One afternoon, she tried jump-starting Gladys’s memory with music, downloading a bunch of WWII-era stuff from the Andrews Sisters and others, singing things like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “We’ll Meet Again,” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Hedging her bets, she threw in a melody she knew her grandmother knew, having already used “Moon River” as the musical scaffolding for one set of memories. But even though the version she played included the original lyrics (as opposed to Gladys’s) it still hit her grandmother hard. When Pandora asked why she was crying, however, Gladys just shook her head, making her wish she could take it in her hands, hold it still, and turn it over like a Magic 8 Ball. But Pandora already knew what it would say:
“Answer cloudy. Try again.”
One day, Pandora noticed that Gladys had developed a nervous habit of tap-tap-tapping one hand atop the other. This was after they’d abandoned watching TV on the set left behind when the room’s previous resident moved out the way they did in that part of the Golden Heart: horizontally. Once she couldn’t focus enough to read anymore, Gladys had taken some solace in the less demanding medium of TV. But just like the bookmark’s progress before it, Gladys’s choice of shows reflected her disease’s insidious progress: from movies, to one-hour dramas, to sitcoms, and finally to game shows. The last held her attention the longest because they were based on taking turns, and each new turn was the whole drama of the moment self-contained and played out within seconds, a minute or two at most. Eventually, however, even these capsules of entertainment eluded her, and so Pandora turned off the TV and left it that way.
It was in the silence that followed that Pandora noticed the tapping. She took it as just a nervous habit at first, but then noticed something about the tapping that made her straighten in her chair: it wasn’t random.
Three threes, always. A trio of triplets. Her grandfather had taught that pattern to Pandora: three dots, three dashes, three dots. Rinse. Repeat.
SOS, SOS, SOS . . .
Save our ship. Save our souls.
Help . . .
Her grandmother had stopped asking for the kind of help people still went to jail for. Her misery had swallowed the part of her still able to ask to be put out of its misery. And so Pandora’s uncomfortable refusals had come to an end—or so she’d thought. Hoped. Because she couldn’t. Pandora just . . . couldn’t.
But now this: a cry for help from deep inside the old woman’s muscle memory.
SOS. SOS. SO—
Pandora covered her grandmother’s hands with her own, making them stop.
“I can’t,” she whispered, her expression saying the rest. “I love you, you know,” Pandora said, snuffling in a tear that had rolled down her nose.
“Love you know,” Gladys echoed, resuming her signaling the second her granddaughter stood to kiss her on the forehead. Pandora left after that; visiting hours had ended. But she’d have left then even if they hadn’t. She had some crying to do, and a face she still preferred hiding while doing it.
We think we can change the world when we’re teenagers. That’s partly because we’ve seen it happen, inside our own bodies. The whole world changes within us in a matter of months. And so we look out at a world that, itself, is in desperate need of change and we think: I’ve got this. Too many haters in the world? Easy, stop hating on everything and everybody. We want to change the world if only to pay it back for having changed us. But when the world refuses to meet us halfway or—worse—only gets worse, the heartbreak can sometimes feel like a challenge in some epic quest, a burden we must bear, a price we must pay to become what we need to become. And so once the cruel gene had unraveled her grandmother’s personhood down to a blink sitting in a stinking diaper, waiting for change of a different kind, Pandora still came to visit Gladys, to be a body in the room, sharing the air if nothing else. She’d spend the time with her body in that room, sitting next to her own future as it slept a few feet to her right. Pandora’s mind, however, was in her hand, on the screen of her smartphone, sending texts to her fellow world saver two or three thousand miles away, depending on whether she drove or flew.
“How about if I give up red meat?” she thumbed out, sent.
Pandora got up to stretch her legs. There was a courtyard at the Golden Heart, outside her grandmother’s window, with trees and a pond, a gazebo, all as if the residents were waiting for the weather’s cooperation to be wheeled out to soak up the glories of nature. The truth was, underneath that blanket of white waiting to be pulled back in less than a month, the stub ends of cigarettes littered the ground like punctuation, from ramrod exclamations to hunchbacked question marks. But for now, they lay hidden. For now, the artificial pond at the center of the courtyard remained frozen still, a hard surface for strings of snow to skate across lackadaisically from what little wind resulted from bodies rushing back inside at break’s end, the snow ringing it drilled here and there by newer butts melting down to join the rest.
The trees surrounding this carved-out space were outlined in white that hung off the ends of branches like trails of ash, waiting to be tapped, making Pandora think of the world’s nervous system lit up in an MRI. And then she noticed a branch, bare—of leaves, yes, but snow too. It was still quivering from the raven that had leaped from it. And Pandora could feel that quiver, viscerally, a sympathetic vibration humming through her own nervous system.
That must be what dying feels like, she thought, meaning the leap into the unknown bridging two worlds—that quivering limb resting at the center of before versus after.
And while there was a certain engineered peacefulness to the tableau, inside her head, a singular word kept echoing: no. There were better things to do with life than giving in to the peer pressure of mortality. And despite what her father might think, it wasn’t crazy, especially not for someone who was sixteen, going on infinity. Because when Pandora looked at the technology available, death seemed less and less inevitable and more like a force of habit. All she had to do was her part to break that habit.
But why AI? Why not, say, progressive, continuous whole-body replacement with organs grown from stem cells? Why not reprogrammed telomeres, the body’s real biological clocks? Or what about whatever it was that prevented naked mole rats from dying of old age? Maybe CRISPR some of that secret sauce into the human genome. And if it looked like she might be running out of time, cryonics and chill while the biotech caught up.
Why none of that? Easy: Pandora didn’t know how to do any of that. But she understood computers, was practically raised by them, and every time she thought about what was happening to Gladys, the comparisons she came up with all came from the world of computing. Dementia was like having a corrupted file allocation table on a hard drive. Or it was like ransomware, encrypting all her memories until she paid with her life. Trying to visualize what the code for dementia would look like, Pandora imagined something almost insultingly simple: a do-loop repeating itself forever, chewing up resources for no purpose, or as part of a denial-of-service attack. And whenever she thought about a cure in the abstract, she imagined George’s visualization of Buzz’s gamified goal, only the dementia version would be called Plaque Man, the little yellow gobbler chasing the neural detritus clogging the labyrinth of connections, deleting the disease as it went.