“Listen,” he wrote one day, prepared to make what was, for him, the coder’s equivalent of a marriage proposal, “my project is clearly a two-man job.”
“Person,” Pandora corrected.
“Consciousness, entity, sentience, head, brain, think box . . . ,” George typed, lapsing into thesaurus mode, a sign that he was not in the mood for splitting hairs, not when the issue at hand was something as transformative as splitting the atom. “You know what I mean.”
Indeed she did. But she was also a girl and in constant need of asserting herself in the brotopia of coding. “And you know what I mean, Mr. Mister.”
Indeed George did. But he didn’t enjoy being reminded of his so-called “male privilege,” especially given his past hiding above the acoustic tiles of the public library he’d called home. Now, however, he had a sweet job with a sweet office he was treating like a hotel suite and banking the money he was saving on rent—which was pretty sweet, too, so . . .
“Point taken,” he typed, followed by his pitch: “But wouldn’t it be great to use our coding superpowers for good?”
“Good is highly subjective,” Pandora blooped back. “Explain.”
“Saving lives,” George typed, before tapping send.
“Whose? Baby Hitler?”
“Kids like us,” George tapped and sent.
“Meaning?”
“The weirdos, the outcasts, the serially cyberly bullied,” George’s response blooped up on the screen. And then, in its own bubble—for emphasis—he added, “The suicidal.”
“Who you calling suicidal? #immortalitynow”
“Not you,” George backpedaled. “But other kids. I’ve checked the stats for Fairbanks and . . .” Having used the s-word once already in this exchange, he seemed disinclined to use it again, as if the FCC were monitoring and had a quota.
Not that he needed to type it again. Pandora knew the stats he was referring to, trailing dots and all. She’d lived them like everybody else in her dark and frigid hometown. And even though her homeschooling had spared her the loss of local peers up until that time, Pandora hadn’t been left untouched by the s-word, leaving her with a mental snapshot she could call up whenever she needed a reminder of the thinness of the line between being and not.
It was back when her father still met some clients face-to-face in the real world, before he switched to online only. Pandora was only ten at the time and in her room, playing around in somebody’s system, looking for exploits other than the one that had let her in the back door. The shower curtain separating her room from the living room and Roger’s office had been drawn, and she was plugged in to a pair of headphones playing that Joni Mitchell tree museum song because, well, she was still being homeschooled and lacked peers to tell her what she should and shouldn’t be listening to. Joni had rhymed museum with see ’em when the floorboards shook beneath her feet.
Alaska is a seismically active part of the country, so floor shaking wasn’t all that unusual. In fact, Pandora and her dad had made a game of it, guessing where a given temblor might place on the Richter scale. She’d calmly removed her headphones and was about to call out her guess when she noticed the red spatters on her curtain and a couple of brain snails sliding down the other side of the translucent vinyl.
Crap, she thought.
Gingerly pinching a corner of the curtain and sliding it aside, she stepped into the living room, where she found her dad and his ex-client. Her father was still seated opposite the body lying beached-whale-like on the floor. Roger’s own face was stricken, blood spattered, and frozen while his hands eagle-clawed the arms of his chair.
“Dad?” Pandora asked.
“Yes?” Roger said, not moving.
“Should I call someone?”
“Yes,” he said, still not moving.
“Who?” she asked.
“Anyone,” he replied.
And six years later, here she was, being invited to use her coding superpowers to do something about the statistic her father’s client had turned himself into.
“Okay,” Pandora tapped back. “Where do we start?”
35
Roger kept a full-sized plastic skeleton in his office, which was also the living room (so-called). He’d added it to the home decor not too long after he and Pandora had moved back into the cabin, once the crime scene hazmat clean-up crew had finished their scraping, scrubbing, and disinfecting from Roger’s final in-person client. He’d strung the skeleton with Christmas lights he’d turn on during the darkest of dark Alaskan nights, to remind himself—he said—that there was light at the end of the seasonal tunnel. “Plus,” he added, “I like how they twinkle.”
Pandora had been fine with Mr. Bones back when he first moved in, Christmas lights and all. But that was back before she’d been forced to socialize among people her own age. Since then—and especially since she’d begun visiting his mother—her opinion on the matter seemed to have changed.
“Isn’t it time we got rid of Mr. Bones?” she asked one day. She’d become upset with not only having to stare her (literally) mortal enemy in the face every day, but also where he’d placed it, in front of the living room window, where passersby could see and recall that, yes, that’s where the weirdo and her weird dad lived.
“It’s a memento mori,” he said. “A reminder that beyond the light at the end of the tunnel is another tunnel to, well, nobody knows for sure.”
“Death,” Pandora said. “It leads to death.”
As an organic entity with an expiration date herself, Pandora went on to explain that she was opposed to death—both conceptually and personally; she resisted the thought of death at an almost cellular level. It had begun as a fear of getting dementia like her grandmother, but spread. Metastasized. Her fear of dementia was the gateway to her real fear: the fear of dying. Pandora found it insulting, frankly, and an affront to the entire species—the pinnacle of creation—to take all this time building a life out of memories only to have it taken away. And here her dad was, putting it right out there in front of her, and adding blinking lights to boot.
“Maybe you should add a dildo,” she concluded. “You know, get the whole Freudian twofer going? Thanatos and Eros.”
“You know, I knew I forgot something,” Roger said, already sensing there’d been more to her objection than he’d thought.
“Maybe you’re in denial,” his daughter continued.
“Of which?”
“I’m thinking both,” she said. “When was the last time you had a date?”
“I found your English assignment on the printer,” Roger said. “‘What do you want it to say on your tombstone?’”
“This space for rent,” Pandora answered, as she had for the assignment.
“Maybe you’re the one who’s in denial,” Roger suggested.
Pandora could say something about that, but if she did, it would escalate, and she wasn’t in the mood. So: “Why, thank you, kettle,” she said, resorting to an old routine, a way for one or the other to call a time-out.
“No problem, pot,” Roger said back, putting a pin in the discussion neither was quite ready to have.