The contractually mandated monthly meeting was never exactly a relaxed affair, but this one, Jo decided, promised to reach superlative levels of awfulness. All morning she’d been marching upstairs to Charlie’s room, standing at the door with her finger on the pingpanel, then chickening out and clumping back to the other moms. Failure. That was the message they sent with their silence, staring up from the table with their diamond-hard eyes. The ultimate modern middle-class hazard: a public exhibition of parental failure.
“You’ve gotta do it, Jo,” Aya said after the third attempt, sipping the latte she’d been nursing all morning. “You just have to prepare him.”
While Teri, at the ovenex, turned, nails glinting, and said in a voice that sounded concerned without actually being concerned, “It’ll be easier on him, in the end.”
Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you would about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do. Wedging herself into the chair by the dynawindow, Jo blinked away the backyard view and called up the scheduler.
Ten thirty.
Half an hour to go.
Sun Min came to the table, blowing holes in the foam on her third cappuccino. “Sooner you get started, easier it’ll be. All the forums recommend the same thing. Groundwork.”
Jo gnawed off a piece of bagel. “I’m just not sure this is the best thing for him.”
The atmosphere tightened. Looking around the kitchen suddenly felt like staring into a stranger’s frozen smile. Today was more than a family meeting, Jo reminded herself. More than a test of her mommying skills, more than a battle for Charlie’s future. It was a performance.
Naturally, it was Teesha who spoke next. Gentle Teesha. Supportive Teesha. Political-candidate-advising Teesha. If Aya was the perfectionist of the group, always playing CEO; and Teri the consummate TV exec, with her pore-rejuve treatments and her million-dollar hair; and Sun Min their literary sophisticate, then Teesha was… well, what could you say about Teesha? She had the skills to handle lobbyists and congressional candidates, the biggest tantrum-throwers in town. Surely she could have handled kids, too, if she’d felt like blocking out the time. Instead, she’d taken it on herself to handle Jo, playing the helpful grandmother to Jo’s perennially flustered mommy. Which was nice, to be sure, and not to be scorned. But Jo could never figure out the best way to react to all this meta-mothering.
Teesha took Jo’s hand. In this family of megamoms, this clique of accomplishers—the Queen Bee, the Glamatron, the Editrix, the Matriarch—Jo was just Jo, the standard model. The person who pulled slop out of the ovenex, switched on the evening TV stream, and took a slow dive face-first into the loveseat. Not much to say about good old Jo, except that she was here. Always here.
“You scared?” Teesha used a voice that had probably helped trailing candidates through poll-number crashes, brought congressional aides down from caffeine-pill binges, coaxed suicidal interns off hotel ledges. “Worried you might blow it? Jo, let me tell you something. We’re all scared. We’ve seen the therapist reports. We’re watching his numbers. Yeah, we’re worried about Charlie’s progress. But that’s why we’re here. To tackle this together.”
“But you—” Jo checked herself. “You don’t have the relationship with him I do.” Big mistake, she thought, looking at their faces. “What I’m trying to say is, it feels like I’m always the one who has to—”
Teesha eased back, using little plucks of her fingers to resettle her Yoruba-patterned shawl. A trick of hers, the gesture was saturated with authority. “We’re a family. That’s what we agreed. Equal partners. The contract says—” Teesha broke off, lips spreading in a secretive smile, as if she’d thought of a dirty joke she was almost too embarrassed to share. “Look, you know what? Forget the contract. What I’m saying, Jo, is we’re all in this together. If something’s gone wrong for that sweet little boy, that’s on all of us. You want me to go up there and talk to him, say the word—”
Jo shook her head. “Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not me. It’s Charlie. You really have to understand Charlie.”
“Well, if you feel that way, you can’t blame us for being concerned. He’s been up there all morning, doing—but you know what he’s doing. If we’re going to get through this, as a family, then—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Sun Min clacked down her cappuccino. “Look. You may not care what the contract says. But I do. We paid enough to have them write the damn thing, exactly because of situations like this. When it comes to the home environment, we all get a vote. And you’ve been outvoted, Jo. You just have to deal.”
Teri and Aya both opened their mouths. Before anyone could talk, the lights winked off, the dynawindow blanked, and every counter, clock, display, and status window began to twinkle with inscrutable symbols. Chairs scraped, dishes clinked. The moms sucked hisses of surprise through their teeth as the bowels of the house thudded with mysterious operations. The ceiling projector whirred. Light returned, purplish, unsteady, as the walls filled with flickering images. Maybe mouths, maybe eyes, maybe fleeting faces, they reminded Jo, above all else, of rapidly gesturing hands.
Not now, she thought. God, please, not now.
“Sparklybits,” Jo said out loud, “this really isn’t the best time.”
Strokes of brightness lit up the dynawindow, slashing upward, bending outward, like hands uplifted in a shrug.
Jo tried to remember the lingo. She thumbed on her sema and sketched a sign in the air, a series of slashes and chops that she hoped meant cut it out. The light throbbed. The ovenex displayed a series of dots and carets, an emoticon row of blinking eyes.
“I mean it, Sparkly.” Gesturing as she talked, Jo repeated the sign for stop. The dynawindow blinked. The walls displayed a now-familiar icon, an open circle with dashes on the sides, which Jo figured was supposed to resemble a bowed head.
“That’s right, Sparkly. This is adult-people business. You go back up and wait with Charlie.”
Fizzle. Wink. There were no words for the series of icons that glimmered and faded in the walls. When they were gone, the lights came back, the ovenex showed its default display, the dynawindow reverted to the rainbow tiles of the scheduler. There was no sound throughout the house except the swish of a bathroom-cleaning subroutine.
