We Are Satellites

by Sarah Pinsker

  “It doesn’t add anything positive to the game. I get it for umpires, but why players? It’s just another enhancement, and everyone has to get them now or they’ll never play. Why would—” Val tore her eyes away from the jumbotron and glanced at Julie, who had a wicked grin on her face. The kids were watching them and snickering. “Are you messing with me?”

  “Maybe.”

  Val sighed and rubbed her neck. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing they’d gotten to her, but really, they knew that already. The least she could do was be gracious in defeat. She gave Julie a wry smile. “How do you know exactly which buttons to push to start me ranting?”

  “Long years of practice, love.”

  “It’s not like your rant button is hard to find,” said David. “It’s labeled ‘RANT’ in all caps.”

  Julie grinned. “And it’s the size of a barn.”

  “You’re right about all of it, Ma.” At least Sophie had some loyalty. “But they wouldn’t tease you if you weren’t so easy to tease.”

  “Et tu?” Val asked. “I thought you’d have my back, at least.”

  “I do, Ma! I wish the players didn’t have Pilots. You’re right that it’s lousy for the game, but what are they supposed to do, get them turned off? The younger players get them before they ever know they’ll make it to pro levels. The older ones get them so they’re not benched. You’ve given that speech at every ball game we’ve been to for years.”

  “And all the games on television, too. Every sport.”

  “And at meets you’ve coached.”

  “And at end-of-year sports banquets.”

  She looked from one face to another, from Julie to both kids, both laughing, their argument seemingly forgotten. If mocking her brought them together, she wouldn’t stand in the way.

  “Fine,” she muttered. She sat back to watch the game again, but they’d reached the seventh-inning stretch. The jumbotron showed the usual distractions: the food race, with the animated hot dog dancing as it crossed the finish line first; guess the crowd size; dance contest. When they did the cartoon shell game, Julie and David both muttered “two,” though Val had long since lost track.

  The shell game disappeared, replaced by David’s face. Val glanced around, looking for the camera, hoping it wasn’t a kiss cam since he was sitting beside his little sister. Except it wasn’t this David, who wore shorts and a T-shirt; Screen David wore a crisp collared shirt with the Balkenhol logo. He sat more formally, too, his military bearing on full display.

  “My Pilot saved my life and my troop’s lives more times than I can count,” Screen David said. Real David slumped low in his seat. Sophie was at full attention, and even Julie had set aside her devices. Stock footage of Piloted soldiers replaced David, and Julie closed her eyes and covered her ears. For all the body-count sites she’d frequented in their son’s absence, she had never been able to stomach the videos; too easy to imagine him there.

  This particular video was clearly designed to showcase their Pilots. Soldiers started to move, then paused. The doorway they would have stepped into exploded, but they’d already taken shelter, their Pilots presumably having delivered them some crucial information. The soldiers gave way to an operating room, then a classroom, then a plane’s cockpit. “Pilots are paving the way for a better tomorrow. They save lives in other ways as well. Pilots improve the attention of surgeons, of drivers, of pedestrians. They increase productivity and make our world safer.”

  Back to the image of David, handsome and alert, staring right into the screen. “My Pilot makes me the best me I can be.” David dissolved into the Balkenhol logo.

  The guy behind David nudged him. “Hey, buddy, was that you?”

  David nodded, sitting straighter, as if remembering he was supposed to be a role model.

  “Thanks for your service. It really saved your life?”

  David nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Val turned to look at the guy. Thick-bodied and leather-skinned, late fifties or early sixties, maybe, or someone slightly younger who had done a lot of outdoor work.

  “Like on the screen?”

  “Something like that, sir.” He held his bearing, but his beer shook in his hand.

  “Did you lose any—”

  Julie interrupted. “I don’t think my son wants to go into detail.”

  The guy glanced at her. He didn’t have a Pilot, Val noticed. He was the customer Balkenhol wanted. “I’m just trying to tell him I’m glad he got back okay, all right?”

  “You said that already. Now you’re pushing him to talk about things he doesn’t want to talk about.”

  “Jules,” Val whispered. “He can take care of himself.”

  David had taken the moment to compose himself again. “Thank you. I’m going to get back to watching the game with my family. Have a good day, sir.”

  The man sat back, mollified by one or the other or both responses. Val glanced over her shoulder and saw the whole section watching them. Julie and David had probably known that the whole time. Had it changed how either had conducted themselves? David had to know an ad like that made him a face for the company, and anything he did would reflect on them.

  “David,” Val said, her tone low enough that the man behind hopefully wouldn’t hear. “Did you know about that ad?”

  He shook his head, then shrugged. “I mean, I knew they were filming me, and I knew it was for an ad. I didn’t know I’d be the only one speaking in it and I didn’t know they were going to show it here, or I wouldn’t have come. It’s weird seeing myself on a screen. I wouldn’t have minded getting used to it phone-sized and maybe working up to the jumbotron.”

  Sophie eyed him. “If you’d had a zit it would have been the size of a car.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “It’s true, but you looked good.”

  “Thanks?”

