yes. Change? All over the floor. Where was she? Bus. Heading to the meeting space. Heading away from home. Engine problem. Brain present and accounted for? Mostly. A few casualties, Sergeant.

  “Are you okay?” whispered the old woman on her left.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.” What was the proper response to that question. “I’m okay. Are you?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t just fling money across the bus and then stare into space while everybody else picked it up.” The woman took on a reproving tone. “If you’re okay, that’s a strange thing to do. If you’re not okay, it’s more understandable.”

  “I’m okay.” Sophie stood and swung her bag onto her back. She didn’t want to be on this bus anymore. She pushed the rear door, but it didn’t open, and when she tried the stop-request cord, it didn’t ring.

  “Can I get off?” she called to Javon.

  “Sit tight,” he said over the intercom, to her and everyone. “I promise we’ll be on our way shortly. They’re sending another bus.”

  “I’ve got to get off.”

  “Then come to the front door.”

  Sophie walked the aisle with all the dignity she could muster. She felt every eye on her. Where before she had relished the attention, demanded it, now she wished herself invisible. Why couldn’t they ignore her?

  “Thanks a lot,” she said to Javon in her most sarcastic tone as she stepped off.

  “No transfer if you leave now,” the driver said. “Are you sure you want to get off in this neighborhood?”

  “This is my stop. I was heading here.”

  She walked in the direction the bus had been heading. Where had they stopped? She recognized the neighborhood. Javon was right: it wasn’t a great one. Nothing but liquor stores and check-cashing joints. She didn’t want to be here on her own if she had another seizure, however unlikely that was. She could always call her moms from one of the liquor stores and sit tight. Val would arrive no questions asked, the guilt trip unspoken, or else Julie would ream her out and then it would be over and done with. She couldn’t do it.

  She walked until the bus was out of sight, then stuck out a hand to gesture for a ride. Hack cabs, private drivers picking up passengers for cash, were the only ones that traveled this stretch of road, but that worked for Sophie. Hacks were cheaper, and besides, a hack would take her money and not give her grief. A ride-share app would trade her information privacy for convenience; not to mention she’d left without her phone.

  Three minutes passed, then five. The new bus roared by. As it passed, Javon saluted her, but didn’t stop to let her on again. This night had to get better.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  JULIE

  Sophie displaced a lot of air these days, with her stomping feet and her slamming exits. By now, Julie had practice in nonresponse. She didn’t rush to the window, or worse yet, the door, as Val did. She didn’t shout after her departing daughter.

  Instead, she started a bath. She poured herself a generous glass of cheap Malbec, cranked her let it out, sister curated station loud enough for Blondie to make sure she couldn’t hear herself think, cycled down her Pilot to its lowest setting, and dumped enough lavender bath salts into the tub to saturate herself in relaxation. She picked the cheesiest-looking audio romance novel in the library app, pressed play, and closed her eyes.

  She chose not to think about the dangers that lurked beyond their front door. Not that the house had ever kept Sophie safe. There was no safe place for Sophie in this world. A room full of pillows, maybe.

  Val was so much better than Julie at hiding her protective instincts from Sophie. Sophie had developed into the kind of teen who would do the opposite of anything you wanted her to do. She homed in on anything you held back, like a boxer recognizing an opponent’s weak point. Maybe someday she would recognize that her mothers had her best interests at heart. For now she chafed, she seethed, she slammed the door on them hard enough to blur the literal and the figurative; and Julie bathed, and bathed again, and smelled of lavender.

  She had only offered to drive Sophie to her FreerMind Association meeting space; she shouldn’t have. Moreover, she definitely shouldn’t have said she’d prefer Sophie get home by midnight, and definitely definitely shouldn’t have said Sophie should get a hobby outside of protest-planning meetings. She hadn’t meant FreerMind was a hobby; it was amazing they’d hired Sophie and Gabe to run the local field office. Even if it paid a pittance, it was the only job around that truly valued non-Piloted staff over Piloted. She’d meant she’d love to see Sophie doing art or puzzles or something again, maybe going to community college, but Sophie had taken it as an attack.

  Val handled her better than Julie did these days. It was a funny turn from their early years, when they both would have admitted Julie was by far the more instinctual mother, Val afraid she might break them. Of course, Val had one major advantage in the Sophie-parenting department these days: she had no Pilot.

  As far as Sophie was concerned, a Pilot was a deal-breaker. No trust for anyone Piloted except for David. David was allowed; he hadn’t known better. Julie, from Sophie’s perspective, had been in possession of all the information she needed to say no, but she went through with it nonetheless. Julie knew they would see eye to eye again at some point in the future. Sophie’s opinions would shift as she grew up. She would miss her mothers, maybe come to understand them. Julie would bathe, and wait, and hope never to get the phone call she dreaded.

  When the water had cooled and the fizz had fizzled and her fingers and toes had pruned, Julie climbed out and dried herself. She put on a thick sweatshirt and leggings, wrapped her hair in her towel, and decided that making dinner could be her next distraction.

