“Froze. I think he may have been afraid of us.”
“Americans?”
“Women.”
“I heard he was . . . ‘shy,’” Pandora said.
If Gladys realized what she meant by that, she showed no signs. “I wonder whatever happened to him.”
Pandora wondered, Should I? Shouldn’t I?
“He died, Gram.”
Her grandmother’s eyes went wide. “But he’s so young,” she said. “And he seems—seemed—like such a nice man. Very serious. Very British.”
Pandora didn’t know what to say. She wanted to scream that Alan from England was the father of modern computing and committed suicide after being chemically castrated for the crime of being homosexual by the country he’d helped save during World War II. She wanted to tell Gladys how Alan from England bit into an apple laced with cyanide and the rumor that the bite out of the Apple logo is a nod to this, as opposed to the Bible’s tree of knowledge or even Isaac Newton. But before she could say any of that, Gladys continued.
“I used to imagine what it would be like to be married to someone like that,” she said wistfully. “To wake up to the sound of English being spoken properly. I bet he would have played Scrabble with me, not like those chickens, my husband and son.”
A week later, Pandora made a point of touching the hand she guessed was probably the hand that had touched Alan Turing. “Tell me about Alan from England again,” she said.
“Who?” Gladys said, as Pandora, now the holder of that memory, proceeded to tell it back to her. When she got to the part where Gladys, bold as brass, reached out and touched the author of the Turing test, her granddaughter decided to take a little editorial license.
“I did?” her grandmother said, her eyes widening.
“You did,” Pandora confirmed.
“And what did he do?” Gladys asked.
“He smiled,” Pandora said. “He took your hand and kissed it like you were the queen of England herself.”
“How marvelous,” Gladys said, the cheeks of her tattletale face giving her away, yet again.
23
Pandora didn’t usually eavesdrop on her father when he was actively with a client. And ever since she’d started using speech recognition and keyword searches, she didn’t do much listening to the recorded sessions either—not unless her search turned up something exploitable in some hackerly way. But this latest session was different; it was the makeup session for the one she’d interrupted with news of Grandma Lynch’s wartime heroism. She’d since learned the client’s name was George Jedson, which sounded like an alias, but a quick cyber tiptoe through Quire HR’s employee database confirmed it was as legal as her own.
The new employee screenings had started as charity from her dad’s college roommate but had since become mandatory thanks to a coder who went a little suboptimal while programming a routine software patch. In this case, suboptimal meant the release of millions of usernames, social security numbers, and credit card information—a release that led to several class-action lawsuits and legislative hearings in the US, the UK, and the EU.
Her father and George had just gotten started when she’d interrupted them, and so Roger was taking it from the top. After winding up the “origin story” of the mandatory psych evaluation, her father concluded with the disclaimer Quire’s general counsel had approved: “It’s not you, it’s us. And by ‘us,’ we mean Quire, by which we mean the parent company, as well as its various affiliates, subsidiaries, and offshore incarnations for tax purposes . . .”
Given the opportunity to speak, George brought up the abrupt termination of the previous session. Because of it, her father’s new client had gone another full workday without an assignment.
“So I have to wonder,” George said, “is all this meaningless waiting part of the psych exam? Like on Law & Order, letting a suspect sweat it out in the box.”
“If you don’t mind me saying,” Roger said, “that sounds a little paranoid.”
“What would it mean if I minded you saying that?”
Roger ignored the attempt at humor. “That I was correct in my original assessment,” Roger said, clickety-clicking his pen to underline the point.
George cleared his throat.
“Different topic.” Clickety-click. Pause.
“Yes?” George said, sounding wary.
Reading from his notes: “‘Ooo, cute.’ What was that in reference to, before you signed off?”
Pandora, perched before her own laptop, listening in as well as watching the session on-screen, noted that the universe had accepted and responded to her terms. Because there was Mr. Jedson’s face, shaved as smooth as the proverbial baby’s butt and just as cute. Looking at it live and free of distracting facial hair, she noticed that George’s face seemed the total opposite of her own, calm and revealing nothing to the point of seeming chiseled. She found herself paying attention to his blinks, to confirm the screen hadn’t frozen. Between the two of them—Pandora imagined—maybe their kids would luck out and get normally expressive faces.
But before she could start scrawling multiple iterations of the name she’d take after marriage (to hyphenate or not to hyphenate?), she heard the session taking a dangerous turn with her father’s quoting the two words she’d been hearing ever since they were first uttered. Now, however, voiced by her father, they sounded, well, creepy, making Pandora want to do several things at once: 1) scream “No . . .”; 2) slam her laptop closed, perhaps forever; 3) take a sledgehammer to the satellite downlink; and/or 4) die of embarrassment and wait for her father to notice the smell.
Meanwhile, “Um,” George said, as stone-faced as ever, “your daughter, I’m guessing?”
“Where?” Roger asked, looking behind him.
“The photo,” George said. “On your desk. You mentioned you had a daughter, and any other explanation seems a little creepy.”
“Yes,” Roger said, turning the frame away from the camera. “That’s Pandora.”
George’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. “Ominous.”
“It’s after the charm bracelet,” Roger said, dismissing any broader, mythological implications. “Her mother collected charms.”
“Collected?” George said. “Past tense?”
“Her mother passed away when Pandora was born.”
“You mean like Mary Shelley’s mom?”
Pandora listened, both fascinated and horrified to hear herself being talked about by her father and his client, neither aware she was listening to every word. But this talking about her mom, too, and the casual way her dad gave away the story of her name when he’d lied to her about it so long just made her—well, she was back to considering her previous options, with smashing the sat link pulling ahead. Fortunately, it seemed her father had grown as uncomfortable with this digression as she was.
“Why don’t you tell me about your mother,” Roger said.
“Isn’t that a cliché?” George countered. “I mean, blaming the parents for a kid’s being messed up?”
“Are you telling me you consider yourself a messed-up kid?”