The Emoticon Generation

by Guy Hasson

  Glynis put both hands on her cheeks nervously and took a few breaths before pressing the link.

  Steve and her mother had been married for three years, between the years 2005 and 2007. Glynis had been born in 2006, exactly one year and eight months after her mother had married this Steve Caspi!

  Glynis couldn’t take any more. She got up, went to the kitchen and made lunch.

  Maybe he was her father. Maybe her mother had lied, as she had about so many things. Maybe Glynis did have Jonathan’s eyes, but Jonathan was not her father. Her real father was this Steve guy. Perhaps she should check all information about Steve, as well. Perhaps she should try and contact him, tell him that he has a daughter. But then... He knows he has a daughter. He got a divorce a year after she’d been born. Was Glynis the cause for the breakup? Why had he left?

  Too many emotions. Too many possibilities. Nothing to grab.

  After she ate, she couldn’t return to the computer. She turned on the television, and watched a meaningless, boring movie for two hours. Meanwhile, her mind drove around in endless, fruitless circles.

  At the end of the two hours, she was ready to face the computer again. What she should do, she thought, was look up this potential father of hers.

  She went back to her room. Information about Steve Caspi was still on the screen. He had left the Institute shortly before he had divorced her mother. Perhaps what had broken them up was not the child but a dispute over work-related issues. Yeah, right.

  His homepage was easy enough to find. He was working now for the Romulus Foundation in New York. The name sounded familiar. But what interested Glynis more, though, was his picture. He bordered on Hollywood-handsomeness. He was smooth shaven, had long, curly brown hair, brown eyes, and looked thirty-five. Then again, maybe the picture was an old one. She saved it anyway. Glynis looked up his address in the Yellow Pages. She then cross-referenced the address with the millions of stationary PubliCams in New York City. Ah – there were eleven in that section of the street alone. Thank god for overcrowded cities! She had the computer show her the locations of the PubliCams on a three dimensional interactive map of the street, with Steve’s apartment highlighted. There were three PubliCams on his side of the street, four on the other, and four more on the roofs. She chose the PubliCam in the cafe on the other side of his street with a clear view of the entrance to his building.

  She accessed the PubliCam’s records (these things were kept for 72 hours), and asked her computer to search for any person that bears a resemblance to the picture from his homepage.

  Glynis sat, riveted by the numbers that crossed the screen, as the computer relayed that it had gone 1 second into the past, a minute, an hour, and so on. Half an hour later, it reported that its task has ended, and it had five segments that included someone that resembled the image with 80% accuracy.

  Glynis watched them all. In the first, he was leaving the apartment. Still as handsome as his picture. He was leaving the apartment in a rush, a suitcase under his arm, smartly dressed. The next segment was a vid of him coming back. Then a vid of him leaving. Then another, the next day, of him leaving. The computer must’ve missed one segment. Oh, well, these things are never perfect.

  Glynis chose the clearest video segment, and played it again and again and again.

  Yes, she could see what her mother had seen in him. She liked the way he walked. She liked that look in his eyes. That haircut that said that he wasn’t altogether there, that some part of him lived inside his mind. Something that reminded her of those wacky professors from the movies. Or suicidal poets. Only a hint, though, no more.

  There was no doubt in her mind now. She put her hand on the screen, “Hello, Dad,” she whispered.

  A minute later, she had his home phone number. She reached for the button activating the phone in her computer, but her hand trembled, and she took back her hand.

  Not yet. Not just yet.

  As nice and friendly as he looked, there was a reason he had never been mentioned in this house. There was a reason her mother gave her the wrong name. There was something about him, maybe something bad. Maybe... Maybe it wasn’t mom that he’d hurt. Maybe this Steve Caspi didn’t like his daughter. Maybe mother was protecting Glynis. Maybe calling him wasn’t a smart idea.

  Change of plan.

  Now Glynis wanted to see who he was, what he was, to learn everything she could about him. In short, she smiled to herself, she felt like stalking him.

