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“Blast radius? Could you unpack that mysterious statement please?” asked Anne-Solenne.
“It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”
They clambered down out of the SUV and tried to find a walking speed that would get them into its air-conditioning as quickly as possible without causing them to get hotter because of exertion. Phil was walking backward, staring curiously at the water tower: a thing he understood conceptually but had never seen on such a scale, since he had spent his life in places with hills.
Apparently cued by Sophia’s reference to a graveyard, Julian had pulled his glasses down over his eyes and begun conducting research. Her grandparents had died and been put in the black soil sufficiently long ago that the details had found their way onto reasonably credible sites on the Old Internet—the Miasma, as many people in Sophia’s life referred to it. The Miasma as such had fallen some years ago, but emulators of it were still running and could be browsed on what had replaced it, which was too ubiquitous even to have a name. In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”
“You can’t possibly remember … Patricia … or John,” Julian ventured, “but you must remember Alice.”
“Grandma Alice died when I was twelve,” Sophia confirmed.
“And she and John and Patricia are all buried …”
“Where we are going,” Sophia said. “Yeah.”
At last they had reached the entrance of the Walmart—or to be precise, one of its entrances, since it had been hacked up into a number of quasi-distinct storefronts. They got inside and just stood there for a few moments, allowing their bodies to recalibrate in the air-conditioning. Then they split up. Sophia and Anne-Solenne figured out how to buy flowers. Phil and Julian ransacked the snack aisle. Somewhere along the line Phil also picked up a tactical camo baseball cap, Levitican compliant. Having paid for their stuff, they went out and got back in the car. Tom and Kevin had peeled off and checked into a motel across the street and so they drove the last few miles into town without an escort.
Anne-Solenne shifted the flowers in her lap. “As long as we’re talking about dead Forthrasts,” she said, “where’d you-know-who end up? His fate is shrouded in mystery.”
“No it isn’t,” Julian said, in the somewhat halting and breathy tone indicative of browsing and talking at the same time, “he died in—”
“I know when he died,” Anne-Solenne said. “But because Sophia’s from the weirdest family in the whole universe, that’s different from his fate.”
“We’re breathing him,” Sophia announced. That silenced the Land Cruiser for a little, and even caused Phil to push his glasses up on his head.
“His molecules, you mean?” Phil guessed.
“Atoms, more like,” said Julian, getting the drift.
“So he was finally cremated?” Anne-Solenne guessed.
“He was cremated one ion at a time, by a particle beam scanning his cryogenically preserved remains.”
“Probably a good thing,” Phil mused, “otherwise the data—”
“Could be anywhere,” Sophia said with a nod and a glance back in the mirror. “Yeah. I guess sometimes it’s better to wait.”
Anne-Solenne was still stuck on We’re breathing him. “I never thought of it like that,” she said, “but I guess the scanning process would generate—I don’t know—”
“Exhaust,” Sophia said. “Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium. Theoretically you could capture the solids and hand it to the family in a baggie, but why?”
“So they just—”
“Blow it out a pipe into the sky,” Sophia confirmed. “Given that it was Seattle, it was probably mixed with rain five minutes later, running through the storm sewers into Puget Sound.”
“Which is no different from cremation,” Julian hastened to add, in his ponderous East Coast way. “Crematoria have smokestacks. We just prefer not to think about the implications.”
This venture into the New Eschatology was cut short by their arrival in the small northwest Iowa town that the Forthrasts came from. And for people accustomed to the gradual penetration of vast cities, from the airport inward, arriving in that sort of town was jarringly abrupt. Suddenly they were just there—as there as they were ever going to get. The town had a central square: a single block planted in grass, with a vaguely medieval stone tower rising from the middle, and, flanking it, a statue each for veterans of the Civil and the Great Wars. A couple of huge deciduous trees cast shade over roughly circular areas, but the scattering of moms who had convened here to let their kids run around preferred to hang out under a shelter where they could sit at picnic tables. Across the street on one side was a courthouse and police station in rustic Victorian sandstone, with a broken clock in its central tower. Two sides formed an L-shaped district of indolent businesses. The fourth side was residential. Thirty seconds earlier they had been driving through cornfields, and if Sophia hadn’t piloted the Land Cruiser into one of the angle-parking spaces along the square, they’d have been back in the corn thirty seconds later. “Leg stretch,” she announced, “and I’m gonna turn off my cloaking device just so these people know what to make of us.”
