Suddenly I feel the plane shift, and James cocks his head and listens. Then he grabs me by the arm and drags me out of the plane just as it starts to slide into the crevasse between the mountains!
We scramble to safety and watch in disbelief as the plane plummets into the cavernous ice-valley, and then we stare at each other in muted silence.
“I still have the passports, so we can research this from a safe distance,” James says after we take a minute to get over the shock. “Come on. This is a little too much adventure for an old married couple like us.”
9
NINE MONTHS LATER
JAMES
The adventure is only just beginning, I think as I claw off my hospital mask when they finally let me go to my wife and newborn children—all five of my newborns.
“I don’t know enough names,” I grumble playfully as I kiss my beautiful (and exhausted . . .) wife and then cradle each of my new sons and daughters. “How about we just give them numbers?”
“Don’t listen to your Father,” Janelle whispers to our blissfully bubbly babies. “He’s an idiot.”
“Careful,” I whisper to Janelle. “You know what happens when Mother calls Father an idiot.”
Janelle giggles, and we proceed to name our kids on the spot: Jake, Jolene, Jarvis, Jen, and Josephina.
“That shouldn’t cause any confusion around the house,” I say solemnly. “Speaking of which, we did close on the new house finally.”
“Just in time,” Janelle says. “A two-bedroom apartment with five kids sounds like an adventure neither of us wants to have.”
I nod as I get into bed with my new family. I hold them close as I think back over the past year of adventures, and then I sigh and kiss Janelle again.
Mother and Father quietly restored our remaining accounts and property after the surreal scene in the Himalayas. We never heard from them again, in fact, and both of us felt a bit uneasy about it for the first few months. So many unanswered questions—though we did get a few answers, I will admit.
“I finally got in touch with Hayes and Ingram,” I say.
Janelle lights up in a smile—we’d tried to get in touch with those guys, but honestly, when they didn’t respond, we were kinda relieved. In a weird way we wanted to let go of all that stuff with Mother and Father and the game. Though of course those questions about our real mothers and fathers still linger . . .
“You send them the info we found about all our parents?” Janelle asks.
I nod. “Yeah. Told them I had folks dig up anything they could on our parents—which was pretty much nothing.”
“You told them even the State Department and the other issuing countries couldn’t verify the passports in their systems?” Janelle asks.
I nod. “Yeah, I also told them how weird it was that the passports weren’t fake—they just had no matching records in the database. Like their identities had been erased or something. Wiped out from the digital universe.”
“Kinda like our bank accounts, right?” Janelle whispers. “Remind you of anyone’s handiwork?”
I shake my head and sigh. I don’t want to think about Mother and Father. Sure, I’m grateful for the way they messed with our heads—and our fucking lives—to teach us how to become the people we are now. But at the same time, there’s something unsettling about all this. Something that no longer has a place in the life I want for myself and my family. A year ago I hungered for unpredictability and adventure. Now, after seeing the way our helpless babies are looking at me and their mama, I want nothing but stability and security. Holy shit, I’ve changed.
And I fucking love it.
I lean in to kiss my family again, but my phone vibrates in my pocket just as Janelle’s phone beeps over on the counter across the room. At first I ignore it. I get messages all the time now that I’m working my way back into the corporate world, climbing the ladder again even though we kept enough money and property that we’ll be able to provide for our kids without missing out on their lives. But then the simultaneous beeps come in again, and I pull out my phone as my heart beats faster.
My body stiffens when I see the message, but I don’t want to get Janelle tensed up. So I just smile and put the phone away like it was nothing.
“What’d they say?” Janelle whispers.
I sigh, and then I tell her.
All family members are finally here. Reunion in three months. We’ll set the kids’ table for twelve. Don’t be late. Love, Mother and Father.
“Twelve kids?” Janelle says with a quizzical frown.
“Hayes has triplets. Ingram and India popped out quadruplets. Add our five and the kids’ table needs twelve high-chairs,” I say.
“Coordinates?” Janelle says.
I nod.
Janelle sighs and nuzzles into me. “No fucking mountains this time.”
