In the original game, each room or level came with four power pellets, one in each corner, the power pellets being the means by which Pac-Man prevented ghost encounters from costing him one of his three lives. Translate ghosts into potential suicides and power pellets into successful prevention scenarios and make those prevention episodes something Pac-Buzz’s score depends on. George admitted he was still a long way from determining how the power pellets would neutralize life-robbing ghosts, but he had his AI’s conceptual scaffolding sketched out in an easy-to-remember form—something to keep in the back of his head (and his AI’s core programming) while he moved on to tackle more ambitious feats of coding.
“But isn’t this copyright infringement?” Pandora asked. “Aren’t you stealing intellectual property?”
“Only if I copied the exact source code and tried to market it as a game,” George said. “But nobody will ever see this on the front end, and I reversed engineered it by accident without even meaning to. Plus, what’s IP versus actual human lives?”
“Assuming it all works out,” she typed.
“It’s not even a total copy,” George insisted, perhaps a bit more defensively than if he’d actually believed his earlier defense. “When Buzz eats a pac-dot, it grows, and this ballooning imparts momentum, causing it to roll or somersault to the next pac-dot, where the process repeats. I’m thinking the pac-dots will be a checklist of suicidal ideation indicators, something like that.”
Pandora looked at the time on her phone. It was winter, and even though she had a window in her room, it didn’t offer many clues about the time, this time of year. Between, say, 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., the sky might lighten a bit with what was optimistically referred to as “sunrise.” But any options outside that, say, nine, eight, four, and she’d have to check her phone to figure out if it was day or night. And these text sessions with George weren’t helping. They seemed to dissolve time, make it even harder to keep track of. And so when she looked at the time in the upper right-hand corner and saw it was five, she needed to squint to register it was p.m.
Shit, Pandora thought.
She was late to see Gladys at the Golden Heart. And so: “Mmmm, pac-dots,” she hastily texted back, followed by the “yum” emoji, followed by the “running girl” emoji—the one along with the “running boy” emoji they agreed meant “gotta go,” to avoid leaving the other waiting on a text that wouldn’t come.
40
When Pandora signed in at the Golden Heart, she took out her phone for the time and noticed the date as well: February 14. Why did that date . . . ?
Oh shit, Pandora thought, followed by doing the IRL version of the “face-palm” emoji. Well, if they’d ever needed proof of what geeks they were, there it was. She and George had spent their first (!) Valentine’s Day exchanging texts about how to program consciousness, oblivious to what day it was. Neither had sent the other anything; neither had texted the words. The two seconds it would take to tap a “heart” emoji and hit send? Nope, neither of them. Or . . .
Pandora scrolled through their recent exchange. There was one. A heart, but right next to a pile of poop—if that didn’t just about sum it up. Maybe she should get one of those reminder boards like the staff updated in Gladys’s room. She wondered what they drew to distinguish between Valentine’s Day and a visit from the cardiologist.
Slipping her phone back into her pocket, Pandora noticed something funny about her hands; they were empty. She was already late for her grandmother’s Valentine’s Day visit and was showing up empty-handed to boot. Nurse Mitchell was going to have a field day.
“Is there a . . . ?” she began.
“. . . gift shop?” the receptionist finished.
Nod.
“Down that hall, left, left, bingo . . .”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not done yet,” the receptionist said. “Hang a right past bingo, and there it is.”
“The gift shop?” Pandora asked, just checking.
“The gift shop,” the receptionist confirmed.
The place was pretty well picked over this late in the day as Pandora took down and put back a variety of possibilities, including gag mugs, teddy bears, kiss-covered kitsch. She knew Gladys wouldn’t turn down anything sweet but didn’t want to encourage her after the Nips situation.
As she continued looking, Pandora noticed she had company in the gift shop, an elderly man in a jacket—a windbreaker—way too thin for the actual weather outside. Emblazoned across the back was a large gear with the letters “UAW” on the inside. Looking closer, she realized that what she’d taken as the cog’s teeth were actually stick people, linked hand in hand, circling the circumference, the human labor that made the vast machinery of the auto industry run.
“You’re a long way from”—guessing but a good one, statistically—“Detroit?”
The old man turned and smiled the high-def grin of someone with brand-new dentures. “That was the plan,” he said.
“Looks like it worked,” Pandora said.
“Looks like,” the smile confirmed.
“You visiting, or . . . ?”
“Staying,” the old man said. “I signed up for the Eskimo burial. You know, send ’em out on an ice floe? This was the closest they had.”
“Well, happy Valentine’s Day,” Pandora said, deciding on a box of damn chocolates and preparing to leave when her retired auto worker snapped his gnarled fingers, winced, and said, “That’s why I came in here,” followed by another uncanny-valley smile.
Pandora raised a box of chocolates like an admissions badge as she passed the nurses’ station and headed for Gladys’s room. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she began when she spotted them: five petals of the bluest sky blue Pandora had ever seen, repeated flower by dainty flower a dozen times, the stems rubber banded together, little pale tendrils at their cut ends, visible through the clear glass vase that rested on Gladys’s windowsill, half-empty, half-full, your call. She’d not be a proper Alaskan if Pandora couldn’t name them, seeing as the alpine forget-me-not (scientifically: Myosotis alpestris) was the official flower for the forty-ninth of the fifty United States. And she’d not be a proper granddaughter if the sight of them in her grandmother’s nursing home didn’t turn her mood from apologetic before seeing them to downright pissed afterward.
Forget-me-nots! In the room of a woman with dementia! What kind of a sick . . .
She hit the call button and then let her rage build for thirty or so minutes before any of the home staff showed up.
“Yes?” a nurse’s aide said after poking her head in the doorway. Her powder-blue scrubs, dotted with fluorescent renditions of Tweety Bird, appeared to be on backward, judging from the breast pocket Pandora noticed over the girl’s left shoulder blade when she’d fully entered the room, after having determined there were no infectious bodily substances splattered anywhere.
Pandora gestured to the blue flowers on her grandmother’s windowsill. “WTF?” she said.
“DK,” the nurse’s aide said. “But they’re pretty, don’t you think?”