“Espionage,” Dr. Marcum said. “I’ve a mind to give it a try. Beats sitting at my desk worrying if Sara Goode’s won the Abel.”
I turned away from the car window. We were driving south on I-5, on the four-hour trip to the Olympic Mountains and the Hoh Rain Forest.
“I thought mathematicians were above such things,” Dr. Brando said.
“When I finally get to say—publicly—I’m on the team that discovered life on Mars, I’ll be above such things,” Marcum said. “And not until.”
I looked at Lexi, taking a virtual tour of the Hoh on the car’s cloud monitor.
“Amazing,” Dr. Marcum said. “I still can’t get over how lifelike our digital world has become. Why have the real thing?”
“To feel,” I said.
“Logical mind, lyrical soul. Ever think of switching to math?” Marcum said.
I smiled.
“Thanks again for inviting me,” he said. “I’ve been remiss about taking the time to explore this beautiful part of your country.”
“Glad to have you,” Brando said. “Not enough activities for us singles and quasi-singles.”
“Doctor Levitt’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I’ve been meaning to ask: how has your heartbreak been going?” Dr. Marcum asked. He looked at Lexi. “If you’re at liberty to say.”
“I am,” he said. “Lexi’s heard it all before. It sucks.”
She looked up from her virtual tour, leaned forward, and kissed her dad on his cheek.
“So was the cloud package optional?” Marcum asked, looking at an exquisitely-rendered visual of a tree covered in bright green moss hovering above Lexi’s lap.
“Not on this model,” Brando said. “I splurged. Figured I better before the lawyers and accountants started dividing everything up.”
“Speaking of The Cloud, anyone know why Alexander Sparks is one of our investors?” I asked.
“The COS guy, right? Of Sparks Hall nomenclature,” Brando said.
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t Sparks one of the world’s three trillionaires?” Marcum said.
“Aren’t there four now?”
“Two, dad,” Lexi said.
“Back to just two?” Marcum said.
“We’re learning about him in class,” Lexi said. “Sparks is to The Cloud what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were to the disk. ‘The man who ‘liberated software from hardware.’ That’s what my teacher says.”
“Hadn’t thought about it that way,” Brando said.
Alexander Sparks invented a kind of Windows or Mac for the cloud known as COS, or Cloud Operating System, a way to instantly and intuitively access all the information that resides on every computer and server on the planet, collectively known as “The Cloud.” COS transforms computer code into three-dimensional images, words, moving pictures, whatever, with virtually no hardware—no cell phone screens, no computer monitors, no pads, no keyboards. All you need is a Cloud password and an antenna, receiver, or projector. Lexi called up her virtual tour saying “Hoh Rainforest,” and had her pick of possibilities in front of her, ranked in order of popularity the way Google did before Sparks bought it.
“I remember when the government wanted to swap out Social Security numbers for Cloud passwords,” Brando said. “Sparks was caught red-handed promoting the idea after he got taxpayer subsidies.”
“Michael.” Another voice I recognized from the faculty picnic, but from last year, not this year. It was almost like Sparks reaching out to scold Dr. Brando for the criticism.
“Speaker off,” Dr. Brando said immediately. “Now’s not a good time,” he said to his wife. “We discussed this. No—we’re on the way now.” He must have had a cochlear chip implant because I couldn’t hear what she was saying, I saw no headset, and no cell phone. “I know what the court commissioner said.”
A truck swerved into our path and I grabbed the otherwise idle steering wheel and swung our car out of the way. We veered into the opposite lane briefly before self-drive took over again and corrected. “Have to call you back,” Brando told Melissa.
“He has to call you back,” Lexi said loudly.
Brando looked back as the semi pulled to the side of road and stopped. “Looks like OnStart got it,” he said. Two Washington State Highway Patrol drones flew past, one stopping in front of the truck, the other stopping at the driver’s side window.
“What reflexes,” Marcum told me. “Your hand was like a lightning bolt.”
ABD saves day. That made me feel good.
“Why didn’t my car swerve on its own?” Brando said.
“This is the Onstart operator,” a voice said. “We’ve stopped the other vehicle and are filing a report. Was anyone injured in your vehicle?”
“No,” Brando said. “But my auto-drive malfunctioned. If my passenger hadn’t grabbed the wheel—”
“We’re analyzing that now,” the operator said. “We’ll download a patch as soon as the issue is identified.”
“Thanks.”
“What about the truck driver?” I asked.
“We don’t know, but do know that he can’t start or move his vehicle until the highway patrol drone releases it,” the operator said. “It has been auto-parked in a safe location.”
“You still have your old-school jalopy?” Marcum asked me.
“I do. Five speed manual everything.”
“And I thought you were a woman of the future,” he said.
“Only parts of it.”
Lexi passed her father on the trail into the rain forest. He didn’t see her, too busy staring at a curtain of green that was as bright and full as I had ever seen. I usually saw at least some brown—on tree trunks, limbs, branches—hints of the framework behind the curtain. But today, only the dirt on the trail was brown.
“You were right,” Dr. Brando said. “Stupendous. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“C’mon you guys,” Lexi yelled.
“It rains all the time here, right?” Dr. Marcum said.
“More than usual the past few years,” I said.
“It’s blinding,” Marcum said. “And quiet. The moss must absorb all the sound.”
“Dad—what’s our cloudcam password?”
“Brandelion Wine,” he said.
“Love Ray Bradbury,” I said.
“He’s why I still have books,” Brando said. “If he were alive, he’d have predicted Fahrenheit 2031.”
We approached Lexi, moving her eyes and blinking, from green scene to green scene.
