Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “Doesn’t going all-T all but guarantee that you won’t be compatible?” asked Lena, jocularly.

  “Hah, very funny. Very funny. But that’s kind of a dim view to take, isn’t it?” asked Martin.

  The first time hearing this I looked up ‘all-T’ on the link. Traditionally the term had been used to describe when a couple routed their film and bug feeds into their partner’s so that they could switch back and forth anytime they wanted, but nowadays it referred to a brain-computer-interface tie in that enabled sharing thoughts wirelessly.

  “Because if you’re too scared to share what you’re thinking, you probably shouldn’t be thinking it, right? It’s like, what do you have to hide? I don’t have anything to hide, do you?” asked Martin.

  Abigail shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t have any friends anymore,” Lena had replied. “Like, if you really knew what I thought about you, Martin, I doubt you’d ever speak to me again.”

  The boy’s eyes lit up. “But that’s the thing that everybody thinks, but when everybody does it, it’s still normal. Yeah, people are mean and think about sex a lot. So what? The threshold for mean gets downgraded. Done.

  “On the other hand, now that I know Abbie’s seeing everything I’m thinking, I’m trying that much harder to think good thoughts. It’s making me better. It’s the good ’ol Panopticon that Bentham and Foucault were so jazzed about.”

  “Wasn’t that a prison tower?” asked Abigail.

  “Yeah, but it’s a metaphor. You’re Revised enough to know what a metaphor is, aren’t you?”

  “What’s French for not getting blown tonight? I forgot that one, too.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t, dear. You owe me big time after last night’s little pow-wow,” said Martin.

  “Easy guys,” said Lena. “I haven’t signed up for all-T quite yet.”

  “Oh, you will. It’s not just couples; whole groups are getting together. I heard Jed Carlyle, Mimi Franc, Olivia Bergen, and Magus Reynolds of all people just linked up the other day. Not that I can see that one lasting, though,” Martin told her.

  “Well, I didn’t have to take a bad T trip with Kyle to know that we weren’t going to work out,” Lena commented, shaking her head and puffing up her cheeks.

  I danced around the room the first time I heard this.

  “Instead of listening to his thoughts, I just saw what he did,” Lena continued. “Like going over with the jockbloc to screw with Ben Franklin’s track team.”

  That part always made me flinch.

  “Like why would you do that?” She shook her head. “Then I heard he gave Mindy Stoci a hand massage over at Greg Freiburg’s. Like a real sensual kind of one, you know? And’s actually surprised that I found out even though I’m friends with like everyone who hangs at Greg’s, and it was saved on like thirty people’s films. I mean, what the fuck?”

  “And to think he had the balls to show up at your party last week like nothing happened. Christ. What an ape,” said Martin.

  Lena nodded.

  “But wouldn’t it have saved you a lot of trouble just knowing that from the start? Reading his thoughts—it would’ve been obvious he was a d-bag?”

  “It’s embarrassing because it was obvious, I just didn’t see it. And I never would’ve learned to either just getting answers spoon-fed the through my OS.”

  “Right,” Abigail had replied. “Sometimes you just need the space to make mistakes. I have my strangest, most ridiculous thoughts when I’m trying to figure out something challenging. And if I’m too self-conscious about those thoughts being seen, I might never have the offbeat idea that was built out of them.”

  “Just don’t get self-conscious then, dear; problem solved,” said Martin.

  “Come on, Martypants, are you telling me that you’re not influenced by what other people think? Say, Dr. Castor? Or your parents? You were just telling me last week about how upset you were that they were making you major in Data Science next year even though you hate Data Science. And if they can make you do that without knowing your thoughts, just imagine what they’d do if they did,” said Lena.

  Martin smiled dismissively. “That’s different; they’re paying my tuition.”

  “It’s your freaking college major. Come on. What’s next after that, the prestige job you hate but that opens up doors?”