They had drawn curious looks from the moms in the park and some old-timers in a barbershop near their parking space. But, at a rough guess, half of the locals were wearing glasses, not merely to correct their vision but to fortify everything with data. Grandma Alice had liked to repeat an old joke that in a town like this, you didn’t need to use your turn signals because everyone knew where you were going. It had become less and more true since she had died. Less because cars now made up their own minds as to when the blinkers should be put on, and more because you really could know everyone’s business now, in a way that the small-town busybodies of Alice’s generation could only have aspired to. The open and trusting culture of communities such as this one had carried over to the digital age. If you had a ten A.M. appointment with the physical therapist, everyone in town could know as much by checking your calendar, which could be accomplished just by looking hard enough at a widget floating above the car that was driving you there. Consequently, cars in a town like this, when seen through glasses, looked somewhat like old-timey sailing ships festooned with signal flags and aflutter with banners.
This all had to do with editors. If you were the kind of person who was enrolled at Princeton, you tended to speak of them as if they were individual human beings. The Toms and Kevins of the world, and most of the population of this town, were more likely to club together and subscribe to collective edit streams. Between those extremes was a sliding scale. Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information. For way less money you could buy into a fractional scheme, which was still very much a rich-person thing to do but worked okay for the 1 percent as opposed to the 0.001 percent. That was about where Sophia, Phil, and Anne-Solenne sat. Julian was stuck with his family’s editor until such time as he went out and made a pile of money. Had he been unable to afford even that—had he been a full-ride financial-aid student—Princeton would have supplied him with a fairly decent editor as part of the same package that gave him room, board, and a library card. It paid off for the university in the long run not to have its less well-heeled students disgorging flumes of sensitive data into the public eye.
Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates—who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.
The more important and high-judgment role played by her editor was to look at any data coming the other way—sound and imagery captured by her glasses, for example—and make sure it never found its way into the wrong hands. Which basically meant it never went anywhere at all.
Maybe a few times a year, Sophia actually talked to her editor. This was one of those times. “I authorize you to put me in Family Reunion Mode for twenty-four hours,” she said.
“Okay,” replied her editor with an It’s your funeral intonation, combined with a light overlay of I hope your mother doesn’t kill me.
Anne-Solenne, Phil, and Julian reacted with a mixture of laughs and mock horror as, in their view, Sophia erupted with vivid displays of personal data, like a circus clown solemnly doffing her top hat to reveal a flower arrangement, a trained marmoset, and a confetti cannon mounted to her skull.
The gaffers in the barbershop and the moms in the picnic shelter had seen the Land Cruiser as just an old-school SUV, with no identifying markings save an escutcheon of dead bugs on the grille proving that it had covered much ground since its last wash. At this moment, however, it was lighting up, letting them all know who had just pulled into town and giving them limited, temporary access to Sophia’s social media contrail. But all of that data was being exhibited with the color scheme, texture palette, typeface, UI conventions, and auditory cues—in sum, the art direction—of her personal brand. Before she opened the door of the car to reveal hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and accessories marking her as Not from Around Here, the same had been preannounced, to anyone wearing glasses, by the digital penumbra of Family Reunion Mode.
“Let’s check out the park,” she proposed, “this won’t take long.”
“Yeah—it’s tiny,” Phil said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Sophia chuckled. “I mean, my rellies will be here before you have time to get bored.”
Crossing the street to the park, the foursome would have drawn stares from curious locals, had the curious locals not advanced to more sophisticated technology that enabled them to stare differently, by scanning all that Sophia had just made public. Without discussing it they went straight to the tower in the middle. This was made of the same buff sandstone as the nearby courthouse. It was just a folly, not a real fortification—only two stories high, with an upper deck surrounded by a crenellated parapet. A windowless steel door, painted Parks Department green, bore testimony to generations of bored teens’ fruitless efforts to kick their way in—or, failing that, to attest to who sucked. A plaque next to the door supplied information they’d already seen in their glasses, which was that the tower had been erected by otherwise idle laborers during the Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. This seemed like the kind of historical/political minutia that Princeton kids ought to have heard of, so they all followed the inevitable hyperlink and spent a minute standing there reading about it. It was the sort of basically dead and inert topic that Wikipedia had actually been pretty good at covering, and enough time had passed that AIs had gone over all of this material and vetted it for mistakes.