  She opened the fridge in search of inspiration. A few assorted vegetables languished in the drawer, all on the far side of crisp and waiting to be diced or discarded. Soup. They’d be good enough for soup.

  A key turned in the front door and her heart leapt in joy. Down, she quashed it. Sophie would never come back that quickly after a fight, even if she realized she had overreacted. She would never give her parents the satisfaction.

  Val walked into the kitchen, her shirt and hair drenched with sweat and sticking to her. She filled a water glass and drank deeply. Repeated the action, then put the glass in the dishwasher. Only then did she notice Julie, still standing beside the open fridge. The hazards of the unPiloted: perpetual surprise.

  “What are you doing in here?” Her tone was amused.

  “Is it that much of a surprise? I’m going to cook dinner.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s been known to happen.” It hadn’t been. Not for a while, at least. They mostly ate dinner salads when Sophie wasn’t around, but Val put those together, too. Julie found herself trying to justify the whim. “I felt like soup.”

  “Fair enough. Do you need help?”

  “Not while you’re sweating like that. How is it possible to sweat that much on a day this cool?”

  Val stepped forward, mock-wringing her shirt in her wife’s direction. Julie raised her hands in defense. “Go! Take a shower. You can help me when you come back if I’m not done already.”

  Val blew her a kiss. Minutes later, water rushed through the pipes. All these things had happened before, except for the soup.

  * * *

  • • •

  The soup wasn’t bad. Cauliflower and cheddar and lentil. Not great, either, but not awful. Julie watched Val take a hesitant sip, then relax.

  “Nice job, Jules,” she said.

  She ate three mor
e spoonfuls before reaching for the salt. Julie loved her for the three extra spoonfuls, which said, I would eat this exactly as it is, if you needed me to do so. Twenty-five years ago, she probably would have eaten the whole bowl bland rather than risk hurting Julie’s feelings. That was their level of comfort now, measured in spoonfuls.

  If it were the other way around, if Julie were eating a soup Val had made, she wouldn’t add more than one courtesy spoonful. Val’s ego didn’t need the stroking. She cooked swiftly and efficiently, for the delivery of maximum nutrition, if not maximum taste, and she liked her time in the kitchen. Like running, cooking was for Val a solitary pursuit. A conversation with herself, a personal contemplation.

  For Julie, food preparation brought adventure. Knives bit, stoves burnt, everything cooked at different rates. A pinch of thyme: Whose pinch? Season to taste: Whose taste? The Pilot had improved her results—not as many distracted cuts or forgotten burnt offerings these days—but still she preferred tasks she could control and measure.

  They ate in silence. Every meal without the kids at the table felt wrong. Once when both David and Sophie were out, they’d tried eating in front of the television. “The table is for the family,” Julie had suggested. They had watched and balanced their plates on their knees, until Val said, “This feels way too much like the way I ate dinner with my parents.” They finished that first and only meal back at the table. The table was for family, absent or present.

  For Julie, the absences altered everything. She couldn’t help but hear David begging for seconds before everyone else had finished serving themselves a first portion. She saw every Sophie sitting at the table, from picky infant to quiet child to impossibly volatile teen. She only ever saw one David, sixteen and serious. David had somehow been sixteen and serious his entire life, even when it didn’t suit him yet. She ate her mediocre soup with her wife and her absent son, and her thousand tortured absent daughters.

  Julie knew that Val also felt the wrongness of their two-person table. Any night without Sophie was a fraught night, but these were the worst: the ones where she stormed out without her phone and without telling them when she would be back.

  “Have you heard from her?” Val asked.

  Julie shook her head. “No. You know if she’d call either of us tonight, it would be you.”

  She didn’t say it resentfully. At this point in Sophie’s life, any connection with either parent was something to cherish and protect: a fire reduced to ember could still be coaxed to life again. If Sophie thought Val was more sympathetic to her cause, Julie wouldn’t step between them. One was better than none.

  Val took the dishes to the kitchen. She joined Julie in front of the television a few minutes later, handing her a mug of Earl Grey with milk and sugar, the scent of which clashed with whatever herbal concoction Val had made herself. They watched the local news and then the national news. Julie had her tablet out, scanning for the two names she didn’t want associated with the news: Sophie’s and David’s. They would be in different places, if she ever came across them, likely on different sites. She searched all the common aggregators, then the one for military families.

  She lingered for a while in the place she didn’t mind finding Sophie’s name, or rather her username; Sophie didn’t know Julie was a card-carrying member of her FreerMind movement’s action chat. A Judas? More of a Trojan horse.

  Julie’s user name was Godnotmod, and she posted frequently. The character she’d invented was an elderly Canadian Christian who believed—and frequently posted—that humans were made in God’s image and should not be altered. Julie got a kick out of playing an exasperated shut-in, connected to the world via her computer. The others had shortened her handle to God at first, and she had thrown a very in-character fit until they called her GNM instead. The ones who liked her sometimes called her Grandma. That included Sophie, who was far more patient with GNM/Grandma than with her mother.