  He was right to be wary of a compliment from Sophie. “You looked good for a giant sellout.”

  “I’m not a sellout. None of that was a lie. It saved our lives. Just because I don’t want to talk about it doesn’t make it untrue.”

  “I know that part is true, and I don’t need you to talk about it, but ‘My Pilot makes me the best me I can be.’ Do you actually believe that?”

  He paused, then shrugged again. “That’s their new slogan, that’s all.”

  “If you say so.” Her voice carried a note of triumph.

  By the eighth inning’s end, everyone except Val looked bored and ready to leave.

  “Time to go?”

  They were all on their feet before her; they’d been waiting for her to call it. Behind the stands, others were streaming from the stadium as well, as happened in a lopsided game. Several people stopped David to shake his hand, though nobody was as rude as the guy who had sat behind them. A few asked if they could pose for pictures with him, and one young woman asked if he would give her his card so she could figure out whether or not she wanted a Pilot.

  “I don’t have a card yet. I just started at the company.”

  “How about your phone number, then?” Her friends all giggled, and he blushed.

  They were clearly all going to have to adjust to living with a celebrity.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  DAVID

  Being home was like being home was like being home was like being on a movie set dressed to look like home. The house still the same cozy familiar mostly still the same. The moms still the same cozy familiar if maybe a little different something changed in them or maybe in him David could never tell whether something else was different and he was the different in the sameness.

  He knew he was different yes of course how could he not be the things he couldn’t unsee were part of him. He knew he couldn’t talk about those things with anyone here couldn’t help the way he tensed the way he sweated the way he didn
’t notice his teeth clenching until his jaw ached afterward and he noticed in the unclenching. He could describe the location of every fly on every wall in a room full of flies but he didn’t notice his body’s reactions until he counterreacted to them.

  Milo was the only person who understood. He felt bad bothering Milo when Milo and Karina were still getting reacquainted, but when he texted Milo always answered, and he wouldn’t admit to anyone how deeply he appreciated that fact.

  After the baseball game, after he realized Balkenhol was plastering his face everywhere—billboards, TV, Internet ads, seriously, he didn’t even know why, it wasn’t like they were hurting, it seemed like everyone had a Pilot now—it got even harder for him to walk out the door. He knew he got looks, that his own suspicion marked him as suspicious, and he mostly confined himself to his commute.

  The exception was when Milo asked him to get a drink, because it was one thing to text him, another to ask him to hang out, that was maybe too much, and then Milo would know he wasn’t handling himself that well, that he needed something he wasn’t finding, that despite the ads, the posters, the smiling, confident persona, he was falling apart. When Milo finally said want to grab a drink, he said yes, name the place, I’ll be there, wherever there is, is right now good, yes, cool, see you then.

  Milo arrived in a tiny electric coupe just as David reached the bar.

  “Karina’s,” he said, waving at the car. He wore a button-down shirt and suit pants, but no jacket, and he had let his hair grow a few inches. He’d been home four months longer than David.

  They sat at a table by the bar’s far end, near the kitchen. In threes: the scent of fry-grease, the sizzle of the grill, the cooks’ quick Spanish. Its own triplet: the bartender’s rhythm of hand-washed glasses scrubbed, sterilized, flipped to air-dry. David noticed he and Milo both rotated their chairs out from the table, so they had their backs to the wall. They turned their heads to talk to each other, cradled ice-cold bottles, their eyes moving to the doors, to the glass blocks that let in light instead of windows, to the two other customers. The floor was carpeted in thin dirty maroon-worn-to-black except an eight-by-eight square laminated dance floor and a DJ booth. Behind the DJ booth, an emergency exit they could duck out if danger came through the front door. A window air conditioner made a valiant and vocal attempt to cool the space. Even with that, compared to most places, it was practically a sensory-deprivation scenario. He wondered if Milo had chosen it for that reason, if Milo, too, craved the relative quiet, the confined spaces.

  “I was hoping you would say it gets easier,” David said.

  Milo cocked his head. “What gets easier?”

  “This. All of it.”

  “You were hoping you’d stop casing the exits? You’ve only been home a few weeks. Give it time.”

  David swigged his lager. “You’ve been here six months and you’re still doing it.”

  Milo shrugged. Laughter from the bartender, news on one television and baseball on the other, the scrape of a chair. Milo understood David better than anybody did. Even when he thought he’d had enough of the noise, he wondered if he’d feel worse if he was no longer able to notice everything.

  That was the problem with multiple attentions; he could never put anything fully away. There was an unspoken fourth and fifth and sixth and twentieth thing in every three he listed: the way the words on the bartender’s black shirt stretched and distorted over her breasts, the guy tapping his foot on the brass rail, the soda gun’s hiss, the boy who blew up in front of him, the IED he never would have seen, not with a thousand Pilots firing full bore, all focusing on everything they were supposed to focus on, and all the other things he had to consciously, constantly unremember.

  They ordered a second round, then a third, and talked about mutual friends, from the Army and from high school. David would have been happy enough to keep going, but Milo begged off. “I promised I’d be home to make dinner for Karina.”