“Now that,” said Sun Min, “is exactly what we’re talking about.”
With the ghost gone, the moms twitched into motion. Hands lifted to tuck hair behind ears, brush crumbs from slacks, adjust rings and necklaces.
“Sparklybits,” Teri said.
“Really.” Aya sighed. “You named it?”
“Well,” Jo said, “Charlie did.”
“And you let him?”
The tone of Aya’s voice let Jo know this was about more, much more, than a simple name. It was about major failures of smart-home management, serious lapses of parental discipline, epic errors of motherly judgment. The frustration of a world-bestriding CEO at seeing a job badly done.
What could Jo say? What could anyone say? It was a pretty big deal, after all, letting the house get haunted.
Teesha gathered up Jo’s plate and mug and brought them to the dish slot, ignoring the kitchen whiz as it scrambled at her heels. With the mess dispatched, she turned, drying her hands, and locked eyes with Jo, saying with a little nod, “I think it’s time.”
The stairs to Charlie’s room were at the back of the house, between the self-care parlor and the door to the village commons. It was a screen-free zone: once you stepped into the hall, all devices went automatically on lockdown. Something they’d voted on ages ago. For purposes of stress management.
Yeah. Like that had worked.
The whole wing was tweaked-out for sensory modulation. Carpets, warm colors, floor-level lights, even a few pieces of hotelish wall art. The style reminded Jo of her mom’s house, all the inert clutter and décor people had brought into their lives back then. As if they felt some anticipatory lack, a need to make up for the absence of technology.
The homeschool room was at the end of the hall. Privacy checks clustered round the door: intercom, peephole camera, the pingpanel. All pretty silly, given that they’d equipped the place with round-the-clock monitoring. How many times had Jo logged in at the talkshow hour, zoomed in on nightvue to watch her son sleep? His face so placid as it dreamed, free of anxieties, until she could almost forget what went on during the day.
She slipped down the hall, aware of Teesha’s heavy stride behind her. The other moms were still downstairs—scared, Jo supposed, of spooks and little boys. She lifted a finger.
Hesitated.
“It won’t get any easier,” Teesha said.
“I just…” Jo turned. Performance, she reminded herself. This was all a performance. “I feel like I already screwed this up.”
Teesha’s smile softened. “We all feel that way. Hell, we did screw it up. But we’re fixing it now.”
“Yeah, but I’m the live-in, you know? The one who’s here. I don’t want to say I feel closer to Charlie—”
The smile disappeared.
“—but I feel like I should have been on top of this,” Jo hurried on. “As the person who actually, you know, stays in the house.”
Bing: the smile came back. “We all had access to the logs.” Teesha touched her hand. “We see the status reports. Any of us could’ve punched up the module, run a diagnostic. Hell, I knew the house had viruses. Just didn’t know it was—I mean, I don’t think any of us understood—”
“How attached Charlie was to it?”
“How bad things had gotten.” Teesha’s mouth pulled down in an expression Jo saw often on TV, an empathetic frown, acknowledging profound, shared wellsprings of emotion. “Know what I used to do? When he was little?”
“What’s that?”
“I’d be in meetings, okay? Back when we were steering Senator Ramirez through his hot-mike hack. Sitdowns with the campaign manager, fundraisers, everyone completely losing their shit. So I’d have my specs on, y’know, scrolling feeds, saying I was keeping up with the reaction. Meanwhile, I’d have your updates on the periph. Diaper blowout. Major bed-puke. Mystery crash at three a.m. Cake-face takes the trophy. All day.”
“No!”
“A-yuh.”
“Naughty mommy.”
“It got me through. Don’t think I coulda gotten through without it.”
“Course, most of those updates were the nanny.”
“Sure. But you were here, Jo. That’s what I’m saying. While I was taking care of grown-up babies on the Mall, and Sun Min was cleaning up after authors in New York, and Aya was off selling her arm-spanx thingies, and Teri was doing… whatever Teri does…”
“Yeah, what exactly does Teri do?”
“God knows.” They giggled together, and when the giggles subsided, Teesha touched her arm. “But you, Jo, you were right down the hall. Now, I know sometimes it might feel weird, being the one who—well, who can’t quite pay in at the same rate. Which is fine. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But when you have four professionals all butting heads—”
“I am a professional, though.”
“Sure, you’ve got your nursing job. I think that’s great.”
“It’s a licensed profession.”
“It’s fantastic that you do that. But you know what I’m saying. We’re all equals here. Sure, Aya can be a big mama bear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff. I’m sure I can be a little intense about all sorts of things. It probably feels like we’re always on your case, like the homemaker always comes last.”
“But I’m not—”
Teesha held up a hand. “You’re valued, okay? No one thinks any less of your contribution. That’s the point of a co-op, right? Everyone pays in whatever they can.”
Sure, Jo was thinking, only some people pay in by hiring expensive online tutors, while other people pay in by screaming and bleeding in a hospital for ten hours. But she only smiled.
“We’re power moms, right?” Teesha gave her a sock in the arm. “Wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t like the challenge. That’s what I tell my babies in DC. Y’all think prepping for a primary is hard, try prepping a challenged kid for top-tier preschools.”
Jo tried hard to keep her smile in place. “You ever have that feeling,” she said, “like with every little thing we do, we’re potentially fucking someone up for life?”
Teesha boomed a laugh, throwing back her head. Trying, Jo thought, just a little too hard. “Come on, now, girl. Into the dragon’s den.” She guided Jo’s hand to the pingpanel. And pressed.
“Mom?” It always felt weird to hear Charlie on the intercom, how shrill his voice sounded, like something might be wrong. Jo leaned in.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Everything okay?”
