My mind was spinning; my foot half slipped off the boards, and I had to grab the rope.
“I have to say, Phri’s been so helpful,” said Sharon.
My hand went up to my earlobe, to my own little metal pearl.
“They’ve sent me 3Ds of every model since they launched in 2020,” she went on. “I’m thinking of running their slogans as a whisperloop behind the visuals. I’m going to start with the classic feminist ones, Phri to Choose, Phri and Equal, Phri to Be You—”
“Didn’t that one morph into Phri to Be You Two?” I asked.
“Yeah, they decided to play up the romantic angle: Phri to Love, Phri for Life . . . Also the mindfulness ones, like Phri to Be Here Now.”
“Phri to Be One,” I remembered.
Sharon nodded. “That was clever—one as in an individual woman, but also, one with the whole world. The campaign scooped all the awards, the way it wrote the words so faintly in water or light, you hardly knew you were reading them. See?”
I nodded to accept the footage she was sending me. As I watched on my Headpiece, I was struck by the fact that my mother—past sixty—had never bothered removing the Phri from her earlobe. The same went for many midlifers. Maybe it made them feel younger, or safer, somehow: that tiny, familiar bead, like a part of the body.
“Phri to Live Lightly, that was a breakthrough concept,” said Jay.
I jerked my head left to turn off the clip.
“And Set Earth Phri,” he quoted hollowly. He turned to Sharon. “You and I knew the Amazon was burning, back in 2029, so how come we decided you’d take out your Phri so we could have a baby?”
She made a little guilty face. “I guess we weren’t thinking very communally.”
“What were you thinking, then?” I asked them.
When Jay frowned, the rippled lines went all the way up to his bald crown. “No one thing. Lots of little longings coming together. Really, what right had the two of us to bring one more child into an overpopulated world, at such a carbon cost? But hey, we could never regret you, Miriam.” He reached out to rub my shoulder.
I knew my cohort of babies had been the last gush from the faucet before it had been pretty much shut off by the Global Pact. When so many governments came on board with financial incentives for the child-free, uptake of the Phri had spread like wildfire from the West across the developing world, and birth rates had plummeted everywhere. Another few years, and likely I would never have happened, which was an odd thought.
“It was a different world,” said Sharon.
Jay spoke in a weary, marveling voice: “Back then, imagine, we still kept animals captive in our apartments and spent money on food and toys and clothes for them, instead of repairing entire ecosystems.”
“Remember that massive row we had with your sister the night we told her I was pregnant?” asked Sharon.
My parents shared a wry grin.
“Lucille was such a zealot,” Sharon told me. “She’d been one of the first Pledgers.”
“Pledgers?”
“They started a birth strike as soon as the climate crisis became really obvious.”
“But hang on, that doesn’t make sense. Didn’t you tell me Lucille went off and joined one of those breeder communes?” The phrase was too harsh; I supposed I didn’t want to sound too interested in my aunt.
“That’s the joke of it,” said my mother. “People change.”
“She never had any babies herself, though, right? Was that about the Pledge?”
Jay shrugged. “My sister’s always been a mystery to me.”
I thought about siblings: the strangeness of two people having the same parents. Was a sister more like a friend or a rival?
“I don’t regret you either, honey,” Sharon told me belatedly. “I’m just sometimes amazed I managed it. Birth’s like shitting a pumpkin—”
“Sharon!”
“Shush, you,” she told Jay. “And as for child-rearing, it was all pretty exhausting, Miriam. Even though it was so much easier then than it is for the dropouts now, because there were still daycares and schools and playgrounds, cafés you were allowed to breastfeed in. You could bring a kid pretty much anywhere . . .”
“If it was so hard, but you two had this yen to do it anyway”—my eyes were on the sun diamonding down through the canopy—“does that suggest it might be a deep-down instinct after all?”
Jay shook his head. “Just an old script.” He tapped his temple. “That religio-colonialist, be fruitful and multiply BS. No, we were acting like a toxic species, and we had to rein ourselves in before we brought on Armageddon.”
The paradox was, there was no way to tell my parents what I was thinking right now, I realized. No, not thinking, exactly: wondering, asking, probing at some lower and murkier level than thought. Jay and Sharon had had mixed feelings too, thirty years ago. So they would probably understand mine, but I couldn’t bear to worry them, especially if it was all for nothing; just a predictable mid-youth crisis.
When Ned and I talked over matcha or lunch during the weeks that followed, it wasn’t as if that—our secret—was what we always talked about.
It was a running joke between us, for instance, that he was so fuzzy on what we did over in Functionality—what I called the actual work of the company.
I tried again. “See, the nurse bot’s currently got a hundred and forty-eight degrees of freedom.”
“As in . . .”
“Ways it can move, Ned.”
“Right.”
“Pitch”—I bobbed my finger up and down—“yaw”—left and right—“and roll, that’s three possibilities for rotation, got it? Then there’s translation—the same movements but going somewhere in space, that’s three more degrees of freedom. Six multiplied by twenty-four end effectors, which each—”
He interrupted. “And they are?”
“What do you guys do all day?”
“Translate your gibberish,” he said, deadpan.
I made a face at him. “End effectors are like arms but customizable. Anti-collision sensors, temperature and pulse readers, brushes, disinfectors, magnets, grippers, lifters, needle-inserters, eye-in-hands, that kind of thing.”
“Like Captain Hook?”
It took me a minute to get the old reference. “Well, a pirate is more like a prototype cyborg than a bot, but yeah. Here’s a 3D that makes it—”
But Ned shook his head, so I turned the footage off.
His voice went right down, which was the only warning that he was about to bring up the subject. “How old were you when you first wanted it, Miriam?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I tried to remember. Hard to date the feeling, given that I’d always written it off as a fantasy, an idle curiosity. Lots of little longings, as my father had put it. “The day I got my period—” Urgh, once had been more than enough. My hand automatically went up to my earlobe now, fingered the hard bead. “I was excited about my first Phri, and the party after. Silly games, and dancing, and the special cake . . .”
“Did they ask you?”
“Ask me what?”
“Whether you agreed to having a Phri fitted?”