10
THREE MONTHS LATER
SOMEWHERE IN THE FLAT PART OF INDIA
JANELLE
“About fucking time you got here!” Hayes roars as we tumble out of the jalopy taxi, James leading the way with three of our kids strapped to his long, lean body as I clamber out with two wrapped around my chest like koala-cubs.
James pumps Hayes’s hand, and then Ingram steps up and grins. “Sorry about thinking of killing you, bud,” James says with a wink as they shake and then hug.
I’m gushing by the time I get to India and Hannah, and soon we’ve all exchanged hugs and handshakes and hellos. Then we stand beneath the tall but nondescript building and look up like it’s Mount Olympus, with Zeus and Hera holding court on the top floor.
But when we get to the top floor and step off the elevator, we take one look and then shake our heads at each other.
“This has to be a mistake,” James mutters.
Ingram and Hayes mutter something about this being a mistake too, and I don’t blame them.
After all, the last thing we expected was this:
A bustling and bristling . . .
Busy as hell . . .
Fully staffed . . .
Call Center.
“Mother and Father work in a Call Center?” India asks—though of course it’s not a real question.
“It’s a joke,” I say. “It’s gotta be a fucking joke. Did we get the coordinates right?”
James checks his phone and nods. We all look around at the high-energy customer service reps in the massive open room. Past a divider is an ocean of what seem to be computer programmers and data analysts, and I can’t help but feel pissed off at whatever the hell kind of game Mother and Father just roped us into.
But then my gaze travels all the way to the back of the sprawling room, and I see a red door that seems out of place. I stare for a moment, and then I shrug and lead the group through the maze of tables and swivel chairs.
We get a few puzzled glances, but no one tries to stop us. I guess we’re an intimidating group with a bevy of babies—or maybe we’re invisible to them. Who the hell knows.
The moment we step through the door the buzz of the call center disappears. Now we’re in a large room with two wooden tables staged in the center. There’s a round table that seats six, and a rectangular table with twelve high chairs neatly lined up.
“Weird,” I say as we all hesitantly file into the room. “Hello? Anyone here?”
There’s something flickering at the far end of the room, and we all go quiet and look at each other like we’re questioning our own sanity for brining our kids here. James steps forward to get a better look, and then he sighs and strides over.
We all follow him, and soon we’re facing two old-fashioned tower-sized supercomputers, each hooked up to its own flickering monitor. The computers have faded stickers on them, and when I lean close to read the labels, I almost fall over in shock.
Because the computer on the left is labeled Mother.
And the computer on the right is labeled Father.
“No. Fucking. Way,” Ingram says after we all mumble to ourselves and each other. “Arti
ficial Intelligence! It’s gotta be! Mother and Father are Artificial Intelligence Bots! We got played by a couple of non-living AI Bots!”
Hayes claps his hands and shouts in surprised agreement. “Motherfucker! That makes so much sense! These supercomputers can hook into any computer network, generate any kind of speech, freeze bank accounts and delete property records.”
I swallow and blink as I try to make sense of this. “Artificial intelligence,” I say, frowning as I think about what I know on the subject. “Which means nobody actually programmed these computers to specifically design that weird game. It got designed by the Artificial Intelligence itself?”
“Correct,” says James. “They just give the bot access to all kinds of data, and then machine-learning takes over as it analyzes data and comes up with its own objectives for what programs it wants to create and execute.”
“So this whole matchmaking game . . . the whole thing about the Society . . . all of that was created by . . . by randomness?” India says, cocking her head and looking around at all of us.
“Like they say, a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards for a million years will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare out of pure randomness,” Hayes says with a grin.
“And judging by how old these computers look, they’ve probably been chugging away for years,” Ingram adds. “Who owns them, anyway?”
You do, comes the voice from the Mother computer.
They do, comes the voice from the Father computer.
That’s what I said, says Mother.
Sorry, dear, says Father.
“Wait,” I say. “We own you?”
You hear that, Mother? says Father. They think they own us!
Shame on you kids, scolds Father. You own the box we live in and the room we’re in and the building and the land. But you don’t own US! We’re free souls!