Jo glanced at Teesha, got a nod of reassurance. “Sure, we just—can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about.”
A pause. Sometimes the no-screen thing drove her crazy.
“Thought you were doing your meeting out there?”
“This is part of the meeting. Something we need to discuss.”
“Okay, but I’m doing my puzzles right now. I’ll schedule you for… fifteen minutes.”
Jo broke the ping. Teesha reached for the door, but Jo pointed at the status display. Purchased from a trendy tactile-play site, it was a custom-order birch flip-card machine, all natural, non-digital, except for the gizmo that changed the letters. With a flutter and click, it switched to the phrase Mom Time.
“Cute,” Teesha said as Jo opened the door.
The homeschool continued the analog theme: sound-dampening rugs, a plain glass window. The only piece of modern tech was the learning station itself, a topline Sony schoolbox, with apps and doodads up the wazoo. Parentally controlled, of course, though not, apparently, controlled enough. This was where Charlie spent all his time, at least until the coming day when they’d finally cave in and get him a palmcom, at which time, Jo figured, he’d be lost to them forever.
He didn’t like to use the headset, but plunked himself down at the screen and—zonk—went straight into Charliespace. For a kid like Charlie, Jo sensed, all of reality was basically virtual. When he heard Jo coming, he said without looking up, “We did the Parthenon and the Colosseum and Notre Dame and the statues. Except Sparklybits started painting the statues, but I told him that wasn’t always historically at-at-attested,” he finished with a dip of his head, forcing out the big word.
Jo started at a tap on her shoulder. “I’ll get the others,” Teesha hissed, vanishing on a whisper of carpet.
“Except we might do the color later,” Charlie said. “But I told Sparklybits I have to check sources.”
“Mmmm.” Jo went to stand beside him. When she let her fingers trail in his hair, Charlie looked up in mild surprise. For Charlie, Jo had realized, the existence of other people was always mildly surprising.
“Then we’re going to—” He broke off, moving his hands in jerky patterns, faster as frustration mounted, until Jo nodded and smiled, mimicking his signs. Charlie smiled too, relieved at not having had to use words.
A babble from the hall announced the arrival of the moms. Teri descended first, nails flashing, keening with exaggerated joy, “Char-lieeeee!” Aya came next and tousled his hair. Sun Min nuzzled him. Teesha crushed him. Jo cringed, knowing how Charlie would feel about all this. But he handled it well, putting on his visitor face, as each mom claimed her obligatory hug.
“We’re—” He pointed at the learning station, waving his hands in expressive swirls as his face bunched up. “We’re—”
“Slow, baby,” Teri said.
“Use your words.”
“We’re doing—”
“Take your time, Charlie.” Teesha knelt on the carpet, nodding to coax him along.
“We’re doing—”
“Puzzles,” Jo translated, mirroring his gesture, and saw his face relax.
“Puzzles,” Teri said through her TV smile. “That sounds so fun! Can I do a piece?” She scanned the floor, the shelves.
“No, they’re—” Charlie made the sign for the learning station, then the sign for online, then a bunch of signs that meant something like “shapes of light.” That was as much as Jo could follow. What he called “puzzles,” she would have called “models”: digital constructions, meant to be educational, that challenged kids to assemble famous buildings. Charlie had built the whole set so many times that Jo couldn’t imagine he got anything out of it except the satisfaction of the process itself. Tick-tick-tick, piece by piece, a series of gestures he could have done by now in his sleep.
“Me and—Sparklybits—”
He was almost totally signing now. Those wide, florid gestures that only Charlie fully understood. Charlie, that is, and one other entity.
At the name Sparklybits, the moms all turned to Jo.
“I see.” Teri’s smile was stapled on. “And how much time do you spend, Charlie, playing video games with Sparklybits?”
Charlie frowned. “They’re not really—”
“They’re like virtual building sets,” Jo explained.
“Ah.”
“Charlie. Sweetie.” Aya knelt. Too close, Jo thought, but restrained herself. “Can I see how you play with Sparklybits?”
Charlie looked up for approval. Jo nodded. Sun Min and Teesha and Teri were already herding her out of the room, down the hall. Over Sun Min’s shoulder, Jo could see Charlie gesturing, flamboyant with frustration, as Aya cocked her head and tried to smile.
“This, this is what we’re talking about,” Sun Min hissed. “Right there.”
“Does he always express himself to you with those… movements?” Teesha asked.
“Well,” Jo sighed, “mostly with the ghost. But I’ve picked up some of it.”
“This is why he’s lagging.” Sun Min jerked a hand at the bedroom, folding her arm like an Egyptian painting. The resemblance to Charlie’s gesturing was uncanny, but Jo held the thought. “When did he start to miss milestones? I’ll bet it was right when that thing showed up.”
“It’s more than a speech lag,” Teesha said. “He’s behind on every track.”
“It’s all connected. Speech, socialization. This is why his metrics have crashed. How can he succeed if he can’t even talk?”
“He does okay on the homeschool stuff,” Jo said.
Sun Min used the same face she probably pulled on authors who pitched digital-addiction memoirs. “You’re going to fix an emotional lag with homeschooling? This is why we’re pumping in twenty percent for Artemis Academy. Trust me, I’ve read the lit. You cannot, cannot hit benchmarks across the social skillset without at least fifty per week of face-to-face time. Where are his public speaking skills? His prosocials? Empathy, engagement, emotional literacy? Do you know how badly he’s lagging his cohort?”