Once they had got the gist, their attention drifted back to the here and now. Julian and Phil took turns reading the graffiti on the door, a palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation that Sophia’s expensive training had given her all the tools to perceive and to analyze but no weapons to change.
“What is the agenda?” Anne-Solenne asked loudly enough to silence the boys.
“Flowers on graves,” Sophia answered.
“Let’s go then,” Phil said. “Because this place sucks.” It was an index of his social deftness that he managed to announce this in a dry and almost stately manner that nonetheless made it understood that he was channeling the ancestral voices of all the boys who had stood where he was standing scratching imprecations into the green paint with pickup-truck keys.
“It’s of the essence,” Sophia said, “that I be seen doing it.”
“Because, you know,” Anne-Solenne added, completing the thought, “the people in those graves—”
“Are dead,” Julian said, pushing his glasses up on his forehead. “They’re not going to know.”
Something flickered in Sophia’s peripheral vision. She turned her head to see a sport-utility vehicle of the largest class, authentically bug spattered and road dusted, easing into a span of eighty-seven consecutive empty parking spaces. Visual stigmas pasted on it and hovering above it let her know that its sole occupant was Pete Borglund, fifty-six years of age, the second and current husband of Karen Forthrast Borglund, Alice’s eldest daughter.
“One of your rellies?” Phil inquired. Just making polite conversation since the new arrival’s privacy settings were so tatterdemalion that Phil could have traced Pete Borglund’s mitochondrial DNA back to the Rift Valley with a few gestures.
“Yup,” Sophia said.
“Uncle? Cousin?” Julian asked. Not currently using glasses.
“That is the billion-dollar question,” Sophia said.
Phil made the faintest hint of a snicker. Not in any way a mean snicker. More of a preverbal marker to indicate, I have familiarized myself with your tangled family history.
“On the advice of my mother’s attorneys,” Sophia said, “I will not address him as Uncle but as Cousin.”
The others turned their heads to study her face and see whether she might be speaking in jest. She did not give them any clues. Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.
“Sophia!” Pete called as he approached, tactfully avoiding the use of any loaded terms. Pete was a lawyer who had finally succumbed to the inevitable and folded his practice in Sioux City to move here and look after the affairs of John and Alice’s estate—a full-time job given that Alice had died a billionaire.
“Peeet!” Sophia called back, drawing it out in a way that implied more familiarity than was really the case. She had not seen him in five years. She began walking toward him, steeling herself for the awkwardness of the to-hug-or-not-to-hug dance. But some combination of Midwestern stiffness and lawyerly formality carried the day; when they were still ten paces apart, he extended his right hand to shake. He was silver-blond, ruddy, portly, wearing a suit and tie even though he worked alone in a farmhouse. “How’s Princeton treating you?” he inquired. Which could have passed for a perfectly routine conversation starter, but she heard it as his saying, Look, kid, in spite of all that happened, you’re on easy street.
“Well,” she answered, shaking his hand, “and how’s the estate treating you?” A slightly barbed response that he accepted with a forced smile.
“It is a never-ending source of tasks. Comparable to being a farmer in that way, I guess.”
They let go of each other’s hands and took a moment to regard each other. She found it impossible to hate him. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said. “Some of your … cousins and whatnot could take some pointers from you in how to better protect their privacy. I worry over them when they go off to college and people find out who they are.”
Sophia let it pass with a nod. “My friends and I decided to see the country on our way out to the coast. I thought the least I could do was place some flowers on my grandmother’s grave—and on Alice’s.”
There. She’d said it. Her mother’s attorney in Seattle could not have phrased it better.
Pete nodded. “It would be my privilege to drive you there. Or you and your friends can follow me. It’s only about a mile—”
“One point two.”
Pete glanced away, a bit sheepishly.
“I’d love it if you would drive us there,” Sophia said.
Pete heaved a quiet sigh. It was a sigh of relief.
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