  Glynis looked at her watch: if there hadn’t been an emergency or something, her mother would be home soon. Just enough time to execute an ISpy (pronounced ‘I Spy’) program.

  ISpy has been around for the last few years, as the PubliCams became ubiquitous. All you had to do was choose a person from an image in a PubliCam from anything from a few minutes ago to as far back as 72 hours ago. The program would then save all images of this person until s/he left the screen. Then it would check for this person on any of the PubliCams more or less in the direction the person was heading. If spotted, ISpy would save the vids for later, adding them to the previous vids. If the person left the view of that Cam, ISpy would do its best to find the person again in the nearest Cam and save the new image after the old one. ISpy could access all PubliCams, some SeCams (security Cams), OnCams (which people wore on their person) and HomeCams – so long as the Cams’ data was stored in public cyberspace. The result would be a ‘movie’ of everything the person did on-Cam from the time ISpy began to follow to the time it was told to stop. (The fun thing to do with ISpy was to find identical twins in a single frame, and ask it to follow one of them. Then you just sat back and watched the machine’s head explode.) Glynis told it to run all night, enough time to assemble Steve’s last three days and this night.

  Glynis executed ISpy and told it to run on the Net, so that she could turn off the computer even as ISpy was running. As if on cue, she heard her mother’s car pull in.

  Her heart raced. She felt like a little kid that was almost caught doing something her parent disapproved. She turned the computer off and ran to the living room. When Olivia came in, she found Glynis watching the 24-hour Tonight Show Network and laughing hard. It was Steve Allen month.

  During dinner, her mother said, “I figured out what I want to do for your birthday.”

  “Really?!”

  “Sure. It’s something special. Something we’ve never done before.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not telling. You’ll have to wait three more days. We’ll do... something,” Olivia smiled mysteriously, and despite her daughter’s urgings added no more.

  When dinner was over, Olivia’s phone rang. It was Ron from work. Half an hour she spent chewing him out over something he did and giving him new instructions. Glynis didn’t listen; her mother’s work always seemed boring to her. But it gave her time to think about the other things. Obviously, she could say nothing about Steve. But there were other things. Like the fact that her mother was registered as living someplace else – hmm, she could check that out with the PubliCams, too. Then there was the fact that she had an uncle she’d never seen. And maybe even the fact that there was no record of Glynis being born – although surely that was just a glitch, and the least important of all these things.

  Suddenly she felt an uncontrollable need to confront her mother with something, to prove to her that she knew more than Olivia had told her. Maybe even to hint that she shouldn’t keep her secrets to herself, that Glynis could figure things out. As soon as Olivia was off the phone, Glynis began, “Mom, I...” suddenly, a rush of adrenaline told her that maybe telling this to her mother was dangerous, “uh... I...” Still, it wasn’t about her father. It was something about public records. “I... Uh... I noticed something by accident today on the Net.”

  “Oh?” Olivia prepared herself a drink.

  “Yeah, it’s just... I happened to look for my birth certificate, and... It wasn’t there. There’s no record of my birth.

  “Really?” Oliv
ia raised an eyebrow. “That’s weird. I’ll have to fix that. Well,” she shrugged, “when I have time. No rush.” She drank a bit, then said thoughtfully, “I think maybe you spend too much time on the Net, Glynis.”

  Glynis froze. Not now! Not with her so close to finding out everything about her father! She’d been stupid-stupid-stupid for raising the subject! “No, no, really, I’m not,” she said immediately. “I just needed it for some stupid club I wanted to join and they needed my birth certi—But really, it was just some stupid club. Just some kid stuff. I mean, you know. Don’t worry about it. Really. I won’t do it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Glynis cracked jokes all evening, trying to amuse her mother, until she was sure Olivia had forgotten all about the Net incident.