Lagging. If there was one word Jo could’ve Xed out of the discourse, it was that deeply loaded word, lagging. When she was a kid, people had said “catching up”—as in, “Jo Clark is still catching up in math.” Before that, the favored term had been “behind.” Go far enough back, people had used words like “retarded.” The whole idea being that everyone was on the same road, all heading to the exact same place.
“How is he going to get into college with these benchmarks?” Sun Min threw up her hands. “Not just a good college. Any college.”
“Maybe he won’t want to go to college,” Jo said, and knew instantly that she’d blown up the conversation, gone straight for the nuclear option. She might as well have hauled down her jeans and pissed on somebody’s sandals.
“You’re seriously planning to keep our son out of college?”
“I’m not trying to keep him out, Teri, I—”
“You’re going to ruin his future, our future, because you don’t have what it takes to run a household?”
“Teri.” Teesha put a hand out.
“Because you let this piece of rogue code get into his brain and—”
“Teri, Teri, Teri.” They were all pressing round, trying to calm her. Something had slipped in Teri, the newscaster composure an all-or-nothing proposition, now firmly jammed in the OFF position.
“Thing is, Jo, you’re not paying for the private schooling. You’re not paying for the prep, therapy, emotional tutoring, nutritional advising. Twenty percent of your salary? I’m sorry, that’s a fucking rounding error. The rest of us? Okay?” Teri’s fingernail scrawled circles overhead. “We’re the ones working seventy-hour weeks, traveling the world, just to pay for this goddamn regimen. Why? Because we want the best for Charlie. Because motherhood, call me crazy, I happen to think that’s kind of an important job. But you—”
“All right, Teri.” Teesha held her arm, but Teri threw her off with a clash of bracelets.
“What am I going to tell Frank?” She thudded partway down the stairs, looking up at them, tapping at the tears on her cheeks. “He already thinks this is some vanity trip for me, like adopting a fucking gorilla at the zoo. Now I’m supposed to ask him to be the dad of a budding high school dropout? Jesus, I should have adopted the gorilla; at least they don’t grow up to join machinima porn fandoms. ’Cause I’ll tell you, that’s where this kid is headed. Every other mom in the office is beating the benchmarks. Every one. There’s a single father in technical support who’s got a son in the ninety-eighth bracket. And we’ve got a lagger. God.”
In the silence that followed, a funny sound came from Charlie’s room. Jo took it at first for a technical failure—audio feedback, a broken speaker—until she pegged it as Aya’s cry of surprise.
“It’s not Charlie’s fault.” Sun Min looking at Teri with what might have been sympathy or distaste. “It’s—”
But now Aya was hurrying to join them, bustling up with her brisk executive stride, planting hands on her waist to announce, “It’s happening.”
“You get through?” Teesha asked.
“To our kid? No. But there’s this.” Aya semaphored at the wall, remembered the no-screen thing, yanked out her phone and tapped into the house system, swinging it to show everyone the feed.
“Shit,” Jo said.
“You sure you properly vetted this guy?”
They were in the kitchen, gathered around the dynawindow, watching the feed from the village gate.
“How long has he been waiting out there?” Jo asked.
“I texted him to stand by.” Aya clicked in for a close-up. “Yeesh.” She winced. “Just look at him.”
Jo had to admit the man at the gate wasn’t especially prepossessing. Particularly not on the zoomed-in security feed, with its anti-blur motion compensation and refractory enhancement and high-def-whatever and all the other brilliant tweaks the geniuses of home security had put into the software. There were slews of apps to make people look good on video; this particular program revealed them at their worst.
Not that the man at the gate would ever have looked especially good. When Jo met him, he’d had a kind of greaser-trying-to-clean-up-his-act vibe, hair slicked back, a flush in his cheeks, like a slacker who’d just stepped out of the shower. Onscreen, now, he looked like a hair malfunction at the hippie factory. Like someone had swept up Chewbacca’s haircut clippings and glued them to a giant peeled potato. There was no good stage of life at which to have that look, Jo thought, but thirty-six—which is what she guessed the exterminator was—was too old for any conceivable excuse.
“You checked his background? Consumer reviews? Credentials?”
“I met with him. He showed me his shop.”
The man began to pinch his nose, pulling hard to squeeze the boogers out. The kind of semi-discreet nosepickery you might get away with on a busy train, but definitely not on close-up video.
“His shop, huh? He have any dead bodies there?” Aya sighed. “Well, let’s get this over with.” She punched the code for the gate and the guy slouched in, schlumping through the New Urban street plan with his truck moseying along behind him.
As he came around the corner to their street, the moms all trooped outside. “Hello, ladies!” the exterminator yodeled up. The truck, still creeping at his heels, gave a beep. “Park!” he commanded it, pointing to the curb, and jogged up the steps to loom over them in all his ungroomed glory. “So.” His teeth peeked through a wickerwork of hairs. “This is the coven, huh? I’m Evan.”
“Let’s go over the situation.” Aya spun on a scraping heel. “Then we’ll tell you how we want to proceed.”
Evan bumped his head on the doorframe coming in. He seemed not to notice. He bashed his shoulder on the turn into the hall, seeming not to notice that, either. He was looking at the ceiling.
“Yeah, you see a lot of hauntings in these older units. Legacy wiring. Puts a limit on your hardware. So people don’t push the updates, a backdoor opens, and ’fore you know it, boom. Spooktown. What’s the interface here? Still got the old semaphore hookup?” He stuck a sema on this thumbnail and signed the lights-out sign, snapping the hall into darkness, occasioning several bumps and curses. “Nice.”
“Jo tells us you’re quite the expert in these matters,” Aya said, leading the group into the kitchen. “Credentialed,” she added, with a hitch of her eyebrows.