  David stayed, ordering a burger and another drink. Better to eat here and drink a little more and then get sober than show up to dinner at home drunk.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  SOPHIE

  Sophie momentarily couldn’t figure out why the meeting space was so packed, but then she realized it was first Monday: the general meeting. The risk in running an ongoing rolling meeting space—she’d lost track. First Mondays were the lure for new folks: free coffee, free chili. Music. The hope was that even if they didn’t become regulars, they’d show up again for big actions.

  Normally, Sophie celebrated gathering so many anti-Pilot people. Tonight, though, she’d hoped to talk with Gabe about the ID caper. That likely wouldn’t happen; they’d have their hands full managing the crowd.

  A tall Black woman approached her. She carried a chipped chili bowl and a coffee mug against her body, using a forearm crutch as she navigated the room.

  “Can I get that for you?” Sophie reached for the chili, and the woman let her put it on the bar. Sophie tried to gather a name, but the woman settling herself on a stool looked only vaguely familiar. She pulled out her notebook and flipped back to the night she’d brought Val. She’d had a seizure that night, so anybody she met then might be a stranger today.

  There were a few descriptions that didn’t match this woman, then “Tommie—shaved head—Pilot kill after thirteen! years.” A glance at the woman’s fresh scar said she’d recently had her Pilot removed. A likely candidate. Sophie tucked her notebook away.

  “I don’t know if you remember me,” the woman said. “My name is Tommie.”

  “Thirteen years, right?” Sophie asked, to show she remembered. Tommie didn’t need to know the notebook had jogged her memory.

  The woman nodded, touching her head. “I still can’t believe it’s gone.”

  “You must have been one of the very first. My brother was the first one I knew, but even he hasn’t had his for as long as you.”

  “I was part of the trials. I was twenty and failing school and I needed the money.”

  “Did you? Finish school?”

  “Yep! Even made honor roll my last semester.”

  “I guess that’s how it works sometimes,” Sophie said. “I never figured school out. Do you mind if I ask why you had your Pilot removed? I usually see them deactivated, not removed.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Tommie said. She sipped her coffee. “I wasn’t sure if y’all knew about the new studies.”

  Sophie didn’t like to be out of the loop. Fake it ’til you get the gist. “I’ve heard some stuff. Which new studies?”

  “BNL is contacting people from those early trials. They’re asking us to do different things. Some are just having tests done. You know, to see if their batteries are still going strong, to see if the implants are still as effective as they were at the beginning.”

  “And?” Sophie leaned into the bar.

  “We’re not supposed to tell people, so you didn’t hear this from me, but they paid me fifty thousand bucks to have mine taken out entirely.”

  Sophie was glad she was leaning. She probably would have fallen over in surprise. “Why?”

  “Why the money, or why did they ask, or why did I do it?”

  “All the above.” She didn’t try to hide her interest or her ignorance anymore.

  “I wasn’t sure at first. I might not have done it, except, well, that’s a lot of money. I figured I could always have it put back later.”

  Sophie frowned. “Have it put back later” was not exactly a catchphrase for the anti-Pilot movement. “So, you said yes.”

  “If I invested some of that money I wouldn’t need a Pilot. I wouldn’t have to work.”

  For a few years, thought Sophie, and you’d still be Pilot-less in a Piloted world.

  Tommie continued. “They made me do some tests, then had me return the next week. They removed it,
and they asked me to come back a week later. They ran a bunch more tests. I think the same tests they were running on the people who hadn’t had their Pilots removed.”

  Across the room, Gabe tried to catch her eye. He made an is everything cool? gesture, and she gave him a quick nod. “What kind of tests?”

  “The same old stuff. Verbal questions and physical puzzles to do simultaneously, timed. Math problems while counting flashing lights.”

  “Okay?”

  “And I tested the same.”

  “The same?”

  “The same as before.”

  “The same as before you had the Pilot, or the same as when you had the Pilot?”

  “As when I had the Pilot. All the multitasking stuff.”

  Sophie ran a hand across her hair. “So you’re saying you never needed it?”

  “No.” Tommie was clearly frustrated with her. “I’m saying they took out my Pilot but my brain still thinks I have one.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sophie said, her cheeks flushing.

  “Have you heard of neuroplasticity? Brains rewiring themselves around a problem?”

  Sophie nodded. You don’t read about seizures without reading about hemispherectomies and laser ablation and brain functions regained.

  “My brain is still firing the way the Pilot trained it to fire, without the Pilot.”

  “I don’t get why you’re here,” Sophie said. “You’re not anti-Pilot.”

  “I’m not, but I’m not sure this is a good thing.”

  Sophie had to get over the fact that not everyone chose sides. The fact that Tommie was here was enough. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for telling me. That’s definitely a concern. I’m going to tell Gabe about it.”

  She strode across the room, leaving Tommie to her chili. Something was bothering her about the rewiring, but she couldn’t figure out what. Maybe Gabe would figure it out, except Gabe was busy talking down some semiregulars who wanted to paint the school board building Pilot-blue.