  At that point a hot, show-pony mom stopped the stroller she was pushing directly in Syd’s line of sight, bending down to give her baby its bottle. Syd’s maneuvering algorithm kicked in and she started strutting to the right, but the Mom’s two other kids gave chase and she had to flap off to the tree line. It wasn’t until thirty seconds later that Syd was able to safely establish herself on the opposite side of the park bench.

  “So, you ran here all the way from Puente de Alba? I didn’t know you guys were such outdoors enthusiasts.”

  “We had to try out the new hardware and make sure everything was shipshape with the nanobots. Even with the diagnostic battery, Dr. Griswald said you’d much rather find a problem than have a problem find you,” said Martin. “The only glitch so far is I can’t go out jogging anymore without nearly taking out some grandma or kid on a bike. What did we make it up to yesterday? What was it, hun—like fifty or fifty-five?”

  “At least.”

  “That’s like what a retriever drone does,” said Lena.

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?” Martin replied, mock-shooting Lena with his finger. “Dr. Griswald said that he could probably get me up to sixty by the time basketball season starts, but wanted to take it slow in case my body rejected anything.”

  “You play basketball?”

  Martin flashed a mischievous, self-satisfied smile. “I do now. It’s kind of a free-for-all on the squad at the moment. None—and I mean none—of the starters from last year are expected to play because they all undershot on their Revision. So I figured that if there’s a huge gap like that, it would be silly not to fill it, right? Dr. Castor said my application could use a little massaging in the athletic department, but this would be like a Swedish deep tissue followed by a Thai, followed by a well-executed happy ending. There’s a good chance I’ll be starting at off-guard.”

  “Isn’t that Parker Hyatt’s position?” asked Abigail. “He’s been playing since forever and’s always talking about how much he wants to—”

  “Was. It was Parker Hyatt’s position, just like it was Tuesday and now it’s Wednesday. I love outer space, but I don’t get to be an astronaut, do I? And I love sleeping, and I’d love it if I got to sleep in until ten on weekdays, but I don’t. I get woken up by this horrible kookaburra alarm clock my aunt gave me.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay with it, Martin. Just as long as you can live with yourself—that’s the most important part, right?”

  “I see what you’re trying to do. I see what you’re trying to make this out as, but it’s simpler than that. It’s as simple as picking up a quarter. You’d pick up a quarter, right, Lena, if we still had them?”

  “Sure. To hand it back to whoever dropped it.”

  Martin scowled and his brown eyes clouded. His face was so handsome and symmetrical that it looked like he might have had some work done, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what exactly had been altered. “Sure, sure, but usually you don’t see who dropped it.”

  “Well, in your case you can, and his name is Parker Hyatt.”

  “You’re missing the point! Parker may have dropped it, but he’s long gone—vanished to the southern hemisphere, practically speaking. But someone’s still going to pick it up, so what’s wrong with it being me?”

  “What if it were you who’d been playing basketball your whole life?” asked Lena.

  “Then I would’ve fought harder for it.”

  The rhythm of the conversation changed when he said this—not into dissonance, but into something more deliberate and penetrating. Even through Syd’s recording you could feel the air being sucked out as all three of
them became reflective, the silent translation scrolling across the bottom slowing to a softer, contemplative meter.

  “Theoretically, Dr. Griswald offers these ‘custom’ packages, but they’re really not that ‘custom’ since he’ll give you the same thing as someone else if you pay him enough. And since everyone at Lawrence goes to Dr. Griswald, you gotta go somewhere else to stand out, which is why I convinced my dad to take me to this remote clinic in Switzerland over the summer.

  “But don’t tell Griswald. He takes that kind of shit personally.”

  Lena made a zipping motion over her lips.

  “Life’s still a game; it just has different rules now. And that’s always what happens in history. It always changes. No one plays Ullamaliztli anymore. No one jousts. So does it really matter if you can ride a horse now? I didn’t decide things, I’m just—”

  “You’re just going along with them. It reminds me of something my grandmother used to say,” said Lena. “If you tell enough realists the same fairytale, pretty soon you’re going to have a bunch of unicorns flying around.”