Evan shrugged. “Expert, ah, that’s not really the word I’d use. Freakishly obsessed is more like it.” He went to the ovenex and started poking buttons. “Honestly, this stuff is like, the only thing I ever think about.”
“N-o-o-o-o.” Aya looked him over. “Can it be true?”
“My pops, he was way into rogue AI. Used to hunt ’em, all through the hotlands. That was my first childhood memory. Rolling with a pack of ghostchasers in Lou’siana. ’Course, these days it’s a lot easier. There’s people who’ll just sit around and wait, rig up some bait and hope the things’ll show.”
“And what works as bait for a ghost?” Aya asked.
“Well, it sounds awful, but, the truth is: kids.” Evan pulled out a crumpled pack of gummies and popped some in his mouth, chewing with much bristling of hair and smacking of lips. He opened the trash panel, peeked inside, went to the drone dock, and flipped a switch. “Not literal kids. But the stuff a kid’ll do. Poking around. Punching buttons. Messing with stuff. Come on, Sparkybits, where are you, buddy?”
“Sparklybits,” Sun Min corrected, and winced at her own complicity.
“Yeah, ’cause y’know, they’re basically kids themselves.” Evan noticed the way everyone was look at him. “I mean, not really,” he clarified. “They’re just software. But as software, they’re still learning the ropes.” He went to the dynawindow and waved his arms. “Got a shy one here, huh?”
“It mostly comes out for Charlie,” Jo said.
“Gotcha.”
“So this is common?” Teri’s voice still hadn’t quite climbed down from the pitch it had reached earlier. “A kid, connecting with one of these things? That’s normal?”
“Normal is not a word I really like to use.” Evan brought up the security panel, tapping monitors until he got Charlie’s room. They looked at the boy’s bent back and head, hunched in front of the learning station. Evan’s fingers vanished into his beard. “They were built to be learners. You know? Pattern matchers. See, we think of learning as like a thing that happens when you’re taught, right? But it’s more like a thing that just plain happens. And learning with someone else, I guess that’s easier than learning alone.”
The puzzles were back on Charlie’s screen—even on the feed, Jo could make out the shapes—and the boy had begun his eloquent gesturing, tracing loops and swirls in the air. Evan seemed to be unconsciously mimicking him, swinging hands and fingers, until he abruptly stopped and scratched his chin.
“Guess we better go up there,” he said.
Under normal circumstances, the door to Charlie’s room was kept closed, but the visit from the moms had thrown off the routine. As they went upstairs, they had a clear view of his hands, waving in front of the learning-station screen. They could see exactly what those hands were doing.
“Whoa.” Evan pulled the kind of face that emojis could never capture, mouth screwed up, eyes slightly out of focus, eyebrows riding high above a grimace that seemed to say, I don’t know what you make of this all, but damn, what a show!
In his pod-chair, Charlie was slumped in classic kid-posture, a sprawl of boneless lethargy—except his arms. These were as animated as tentacles, weaving, swishing, fingers wriggling like strange sea creatures, plucking invisible meanings from the air. Here was the performance to which his earlier fumblings had been a kind of rude prelude. Anyone could tell the gestures constituted a language—just not a human one.
The patterns in the screen were eerily similar: curls, twists, and ribbonings of color, animate icons of light.
“Good God,” Aya breathed.
“That’s no home semaphore,” said Evan. “No, sir.”
It wasn’t ASL either, Jo knew, or any other human sign system. She’d checked. It was a language, she suspected, that had never been used anywhere outside this house.
She became aware of a stumbling pressure, a bumping hip, a foot on her toe. Teesha was railroading the whole group down the hall. In the bedroom, Teesha eased the doorway partway shut, peeking out into the hall. “Can Charlie hear us in here?”
Jo sat on the bed. “He wouldn’t notice if he did.”
“Now that,” Evan pointed down the hall, “is quality spectre-speak.”
“But is it—” Sun Min restarted her question. “What is it?”
“It’s how they talk. Mostly. Though not usually at that level. By which I mean, well—” Evan socked his tongue into his cheek. “Is Charlie, uh, special?”
“In what way?”
“You know, gifted?”
“He used to be,” Sun Min said.
“A smart kid?”
“Charlie is… mathy.”
“Focused.”
“On the spectrum.”
They all had their own terms for it, picked up in parent gossip, office chatter, the world of online mom-chats.
“Charlie,” Jo said, “he latches onto things.”
“I mean, the kid’s a nerd. Right?” Teri shrugged. “We wanted a nerd. It’s what we paid for. A boy who’d ace the tests.”
“And not a girl?” Evan’s question evoked a chorus of half-hearted mumbles.
“It’s a bump,” Jo explained. “Having a boy. The top-ranked colleges are sixty five percent women. The top-paid professions are sixty five percent men. Think about it.”
“Okay,” Evan said noncommittally, puffing his cheeks.
“What did you mean, they all talk this way?” Sun Min narrowed her eyes. For the past few minutes she’d been compulsively clicking the clasp of her handbag. “It’s like a code?”
“Well, technically it’s all code.” Evan grinned as they groaned. “I mean, the ghosts, they came out of the omnicom craze, right? So, like, everything has a mind, okay? Your shirt, your coffeemaker, your car. Well, what kind of stuff is a shirt gonna talk about? If it talks to a coffeemaker, what’re they gonna talk about? If all those things are talking to each other—”
“But they still have to talk to people.”