  That night, Glynis dreamed about the man in the picture. She attached a voice to him. She phoned him and told him he had to come to this address and that it was really important. A day later, there was a knock on the door. And it wasn’t Ron or Elizabeth or mother. It was him. He’d come. She was hesitant at first, and tried to procrastinate as long as she could, but eventually she told him who she was. For a minute he was shocked. He never knew he had a kid. He had been estranged from her mother since a year after their marriage – their divorce was only a formality. Olivia never even told him she was pregnant. He hugged Glynis and Glynis hugged him, and they both cried, and he promised that he would take care of her and that he’d be there for her from this moment on and—And then Glynis woke up. As soon as she realized that it wasn’t reality, that it didn’t really happen, she twisted in pain. Anything else that happens with her and her father can only be worse.

  She took an hour to recover. The house was silent. Her mother was off at work.

  Glynis made herself breakfast and watched television for a while, unable to walk to the computer and turn it on.

  Eventually, she forced herself. She hit three buttons and watched the movie ISpy had made for her.

  In the beginning, she watched each and every second. Steve Caspi walking out of his house, down this street, past another, taking a cab to the other side of the city. Eventually, she fast-forwarded through the boring parts, and concentrated on his interactions with other people. There were snippets of him having conversations with people during work hours. Some of the conversations were actually from the inside of the facility in which he was working, from some OnCams and some distant PubliCams that ISpy had zoomed in considerably. Glynis had AdLip read the lips of the conversations Steve held and instantly dub the image. It wasn’t Steve’s voice, obviously, but at least she heard the words.

  Apparently his expertise in psychology had made him an advisor for the biologists Wilde and Clarke. Where had she heard those names? Ah! They were the first to have publicly cloned a human being! (Although two years ago there was a scandal about a rash of cloning experiments done as early as 2001.) Yes, little Charley and Joey, the twins that had been born one year apart, with their ‘bigger twin brother’ thirty years older than them. The clones must be... what?... Charley was born around 2009, which made him slightly younger than her. So what was a psychologist like Steve Caspi doing there?

  On second thought, it made sense. The ‘twins’ got more coverage than the British royalty, not to mention the fact that they were the first of their kind in the world, and yet not unique like the rest of us. They would need a shrink.

  The details about the twins that she garnered from Steve Caspi’s conversations didn’t interest her. More important was how he spoke and how he related to people. He seemed to always listen to others. He was impatient only rarely, and never discourteous. Everything he said was intelligent. Oh, she liked him. She liked him!

  After three hours of ISpy snippets, Steve Caspi’s first day at work was done. Glynis wanted to replay some of his conversations. But she wanted to see what he did outside work even more. Steve headed back home. His open apartment window could clearly be seen and magnified from a PubliCam on a roof two streets away. She got to watch him inside his house! Who said technology wasn’t great?

  She watched him watch tv, talk on the phone to a friend, prepare himself a meal, read a textbook, write a psychology paper on his computer (the title was big enough to discern – not the text itself), close the shade, and, inferring from the darkness that soon followed, put himself to sleep. The next day – yesterday (Thursday) – was much the same. At the end of that day, Glynis hit the jackpot with an AdLipped phone conversation. She only heard bits and pieces, since most of the time he was with his back to the window or out of sight completely. Here’s what she heard of the conversation:

  “Hi, honey... yeah... fine, fine ... You know, work, nothing ex— [... he turned his back ...] How are things in Ha— [... his hand covered his mouth ...] Sitting down? Why? [...he bent over...] ... —regnant?! You’re pregnant?! [... for a long period he was out of view...] —not happy— [...turned his back, then quickly...] No, I’m not happy, I’m ecstatic! I mean, oh, my— [...] You’re still coming back tomorr— [...] Listen, you have to tell this to me agai—”

  He walked out of view, and the next image that ISpy showed was when he reappeared ten minutes later, no longer on the phone. He was jumping up and down like a small child. He was going to have a baby and he was happy about it!

  A heavy weight she didn’t realize was there had been lifted from Glynis’ shoulders. This man would not hate his child. He doesn’t now and he couldn’t have once – not with a reaction like that. She replayed his joyful bouncing again and again. He would like to have a kid. He would like to have a kid!