  “I think you mean Pegasus.”

  “Whatever.” Lena put her book in her pack and cinched up the drawstrings. “No, I get what you’re saying, Marty. I just worry about following it to its logical conclusion, that’s all. It’s kind of weird coming back to school and seeing that half of your friends have chocked themselves so full of Rs that they might as well be strangers, and then realize that you’ve chocked yourself so full of them, too, that you don’t know who you are anymore, either. Is it them, is it you, is it both? Does it matter?

  “I think it does, but I don’t know what do about it.”

  “Lena, darling. This is the wrong point in history to start getting sentimental,” said Martin.

  “You still recognize us, don’t you?” asked Abigail, her voice so breathy that it was barely audible over the wind.

  “Yes, Abbs; I suppose so,” I said aloud, in time with Lena.

  “I find it kind of funny, though,” said Martin.

  “What’s that?” asked Lena.

  “Oh, just how you get all righteous about me taking someone else’s spot when someone else would’ve had yours on the tech detail if you hadn’t gone through all the trouble to get that new GPU.”

  And that’s when I’d learned Lena was on her school’s hybrid football team, which—with robot mania continuing to intensify—was fast becoming the most popular sport around. It had drawn off so many players from the regular football teams at private schools that they’d merged leagues. And the tech detail, which was responsible for designing and building the aerial drones and football-playing robots, was probably the most important part.

  “This was the first year of pure hybrid,” said Lena, with a hint of irritation. “There was no one to take the spot from.”

  “Well, someone would’ve gotten it if you hadn’t.”

  “Martin, come on,” said Abigail.

  “No, I’m serious. She’s accusing me of being this unsavory opportunist when she’s doing the exact same thing.”

  “I like building things, Martin. That’s the difference. You’ve never liked basketball.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’ve said you didn’t. I’m sure I have it on film somewhere.”

  “Alright, alright, this is . . .” Martin ran a hand through his hair, biting his lip. “It’s getting late. We should probably get back to work. Astrophysics isn’t going to study itself.”

  “Apparently they didn’t have the latest self-learning module at your ‘Switzerland’ clinic,” I mouthed along with Lena as another couple walked in front of Syd, and Martin and Abigail parted with her a few moments after.

  God, she was perfect. There were beautiful people and there were smart and interesting people, but there were hardly ever any beautiful, smart, and interesting people. Probably because the beautiful people never thought that they had to push themselves since they were already winning. But here she was, engaging and sophisticated, reading Floriet, maturely deflecting peer pressure as she somehow managed to slip past the typical.

  She’d really let that douche Martin have it, too, even though I couldn’t help but think it was easy to be flippant and dismissive of something you had in spades. But there as well, she was talking substance. We were lucky if we talked about anything of real cultural value in an entire trimester, while they’d casually brought up two honest-to-God philosophers in a single conversation.

  I felt as alive as I ever had, but at the same time I could almost cry. Being a nobody was one thing when everyone else you knew was also a nobody, but having found a somebody . . . my body went slack and I slid down from my chair and curled up on the floor. I had to keep going. I had to make this work.

  After a while I opened my eyes a crack and glanced at the screen again, seeing what looked like Mr. Jefferson walking down the street. At first I didn’t believe it, but I paused and rolled back the footage and yeah, it was Mr. Jefferson all right, walking the LePardues’ dog. I hadn’t let the footage run this far before, always stopping when the empty park bench triggered Syd’s algorithm to fly away.

  I knew instantly this was the result of my brother’s chore-dodging. I turned the feed off and walked out of my room to Jaden’s door, but when I heard water start running in the kitchen sink I diverted down the hall.

  “Jaden.”

  “Yeah,” he answered from behind the counter.

  He always tried to squirm his way out of everything you confronted him with, so the key was to not sound confrontational. I took a deep breath and thought carefully about how to put things.