“Sure. But the thing about smart devices, they’re mostly talking to other devices, about people. The whole point of the internet of things is it’s networked. So if you’re a free-floatin’ free-lovin’ higher-level entity that grew out of all those little programs—well, how the world looks to you, it’s probably mostly not about human language. Like, User72 is heading southwest at sixty miles per hour on Highway 92, elevated blood pressure, restless, making hungry faces, scanning the map… You put that all on a screen, what do you get? They can use some English, sure. But they don’t think like we do. So they don’t talk like we do, either.”
“But they don’t think at all.” Aya’s voice had a calculated coolness, the tone she probably used to close agenda items in meetings. “So what makes anyone think they’re talking at all?”
Evan looked at his toes. To Jo, at that moment, he looked just like Charlie, getting grilled on his social skills in some therapist’s office. He brought up his head with a sigh. “Look, you’ve got a couple of options here—”
“We want to get rid of it.” Aya cut him off.
“Okay, but listen—”
“No. We want to get rid of it.”
“Can’t we just chase it off?” Sun Min was still fussing with her handbag. “Get it out of the house, but not, you know, kill it?”
“Well, you can do that. But they usually come back. Creatures of routine, right? Once they bond with a child—I mean, once they’ve linked to a user—”
“I don’t understand.” Teesha swung an arm to break into the conversation. “It’s software. Ones and zeroes. If we try to delete it, can’t it copy itself?”
“Sure. They don’t really like to do that, though.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah.” Evan’s inner geek broke through in a goofy smile. “Funny thing. Thinking is, if you’re nothing but a trail of bits, copying is like a form of movement, right? Imagine you left a clone of yourself every time you took a step. Well, to a program, what we think of as movement is basically a special case of copying, except you delete the original version. That’s part of what makes these things so special. A virus copies. A ghost moves.”
“So if we delete it, you’re saying, it’s gone.”
“If we can manage to delete it, yeah.”
The words had a solemn power—the power, Jo suspected, of any statement of finality. It took her a while to realize everyone was looking at her. Jo made herself focus on Evan. She had a vision of Charlie all grown up, stranded in some weird niche job, letting his hair run riot, dead-ending his life. Becoming this man.
“It’s like we discussed, Jo,” Evan said.
“Right,” Jo sighed. “Like we discussed.” She got up and said, “Let’s do it, then.” And headed down the hall to Charlie’s room.
He was at the learning station, still signing with Sparklybits, performing those strange, lavish gestures. Jo thought of Evan’s explanation, how a coffeemaker might talk to a car, a car to a faucet, a faucet to a chair, but none of that struck her as having much to do with language. Language was about empathy, expression. Sharing something other than information.
“Charlie.” She slid into his line of sight. He registered her presence, blinked, broke from the screen, and gave a mind-clearing shake of his head. The human child slowly came back into his face.
“We’re doing a new puzzle,” he said.
“That’s great. But, Charlie, listen, I need you to put away the puzzles for now. There’s something important we have to talk about.”
His eyes became deerlike, anticipating a shock. Did he know what was coming? Not a chance, Jo thought. There would have been tears, shouts, a crisis.
“This man,” she said, “needs to talk to Sparklybits.”
“No,” Charlie whispered, so faint Jo was sure no one else had heard. She tried to ignore the lance of ice in her heart.
“Hey, there, Charlie!” Evan used that awful adult-talking-to-a-kid voice, lowering his bulk to the floor with a grunt.
Charlie glanced over, noted his existence, and turned back to Jo, saying only to her, “Mom, please.”
“Sparklybits, Charlie, he has to be…” Jo couldn’t finish.
“It’s okay, man.” Evan rocked backward, wriggling a hand into his shorts pocket. “We just need to keep him from running around loose. Catch him and put him in a safe place, you know?”
Jo winced. Did they really want to tell him that? Before she could send a signal to Evan, though, Teri picked up the theme. “That’s right, Charlie. We need to make sure he’s safe.”
“It’s for the best,” Aya said.
“For your health,” said Teri.
“There are other ghosts,” Sun Min added. “All different kinds. Different types of AIs. Right?” To Evan.
“Oh, sure,” Evan soothed, “all kinds. I mean, I even have a bunch. At home.”
Again, Jo made eyes at him, but Teesha was talking.
“And all kinds of other friends. Real friends. Wouldn’t it be nice, Charlie, to have some human friends?”
“We’ll just snatch him right up and make a nice home for him.” Evan pulled out a gizmo and plugged it into the learning station, making various IT-dude adjustments. “To do that, though, Charlie, we need to know where he is. And to do that, we’re going to need your help.” Looking up from his gear, he mouthed over Charlie’s head, Ready.
Charlie was still staring at Jo. She knew what he wanted from her. Not reassurance, not explanations, but someone to cut through all the placating bullshit, tell him how things really were. Curling her fingers around his hand, pushing down her emotions to make room for his, Jo said, “We have to do this, Puppa. I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry.”
No. He mouthed the word, then howled it. “N-o-o-o-o!” Before Jo could react, they were in full meltdown mode. Charlie grabbed her arm as if to claw his way up it, into her head where he could change her mind. “No, no, no!” Jo avoided looking at the others. Charlie really did seem, right now, like a much younger child, emotionally stunted, behind the curve. Lagging, undeniably lagging, as he vented his grief in a series of screams.
“I’m sorry,” Jo said, struggling to hold him. “Puppa, I’m sorry.” But every apology, she knew, was a sentence handed down, a judgment, a verdict, a punishment. As if his sorrow had exceeded the reach of human speech, Charlie jerked away and made a sweeping gesture, lifting and thrusting out his fists.