  It was time to talk to him.

  She looked at her watch. Taking into account the different time zones, he’d be home in another two hours. Enough time for her to run through most of today. She sped through everything ISpy prepared of this day. Nothing seemed unusual. She did stop to hear every phone conversation – perhaps he’d had a change of heart. But he hadn’t.

  She did, however, get his timetable. He’d be home at 21:00. At 22:00 he’d leave the apartment to pick up the woman Glynis only knew as ‘honey’. Her mother would probably be home at 21:30, New York time. That gave Glynis a very small window to catch him alone. A window that would start in ten minutes.

  Glynis watched him as, at this very moment, ISpy showed him waiting patiently inside a cab (she now knew that his (their?) car was in the shop). Five minutes from home and stuck in traffic. Glynis’ entire body began to shake uncontrollably.

  She tore herself from the screen and left the room. She made herself a sandwich and hot cocoa. What would she say? What could she say? How should she introduce herself? What if he hated her?

  Five minutes later, it was exactly 21:00 in New York. She’d made up her mind not to say that she was his child, but Olivia’s child. She’ll see how it goes from there.

  She sat in front of the screen. Steve was just entering his apartment.

  She dialed: sound only – he wouldn’t be able to see her. One ring. Two rings. He answered, “Hello?” His voice was different from what she had imagined. But it was warm. It was nice.

  “Hi. Is this Steve? Doctor Steve Caspi?”

  “Yes, yes it is. Who is this?”

  “My... Uh... My name is Glynis.” Don’t tell him her full name yet, he might know who Glynis Hatch is. “Ah... Do you mind if we switch to vid?”

  “Absolutely not. Switching.” The PubliCam’s image was immediately replaced with a close-up of his face. Good looking.

  “Omigod!” he said, obviously reacting to her face, and her heart sank. “You’re on that grainy tv thing, what we used to call ‘color’ or actually—what was it?—pixels! I haven’t seen one in more than a decade!”

  “Yes, I know. Technology hasn’t reached my humble home.” He was friendly. She was friendly right back at him.

  “Technology?! This is like talking to someone in black and white! I didn’t know they made pixel-based televisions anymore! Anyway, I didn’t mean to insult you. How can I help you, y
oung woman?”

  “Um... Do you remember an... Olivia...” – she almost hung up; no going back after this –”...Hatch?”

  His smile cracked – just a bit. It was enough for Glynis to fight mounting panic. “Yes, I do,” he said, his tone more serious.

  “Well, I’m—I’m... Glynis... Hatch. I’m...”

  “Related?” he finished her sentence.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Let’s see,” he tried to think. “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t immediately place it. Glynis Hatch, Glynis... Hmm, Olivia had a brother, and when I knew him he had one son and one daughter... She was called... Um... Barbara.” He was back to being friendly. “But she was five last time I saw her which was ages ago. And you’re a bit on the young side. So I probably missed your birth or something,” he flashed a smile. He was treating her like an old acquaintance. “Are you Thomas’ kid?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Steve waited for a few seconds for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he said, “Okay. So, how can I help you?”

  “Well, I, uh, I heard that—I mean, I—”

  “Wait a minute, I know why the name’s familiar! You have the same name as Olivia’s ex—” And suddenly he froze. His face tight, the smile gone, he looked at her eyes right through the screen, “Who are you?”

  “I—I—I don’t understand the question.”

  “You’re a relative, you said!” he snapped. “Who are you?”

  Tears were forming in the corner of her eyes. There was so much anger in his voice. Too much anger. He was angry at her from thirteen years ago. “I... I’m Olivia’s daughter.”

  He put his hand to his forehead.

  “Um...” her heart pounded, but she said it, and there was a hint of pleading in her voice. “Do you know me?”

  “I... don’t know. That depends on who you are.” He shut his eyes, and said, “How... old... are you, Glynis?”