“Almost bought a cloudcam subscription,” Dr. Marcum said. “But the idea of an invisible camera following me around—”
“It’s great,” Lexi said. “All I have to do is look at what I want photographed and blink. Blink twice for close up. Blink three times for really close up. Close my eyes to access Distance Vision,” which creates a panoramic shot.
A group of teens headed our way so we single-filed along this narrow part of the trail.
“What do you make of Crimsy looking green?” Brando said.
“Maybe she caught a bug,” Marcum said.
“Maybe she contains chlorophyll,” I said.
“Bex doesn’t think she’s a cyano,” Brando said. “But who knows.” Plants use chlorophyll to make food from sunlight through photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria are the only bacteria known to do the same thing. Until now—maybe.
“Dr. Marcum? William Marcum?” It was one of the teens after they passed us.
“Only if I’m not in trouble,” Dr. Marcum said.
“And Michael Brando?”
Dr. Brando looked amused. The five-person group conferred in whispers, then walked up to us. They looked like the nerds I used to hang with—brilliant but fearless, self-effacing, non-threatening.
“I’m Kelsey Bridges. These are my friends. We go to Timberline High School.”
“Is it true you guys discovered life on Mars?” one of the other students asked.
“Where is Timberline High?” Marcum asked.
“Lacey,” Bridges said. “We can’t believe we’re really meeting you.”
“And Lacey is…?”
“Not far from here,” I said. “Where did you hear we discovered life on Mars?”
“Our biology teacher. But there’s stuff all over the Cloud about it.”
I reached out and shook their hands. “Jennifer,” I said.
“My daughter Lexi,” Brando said. She smiled.
“What’s it like to be the daughter of a famous scientist?”
“I don’t know,” Lexi said.
“What is it?” another student asked.
“What did you guys find?”
“It’s classified,” Marcum said. “So they tell us.” They laughed.
“Our teacher swears we all evolved from little green men—”
“And women!”
“Little green men and women from Mars.”
“I thought men were from Mars and women from Venus,” Marcum said, referencing the title of a famous book. He was quite the card today.
“He’s just kidding. I mean, Mr. Sanders,” Kelsey said.
“I don’t think so. He always sounds serious.”
“Who’s Mr. Sanders?” Brando asked
“Our biology teacher.”
“He can’t be that serious,” Dr. Marcum said. “You haven’t even asked for our autographs.”
“Autographs?”
“What’s that?” Kelsey asked.
“You don’t know what an autograph is?”
And while Dr. Marcum was explaining the fine points of this ancient signature-gathering ritual, I watched Dr. Brando, staring at the greenest tree in our sight line.
We took Highway 101 around the Olympic National Forest and visited Hurricane Ridge. With its breathtaking views of the Olympic mountains, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Canada beyond, Dr. Marcum called it a “spiritual experience” and Dr. Brando retreated from his reverie long enough to label it “awesomeness personified.” Lexi was full of questions and filled her cloudcam with dozens of pix of the water on one side and snow on the other.
We ate fast food and stayed the night in the town of Sequim, aka Sunny Sequim, at the base of the mountains sheltered from the rain. I walked to the room Lexi and I shared bearing Cokes and candy bars and smelled a familiar pungency. Marcum and Brando sat on deck chairs outside their room puffing joints dispensed from a converted cigarette machine near the front office.
“Jennifer,” Dr. Marcum said. “On behalf of my illustrious colleague and myself, I must thank you for a wonderful tour of this magnificent place.”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“It was spiritual for me and inspirational for Brandy. He’s mulling an astonishing idea.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Can’t say just yet,” Brando said. “It’s not much more than a hypothesis. And if we can’t get Crimsococcus here, that’s what it will stay.”
“Those kids were right,” Marcum said. “Our classified discovery has to be the world’s worst-kept secret. Prat cloggers have seeded the Cloud with it.”
“Which clogs?”
“Science Mysteries, Alien Life, Are We Alone? Names like that.”
“Those weren’t reputable back when they were blogs.”
“Background noise,” Brando said.
“I’d ask you to join us, but I see you’re on a mission,” Marcum said.
“Story of my life,” I said.
I asked Lexi to dial back the brightness on the cloudbook hovering above her chest and fell asleep. I awakened later and heard her sniffling. I listened.
“Lexi?” I said softly. She didn’t respond. “Lexi?”
“Yes?”
“You’re awake.”
More sniffles.
“You okay?”
I leaned over to the edge of my bed.
“Lexi?”
“I’m okay.”
“Sure?”
She was turned away from me so I got up and walked to the other side of her bed. She had the covers over her head. “Bath light,” I said, and the light came on in the bathroom. I reached down and pulled back the cover until I could see Lexi’s face.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” I asked.
She stared ahead.
“Lex?”
“Stuff,” she said.
I sat on the edge of her bed. “What kind of stuff?”
“Just stuff.”
“Mom and dad stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“They both really love you.”
“I know.”
“But it still sucks, huh?”
“Yeah.”
I brought my hand to her head and smoothed it through her hair.
“That feels nice,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Mom does it sometimes.”
“Bet I don’t do it as good,” I said.
“Almost,” she said.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ve had all kinds of crazy family stuff, too.”
“You have?”
I didn’t want to get emotional. “My brother died,” I said.
“Wow,” she said.
“My dad died, too.”
She reached out from the covers. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
I smoothed back her hair. “Think you can sleep?”
“Prob’ly.”
I sat on the edge of her bed until she closed her eyes. “Lights out,” I said, and the bathroom light extinguished itself. I went back to my bed.
“Jennifer.”
“Yes?” I waited.
“Would you hold me?”
“Absolutely.” I started to get up but she beat me and came around and tucked herself beneath my sheet and blanket. I put my arm around her and before long, heard the rhythmic breathing of sleep.