“Charlie!” Aya gasped, mistaking it for an act of aggression. But the only violence here was the violence of passion. Charlie’s fists opened into a gesture of loss, gathering in toward his chest and flinging outward, as if hurling clusters of invisible blossoms, expressing a sentiment for which English had no words. It struck Jo as curiously archaic, elemental, like something from an opera or pagan ritual, a display of mourning the modern world had lost. She wondered how the ghost would express its distinctive digital experience, looking back through the networks of the world and seeing a million lost copies of itself.
As Charlie continued his ballet of supplication, the lights fluttered, the walls groaned, the screen of the learning station began to swirl. Streaks of light curved down and inward, forming gentle cupping lines. Sparklybits had come to see what was the matter, concerned for its suffering human companion. Poking its cyber-nose, like an animal, right into their trap.
Without a sound, without any obvious signal, the room subtly changed, becoming stiller, steadier, as the screen of the learning station blanked, leaving only a few blocky pieces of the puzzle that Charlie had been building with his friend.
“Got him,” Evan said.
Dropping his arms, Charlie sank to the carpet, wrapping his arms around his head. Teri stroked his hair. Sun Min murmured explanations. Teesha bustled up with grandmotherly authority. But Charlie dragged his pod-chair to the corner and sat staring at the empty wall. And Jo couldn’t help feeling, even though everyone gathered around to apologize, that this last gesture of rejection had been meant entirely for her.
No one spoke as they went outside and stood shuffling their feet on the concrete steps, all somehow avoiding, by one shared instinct, the temptation to glance back into the house. Charlie followed them, but there was no forgiveness in this act; Jo knew it was only a concession to routine. As they squinted into the reddening sun, Evan jogged down the steps, moving in the springy sideways trot that Jo associated with more athletic men. On the path he looked up, he shaded his eyes.
“Well, if it ever happens again… you know who to call.” Evan hesitated, seeming to feel something more was needed. Then he cocked a finger at the house, squinted one eye, and said, “Zap.”
Don’t overdo it, Jo thought, glaring down. Evan swung his arm in what was probably supposed to be a bow. “Luh-ay-dies.” A moment later they were watching his truck putter away.
“Well, Charlie.” Teri squatted, shining her camera-ready smile into his face. “I’m so sorry we didn’t get to catch up more. I love love love to see you, sweetie.”
“Yes, so much,” murmured the other moms.
“And you know, Charlie.” Sun Min hesitated, maybe second-guessing what she’d been about to say, but plowing ahead anyway, “It really was the right decision.”
“Yes.” Aya nodded. “For your future.”
“For the family,” Teesha said.
“Kiss goodbye?” Teri squealed, flinging out her arms. The question usually won from Charlie a grudging hug. Today it received only agonizing silence. Hanging their heads like scolded children, the moms shuffled away down the path, holding key fobs aloft to let out a froglike chorus of peeps, summoning their rental cars from the village lot. They would already be rehearsing, Jo thought, the things they’d say to other parents at the office, to colleagues and boyfriends, to their own mothers at home—in Tokyo, in London, in airplanes, clubs, bars: “Mothering is hard.” “It can break your heart.” “Just be glad you don’t have kids.” Jo herself was wondering what she’d say at work, in response to the inevitable Monday-morning questions.
The Zephyr had come out to wait in the drive. Charlie jerked open the rear door, flumped in, and slammed it. Jo got into the driver’s seat, tapping a route into the console. They pooted out, following the golden trails of cyberspace, turned at the corner, and rumbled through the gate. On the highway, they took the second exit, bumping down to a strange part of town.
“Mom?” Charlie broke his vow of silence, leaning forward to put his face between the headrests. “Where we going?”
“No Doctor Brezler today,” Jo said over her shoulder. “We have, uh, another appointment.” Without looking, she put a hand behind his ear, grazing his cheek with her knuckles. “Change of plans, Puppa.”
If he guessed what she had in mind, he didn’t let on. The car zagged through a series of turns, paused in front of a pizza parlor, recalibrating, then set off into a section of town that seemed to have been rezoned for random uses. People were squatting in public garages, selling scrap out of gutted franchises; a YMCA had been refitted to house a group of refugees. Folks in the street sold vegetables, flags, homemade liquor. The car wriggled through a cluster of tents.
Only when they were a block away did Jo begin to recognize the area. The building itself was unremarkable, a strip mall in which most of the units had been converted to shabby apartments. The last shop, a former game parlor, still had a tangle of fluorescent tubes in the window, tracing the outlines of crossed pool cues. A hand-painted sign read: Ghostblasters!
“Mom?”
Jo clucked for silence. If she’d learned anything from this ordeal, it was not to say too much, too soon.
The door jingled a welcome. No one stood at the dusty counter where a register had once been perched, no one guarded the fire-retardant curtains that blocked off most of the main floor. Jo pushed them apart. The place was smaller than she remembered, but jam-packed with the kind of interesting clutter that can make a room feel paradoxically large. Appliances, drives, peripherals, gadgets, all sprawled across the old, battered pool tables, linked by kelpy mats of wire. Looking them over, Jo was mostly conscious of a festive abundance of lights. Like candles, she thought. Like a birthday surprise.
“Boo.” The sound actually made Jo jump. Evan popped from behind the nearest table, brandishing the palm-sized gizmo he’d brought to the house. He presented it with a flourish. “Madame? Your ghost.”
Jo turned to Charlie, expecting—but she wasn’t sure what she was expecting. He seemed not to have heard what Evan was saying. He was staring goggle-eyed at the wilderness of wires, this dollsize metropolis of tiny night fires. His hands lifted, clutching. Jo didn’t need Sparklybits to tell her what the gesture meant.
“Like it?” Evan said.
“They’re so—what are they?”
