“Naïveté?”
“You.”
“Okay,” George said. “Hit me with some truth.”
“Memory Hole Mondays,” Milo said.
George nodded. Memory Hole Monday was the feature that distinguished Quire from similar platforms like Facebook, instituted as news of data breaches and undisclosed invasions of privacy were inspiring widespread defections. Announced within days of the company’s IPO, “the hole,” as it was affectionately known, allowed users to “completely delete, obliterate, bury” anything they regretted posting. At the same time, they could review what Quire had on them and perform other routine acts of personal privacy hygiene.
“People actually bought that shit,” Milo said.
“What do you mean ‘bought’?”
“Hook, line, and the proverbial sinker,” Milo said, then smiled. “Bought like the proverbial farm, privacy-wise, may it rest in peace.”
“More info,” George said. “Less Milo.”
“They’re kidding,” his newly appointed Virgil said. “About deleting everything? Totally joshing.”
“You mean lying?” George said.
“The terms of service refer to it as using ‘corporate discretion.’”
“But why? What’s the point?”
Milo smiled. “Memory Hole Mondays point the platform in the direction of the most valuable information there is. The embarrassing parts. The incriminating. The stuff you want buried.”
“Valuable how?”
Milo mimed contemplation, tapping his lips, eyes lifted heavenward, followed by a pointing finger, an open mouth, and . . . nothing. Blank faced, he waited for George to put it together.
Which he did, as signaled thusly: “Oh crap . . .”
“I’ve heard V.T. has political aspirations,” Milo said before pausing to let that sink in. “Any guesses about his chances?”
George recalled the V.T. he’d met—the one who’d given him his job, whatever it wound up being. The man had a certain geek charisma about him, in the sense that only geeks could find him charismatic. The rest of the world could probably see the needy narcissist who’d netted billions while carrying a negative balance in self-worth. What else could you say about a guy who had to pay people to make other people think he was human? No way was V.T. a likely candidate for political office. There was no way he’d win a fair and honest election . . .
Bingo.
“Oh crap,” George said, the horrible potential manifesting itself behind his eyes. Hadn’t the country suffered enough at the hands of amoral billionaires who decided to play politics when they got bored or their dicks got limp? Could it really survive another round? “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap . . .”
“You are most welcome, grasshopper.” Milo smiled.
19
“It was almost all girls,” Gladys began as Pandora surreptitiously thumb-tapped the voice recorder on her phone. “All the boys were either overseas or broken, leaving the job up to us, like Rosie the Riveter, but brainier.
“I was never in a sorority, but I imagine that’s what it was like, where they put us, working shoulder to shoulder, not perspiring like ladies, but sweating like pigs, and about as happy as a bunch in slop, because the freedom to sweat was, well, very freeing,” Gladys recalled.
“At first,” she qualified.
“But then it got annoying, and I personally started longing for the days of talcum, judiciously applied. Not to tell tales, but some of my sisters were not exactly going for gold in personal hygiene. It got so I could tell who was coming down the hall before I even saw her.
“And then I noticed our smells started changing. There was heat sweat, and there was fear sweat, and more and more, fear sweating was what we did.”
“You have to back up, Gram,” Pandora said. “Where was this?”
“DC,” Gladys said. “The District of Columbia,” she added, decoding the initials gratuitously and with a tone that made the place sound like a foreign country.
“The pay wasn’t much, but I would’ve worked for room and board and nothing else. It was”—her grandmother paused—“the best, worst time I ever had.”
Did Pandora feel guilty about using her grandmother’s condition to get her to break what was apparently some vow of silence? No. She was doing what needed to be done before her grandmother’s history was lost. Who knew what she may have forgotten already? Sure, the first phase of Alzheimer’s was short-term memory loss, but her grandmother had gotten past that part. There were hints she thought Herman was still alive. But as far as Pandora could tell, the war stuff was still there, perhaps the mental treads dug especially deep by whatever was making Gladys so skittish on the subject.
Not that the how or why of her grandmother’s recollection mattered. What mattered was finally getting Gladys’s story. The whole story—or as much of it as remained.
And as Gladys spoke, Pandora could see it as if it were a memory of her own: the padded shoulders, the bouffants, the sweaty dress shields. But how did Gladys Kowalski fight World War II, specifically?
“The clock, dear,” Gladys said. “We fought the clock—around the clock.”
“Were you a secretary?” her granddaughter asked.
“Well, I dressed like one,” Gladys said. “I’d bicycle with bag lunches from a boardinghouse to an office building that looked like all the rest, but with fewer windows than average.”
“So,” Pandora kept prying, “in this innocuous building of few windows, what were you doing? Taking dictation about secret war plans and typing them up on official letterhead or something?”
Gladys looked at her granddaughter, disappointed. “I said I dressed like a secretary. DC was full of them. That’s why it was the perfect disguise. Because while the boys over there used their bodies, bullets, and bombs to fight the war, nobody would’ve guessed that some little secretary with her bag lunch was fighting that same war with her brains.”
“But what were you doing?” Pandora implored.
Gladys blinked, her expression reading, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Cryptography,” she said, filling in the blank.
And now it was Pandora’s turn to blink confusedly as she tried to process the too-many thoughts rushing toward articulation.
“I was going to be an English teacher,” her grandmother continued. “I had a gift for language and word games. Crossword puzzles were a favorite. Word finds. What’s different between these two pictures? And I found a puzzle pinned up on a bulletin board at high school, daring me to solve it. If I could, I was supposed to send my answers and contact information to a PO Box at the bottom. So I did, and sent it in. And a month later, a big black car pulled up outside our farm, and two men in dark overcoats got out. I don’t know why, but they looked like big beetles walking upright as they approached our front door. ‘Can we see Miss Gladys Kowalski?’ they asked. The beetle men had come looking for me.
“The test was a screen for minds that were needed for the war effort. Ones like mine,” her grandmother continued. “My country needed me. America and the Allied forces needed little Gladys Kowalski to go to Washington and play word games that could spell life or death for our boys overseas. How could I say no? I couldn’t. I didn’t. I packed my bags, kissed my mom, scowled at my dad because that was our way, and left on the biggest adventure of my life.”