  Julie routed her little deception through an e-mail she’d created for the purpose, on a VPN she’d set up to give her a Canadian IP address, since Sophie had once said that FreerMind occasionally investigated new online members. GNM had been there long enough now to move beyond their skepticism; a valued member of the anti-Pilot community.

  Sophie hadn’t posted anything yet tonight, which in itself was enough to ratchet up Julie’s anxiety. Shouldn’t she be at her meeting already? Shouldn’t they be planning actions and broadcasting to their waiting public? The possibilities began to swim through her head: Sophie had seized on the way to the meeting. She’d been robbed, taken to the hospital. Seized and robbed and injured, no ID, unable to provide their phone numbers as emergency contacts.

  “Turn it off, Jules,” said Val. Julie looked up. “Turn it all off. You’re getting that frantic look. Put down the tablet. Read a book, or watch a movie with me.”

  “A movie,” Julie agreed, drawing out the movement of turning off her tablet to glance at one more headline. Val scrolled through movie options and picked something they’d both seen before, an old comedy, the compromise between her own preference for horror and Julie’s preference for romcom.

  Julie leaned into her wife’s shoulder, taking comfort in contact. If something had happened, the universe couldn’t be cruel enough to let it happen while they were watching Young Frankenstein. Julie’s Pilot awareness agitated for stimulation for a few minutes before fully latching on to the movie. She let it focus on hyperdetail, let herself watch, let herself feel Val’s arm and Val’s shoulder and Val’s steady heartbeat. Their kids had been in this room watching this movie with them a thousand times. They still were. She focused her gaze on the screen, so the phantom Davids and Sophies could fill the rest of the room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SOPHIE

  Given the bus ride from hell and the walk, Sophie was pleased to arrive only fifteen minutes late at the decrepit former Moose Lodge they called headquarters. They were co-leaders, and Gabe wouldn’t normally start without her on one of her nights to run the meeting, but since she’d left home without her phone, she’d had no way of conveying she was still en route; she understood why the group had already gathered in a circle at the far end. Gabe had the floor and was gesturing, fist to palm, his short locs bouncing as he spoke.

  Whatever he was saying had to be interesting; nobody turned when she opened the door. Gabe’s back was to her, a breach of protocol; the meeting host always picked the far side, the twelve o’clock seat, to acknowledge any new members coming through the door, and be alert for potential attacks. It was a responsibility they both took seriously.

  She touched his shoulder as she walked past him, and he smiled and gestured to the empty chair at twelve o’clock. He had left the host’s chair for her; her ruffled feathers smoothed themselves back into place. She dropped her backpack and sat. There were about twenty attendees tonight, not their best or their worst turnout. A few regulars were currently in lockup, awaiting arraignment after that morning’s civil disobedience. The turnaround time at Central Booking these days was obscene.

  She scanned the group for new faces, finding a few interspersed around the circle: a middle-aged Black couple; a fortyish white woman in a wheelchair; a wiry, nervous-looking white teenager, maybe fourteen or fifteen. She knew his type: he was at the age when the pressure to get a Pilot started to build, but he was too smart or too idealistic or too scared to fall for it.

  “Have you done names already, Gabe?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Names and not much else. We waited for you. I was just telling them about this morning.”

  “Damn zombies,” someone said, then made a spitting sound Sophie hoped didn’t contain actual saliva. Officers didn’t want their soldiers losing discipline, either.

  “Agreed on the sentiment, but no spitting in our meeting space,” she said. “I don’t want to have to wash the floor before I sleep on it.”

  “Can we sleep here?�
� asked the new boy.

  Sophie gestured toward the mountain range of yoga mats and spare sleeping bags along the back wall. “Any of you that don’t feel safe elsewhere, you’re welcome to crash here as long as Gabe or I are here, which is most nights.”

  She realized she should take back control, now that Gabe had ceded it to her. “Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to introduce myself yet. I’m Sophie. She/her. Feel free to introduce yourselves later if I haven’t met you yet. When you speak, start whatever you’re saying with your name and pronouns, so others can start to get to know you. Now, then, Gabe, where were you?”

  She sat, satisfied that the group understood they were both equally in charge. She was glad he’d started the meeting without her. Too much reliance on a single leader wasn’t a good thing in this movement; that was part of why they’d insisted on co-running this field office. The whole point was that people should be able to think and act for themselves. She sat back to listen to what Gabe had to say.

  As always, he took a moment to get started, like an old car that needed to be coaxed to life. He hated his voice, she knew. Those first moments of public speaking were always agony for him, until he got over the self-consciousness and into the stuff that impassioned him. Tonight there was no shortage of topics to get worked up about.

  “Okay, I’m going to start with them, then come round to us. ‘Them’ for tonight is Balkenhol Neural Labs as usual, but also Congress. The House of Representatives yesterday voted to subsidize Pilots for all ninth graders living under the poverty level, under the assumption that the parents of all the others will pay for theirs. This was the first state with subsidies, since Balkenhol is in our backyard, and that has spread to about twenty other states, but it’s bad news if this goes federal.”

  One of the regulars, with a geometric haircut and full-sleeve tattoos on both arms, raised her hand. Gabe looked her way. “Daya?”