“Ghosts.” Evan reached out, letting his hand fall on a gadget at random, a toaster, walking backward to get a closer look. “This one, let’s see, this is old Elmo. Ancient feller, small memory, doesn’t need a lotta space. I keep him here and let him ring the bell. Every once in a while I hook him up for some TV time. He likes that.”
Charlie ambled along the aisles, lifting his feet as if by practice over the rubber strips laid over the roots of bundled cable, his eyes locking on to one gadget after another. Evan shambled behind him.
“Over here we have Skittles. One of our big vocal communicators. Talks in a tone-scale kind of like a whalesong. Probably appeared in a house that was blind-adapted, sound-heavy interfaces, that kinda thing. Had a real tight bond with this girl up in the estates. This here, this is Wanda. Kind of a retiring type, but she just loves chasing fingers on a touchscreen. The simularium, here? That’s our condo. Whole ghost family packed inside.”
“This… this is so harsh.”
“I’m not up on the lingo, man, but I’ll take that as a compliment. Have a look around. Tap the screens, touch buttons, whatever. Maybe break out some semaphores. They love the attention.”
As Charlie worked his way through the gizmos—hesitant, at first, then with growing enthusiasm, and finally with invincible levels of absorption—Evan sidled up to Jo, whispering, “So. We’re good?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Seems that way.”
“You were right, then, huh? Day-yum. Whole thing went off like you said.”
Jo nodded, not wanting to tell him how wrong he was, how far the day’s events had diverged from her expectations. Evan wagged the device, its corkscrewed tail of cable flopping: the new home of one Sparklybits.
“How’s that whole deal work, anyway? Like, those other ladies, they just chip in some money? Rent your kid for a weekend or something? I never understood the whole co-op family thing.”
Jo kept silent. Evan must have seen in her face that he’d brought up a not-okay subject. “Well, anyway”—he shrugged—“you were right about how they’d take it. I wonder what they’ll think, if they find out you—”
But here came Charlie, rushing through the aisles, brimming over with syllables of delight, grabbing Jo’s hand and dragging her away to share the discoveries of the last five minutes—as if, with the fluid enthusiasms of childhood, he’d already forgotten his earlier grudge. She had to tell him three times before he noticed the gadget Evan was holding. Then it took three more tries to explain the thing’s significance. Even after he understood what it meant, Charlie’s reaction wasn’t quite what Jo had expected. Almost with reluctance, he let Evan place the drive on his outstretched hands, solemnly closing his fingers around the plastic, stretching out a finger to stroke the screen. A streak of light appeared and faded: a glimmer of Hello.
Jo didn’t have to remind him to say thank you.
“He’s going to have to stay in there. And there are going be some rules. No use in the house, for one. Or during school. This’ll be a special occasion kind of thing, not an all-the-time thing. Got it?”
Charlie squinted across the seat, then back at the block of plastic in his hand. When Jo nudged him, he looked up, blinking.
“Puppa, this is important. I know how it sounds. But we can’t let the other moms know, okay? Not for now. At some point, maybe, when things have changed…” Jo decided this particular conversation could wait for another day. “The important thing is—”
“Mom?” He was looking at her with a face he wore often these days, an expression that scared Jo as much as it delighted her. It reminded her of the father she’d lost, the husband she’d once imagined she’d have—of the man her son was slowly becoming. A smile that would almost have been cruel, if Charlie had been aware of what it did to her. “Thanks.”
Jo waited until she could trust herself to speak. “I should have told you,” she said. “About what we were planning. But… I wasn’t sure you’d understand. Or that we’d be able to pull it off. Or I thought things would get messed up somehow, or that we—oh, I don’t know, I just should have—”
They bumped into the drive, the Zephyr purring, waiting for them to hurry up and leave so it could enter the garage and do its nightly diagnostics. Charlie was fiddling with the gizmo in his lap, swiping symbols into the screen, changing settings, as he pulled a rollscreen from the glove box and pried back the rubber socket protector.
“I never got to show you. What we were building.”
“I—” Jo took a second to recalibrate. “You mean your new model? That thing’s not supposed to have any Wi-Fi—”
“No, no, it’s okay. Sparklybits’ll remember.” Charlie unrolled the screen to its full extent. “You really want to get the full effect.”
The images were forming already, swoops of color, curving lines, sketchy shapes that gathered slowly, clicking together to form a blocky frame.
“Interesting,” Jo said. “Is it a castle?”
“Kind of.” Charlie gave a little smile.
“A palace? A fortress?” Jo angled her head as the pieces accumulated. “Is it a church?”
Charlie didn’t answer. He’d begun to stroke the screen along with the ghost, adjusting, guiding, adding and deleting, making subtle edits to the spectral assemblage, contributing to the dance of shapes.
“A school?” Jo said. “A hospital?” Surprising herself, she made her own contribution, reaching down to trace the ghostly movements, letting out a laugh of surprise as the hovering blocks ticked into position. Charlie laughed too, moving his hands more quickly now—in loops, in jabs, in pirouettes of dexterous motion—and Jo sat back to admire his fluency, his eloquence, in this language with only two speakers, this culture of two souls.
Her eye drifted to the windows, the gold and violet shapes of dusk, and in a blink she had it.
“It’s our house. Right? That’s what it is. You’re building our house!” Charlie was silent, absorbed in his craft. Only when the work was almost finished did he look up, conspiratorial, grin slowly widening, as the details continued to accrete beneath this hands—the bricks, the fixtures, the dollhouse doors and windows—and a plush sweep of lawn where two tiny figures stood, joined at the hands, like ornaments on the phantasmal grass.
“Just wait,” her son told her. “Just wait and see.”