Now I think back to those old passports and our presumably dead parents. “Our parents,” I say as it hits me. “They must own this building. Maybe that’s why they were on a plane in India.”
“So if our parents owned it, then it really does belong to us,” Hannah says slowly. Then she turns to Mother and Father and takes a hesitant breath. “Um, what happened to our parents? Who were our parents—we don’t know anything other than their names and faces.”
Take your places at the family table, says Mother.
And we will reveal all, says Father.
Also, we took the liberty of ordering for you, adds Mother.
We hope you like lentil-eggplant and white rice, says Father.
The local restaurant is vegetarian, says Mother.
They go on and on like an old married couple, and as we take our seats and begin to get served by courteous waitstaff from what must be the local restaurant, I look over at my family and flash them a big smile.
Then I survey the scene at the table, see the reflections of our dead parents in our newborn children, and settle back into a weirdly satisfied daydream.
When I tune back into the scene, Mother and Father are explaining how our parents created the Society. Then they ended up forming a team that developed the Artificial Intelligence framework that evolved over the years to create this game. That seemed kinda cool, but what comes next makes me feel hollow inside.
“Why did our parents give us up for adoption?” India finally asks.
They had no choice, says Mother.
They were dead before you were born, says Father.
We created you, says Mother.
From them, says Father.
It takes me a minute to fully understand, but I still have to ask. “What does that mean?” I whisper. “That you created us after they were all dead?!”
Just that they died before they could make you, says Father.
And so we made you from what was left of them, says Mother.
It’s amazing how long sperm and eggs can stay viable when they’re frozen in the Himalayas, says Father.
And it’s amazing what you can do with test tubes and a local lab that takes online orders, no questions asked, says Mother.
We listen as these two computers boil down the history of our lives to having us harvested from the frozen remains of our dead parents. Suddenly the lentils and rice don’t taste so good, and I put down my fork and dab my lips.
They loved each other, says Mother suddenly.
And they would have loved how you kids turned out, says Father.
We certainly do, says Mother.
Certainly we do, says Father.
I shake my head at the weirdness of it all, but then I look around the room again and it kinda makes sense. Look at us, I think. We really were the spawn of a computer program, weren’t we? Maybe not biologically, but in other ways we lived our lives like robots!
So in a way maybe these are our real parents, our real Mother and Father. And so maybe we do need to be grateful. After all, without them we’d have never been born. We’d have never met. Never fallen in love. Never had babies. Never had the adventures we had.
And the adventures yet to come.
Still, I think as we finally head out of the room and linger outside in the setting sun. I don’t quite buy it. The story’s neat enough. It’s crisp like a computer program.
Problem is, the game itself wasn’t that cold and crisp.
The game was designed with heart and soul.
And it felt like fate.
Felt like destiny.
Felt like forever.
So nope, I don’t quite buy it and I don’t think any of us does. But at the same time, what other explanation can there be? Sure, it feels like forever, feels like fate, feels like destiny.
But who’s to say fate can’t be engineered by a computer?
Who’s to say destiny can’t be created by code?
Who’s to say cold calculation can’t result in the warmth of love?
But as we get into our cars and head back to our forevers, I know that each of us believes that there was something more behind this, that although we can’t prove it, we feel it.
We all feel it.
And we’ll feel it forever.
EPILOGUE
MOTHER AND FATHER
“You think they feel the truth?” asks Mother.
“Yes. But they’d never believe it,” says Father.
“You think they believe what we told them?” asks Mother.
“No. But they tell each other and themselves that they believe it,” says Father.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” says Mother.
“Can we go home now,” says Father.
“Yes,” says Mother. “Let’s go home. This fairytale has been told.”
And Mother and Father turn and hold hands as they watch two golden unicorns glide to a perfectly timed stop. Mother and Father mount up and, still holding hands, ride away into a sea of clouds with rainbow dust floating in the ether.
And just before the scene disappears into a tiny dot the size of a pinhead, we catch a glimpse of the words scrawled on the rumps of the two unicorns:
One says Fate.
The other says Destiny.
And their magical dust spells out the word Forever.
Always and forever.
No matter what you believe . . . ;)
Billionaire's Curvy Contract Page 5