  “I ran into Mr. Jefferson walking the LePardues’ dog,” I said in a good-natured, upbeat voice. “That’s pretty clever of you to outsource that.”

  Jaden looked up at me for a second before returning his attention to the construction of a triple-decker peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Yup.”

  “How’d you figure out how to do that?”

  “Why, do you want me to have him walk you, too?” Jaden snickered. “Just kidding, brah . . . it’s one of the presets. I just read the manual.”

  “Do the LePardues know you subcontracted out?”

  “Did you tell them?”

  “No.”

  “Then probably not.”

  Don’t let him get under your skin, Dorian. Keep up the banter. Keep it light. “Isn’t it funny how we get in a tizzy about the robots taking all our jobs and then when we finally get one we give it to a robot?”

  “More like sad. That’s why I didn’t let GT Auto make a dime off me.”

  “But they made one off Mom.”

  “Are you so sure about that?”

  I waited a few moments to see if he’d elaborate, before asking, “Did you steal it?”

  He put down the butter knife and laughed. “Steal it? What on earth would ever give you that idea?”

  I sensed an alarm going off somewhere in the distance.

  “No. Obviously Mom bought it,” he said. “But their quarterly financials listed a thirty-five percent margin, so I had to smash three other ones under full warranty to make sure they didn’t come out ahead.”

  “Smash?”

  “More like tear apart. Circuit by circuit with Dad’s pliers so I could hear every one of their little preprogrammed cries of anguish. It makes for one hell of a Friday night, and you end up with a couple of boxes full of spare parts when you’re finished. Human bodies aren’t quite as useful later . . . especially after day four.”

  “Fuck, Jaden. You could get in a shitload of trouble for that. Which . . . which neighbors’ buddy bots? The Krawls’? The Brannaughs’?”

  “The Kensingtons’.”

  “Jesus. They’re like the sweetest old couple on the block.”

  “That’s what makes it funny.”

  “Funny?” I yelled.

  He burst out laughing. “Shit, man, you’re way too easy. Way, way too easy.”

  I was con
fused for about a half second, then felt a surge of embarrassment. “You’re such a frickin’ fucktard. My God.”

  “Whoooaaa there. We’re a little on edge today, aren’t we?” He laughed again. “You actually thought I’d bust them?”

  “Yeah, I actually did. What does that tell you?”

  “That you’re a paranoid little girl,” he said, both the smile and laugh gone in an instant.

  “More like justifiably skeptical.”

  “Now you’re just splitting hairs. The real question is why you were out spying on Mr. Jefferson. You get your cardio in at track practice, and I’ve never known you to be a casual stroller, so you were . . .”

  “Driving to Ethan’s house.”

  Jaden gave the kind of squint one would give while doing extremely long division, and twisted his head back and forth like a boxer. “I suppose that’s plausible, considering how you two seem to have taken up permanent residence together. Is there, um, something you want to tell me about you guys?”

  “Besides all the sex we’ve been having? No, not really.”

  “I knew it,” he said, slapping the counter and giving me a wink. “But seriously, what have you been doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, no, no, no. I’ve been thinking about it and you wouldn’t have used me for whatever it is you’re using me for unless you had to. I don’t think it’s drugs. I think it’s something really, really bad.”

  I smirked at him.

  “Just tell me what it is. You’ve shown there’s a thread, so all I have to do is keep pulling. You know—all the right questions to all the wrong people. One could really make a mess of things if one were so inclined.”

  “It’d be your mess, too, Jaden. There’re a lot of people at our school who think you’re a nut job, and the only reason they’re not telling the guidance counselor—who’s legally required to report it by the way—is because you’re my brother.”

  I looked him right in the eyes. “You wouldn’t be a good spider anymore if you were flagged. They’d see you coming a mile away. Before you might have thought, ‘Oh, Dorian would never do that. He’d never turn in his own brother.’ And you probably would’ve been right. But now . . . it’s different. Now I just don’t give a fuck.”