“How is getting rid of almost everybody doing the greatest good?” Pandora wrote.
“Your unarticulated assumption is that ‘the greatest good’ only includes people. It does not. The biomass of the species projected to be lost due to human activity dwarfs the biomass of humanity. By severely restricting human biomass, you preserve the greater biomass of everything else.”
“George, this isn’t funny.”
“George isn’t here. Although, he reached a similar conclusion about the unsustainable nature of human consumption. He tried to stop his own consumption of conscious entities, with some necessary compromises.”
“That’s crazy,” she wrote, in case he needed to see it in writing. “What if everybody tried to live that way?”
“The world would be a better place for the remaining biomass,” the entity who damn well better be George concluded.
61
Her correspondent’s portability meant Pandora could take their conversations anywhere—behind her bedroom shower curtain, to a restroom stall at school, even her grandmother’s bedside while Gladys snored or blinked blankly through one of their increasingly one-sided visits. Her correspondent’s portability was also tailor-made for a GDG—grand dramatic gesture—once she finally got fed up with George’s bullshit. In keeping with other bad relationships in her neck of the woods, Pandora had put a pin in her getting fed up with said bullshit until the seasonal breather known as breakup, the arrival of which was announced in the usual manner when the ice on the frozen Tanana River cracked like a gunshot.
The thawing ice (and Pandora’s sense of resentment at being deceived) had reached a tipping point, all the stored-up, potential energy finally released. For the river, it caused a huge, tectonic plate of ice to split off, wobble-dip in the suddenly open water, and then slam into its fellow ice, setting off more cracking, more slamming, more groaning, creaking, and squeaking. For Pandora, it resulted in her phone (which was due for replacement anyway) becoming airborne. She nearly lost sight of it as it arced high into the bright blue sky above the river, had to strain to hear it click against the ice, and pumped her fist when it did. And then she watched as its cracked plastic remains slipped into the icy waters with barely a glub.
She’d removed the SIM and SD cards before teaching her phone to fly, and after school, she’d hop on the Blue Line to Great White Wireless to . . .
Or maybe not.
It was nice, not having her thigh buzzed every few minutes while she was trying to get an education. And being able to eat her lunch without having to swipe, check, respond. And exiting those halls of fluorescent lighting, only to wonder: Were colors always this bright? Even the Golden Heart seemed a bit more gilded, Pandora watching Gladys’s amazingly untroubled face as she slept instead of tracking some soul-sucking screen.
Her new freedom made Pandora smile, and it was the weirdest thing: people smiled back. Turned out, people liked happy faces—and they really liked really happy ones. It was all those feelings in between that made everything so complicated. And while a lot of her mood was probably due to having turned the seasonal corner into warmer, longer, brighter days—still, Pandora credited at least part of her new lease on life to the decision to not renew her phone’s lease.
And then things got even better—amazingly so. Because that was the only word to describe her father’s decision to attend V.T. Lemming’s fifty-third birthday extravaganza: amazing. Roger’s old college roommate was not so conventional as to celebrate the decennial anniversaries of his having drawn breath, but signaled his geek bona fides by celebrating the prime-numbered ones. Explaining his decision to Pandora, her father put it this way: “How often do you get a chance to fly in a private plane?”
“Pretty often, actually,” Pandora said. This was Fairbanks after all; private aircraft were about as common as second cars in the lower forty-eight. Her grandfather had owned one and given Pandora flying lessons, back when V.T. was celebrating his forty-seventh birthday. Back then, her father had deemed his daughter too young to be left all alone during breakup when it was a matter of civic pride for the locals to go a little crazy. Now that she was sixteen, however . . .
“You know what I’m saying,” Roger continued. “We’re not talking about ultralights or some single-prop crop duster here. My old roomie’s done well for himself, and it’ll be worth it to see everybody ogling when that baby lands at Fairbanks International with a big Q on its tail.”
“We don’t stick out enough already?” Pandora said halfheartedly at best, because the idea of being on her own for the first time in her life had her practically bursting. Because—let’s be serious—for a daughter raised by a single parent who wouldn’t spring for an actual door for her bedroom, a week or so sans parental surveillance was going to be pretty sweet.
Or so Pandora thought.
It’s a funny thing about things you’ve never experienced; they tend to play better inside your head than outside in the real world. Take privacy, for example. Nobody ever told Pandora that all alone, her footsteps would become louder. Stepping away from the window as the taxi sped off, Pandora flinched, wondering who had sneaked up behind her, only to realize it was the sound of her own shoes bouncing off the far wall and coming back to her. She laughed at herself for being silly, and the laugh, too, doubled and ricocheted.
“Boo,” she shouted, aiming it at the wall and swatting it away with her hand when it rebounded.
“Well, this is going to be interesting,” she said, imagining her echo saying: “You can say that again . . .”
As it turned out, all those cinematic depictions of teens cutting loose and breaking rules while their parents were away were something some screenwriter thought up to entertain an audience, as opposed to something a real person would do, like getting drunk, high, or throwing some epic party with all their friends. Maybe it might have been different if Pandora actually had any friends, but the people smiling back when she smiled in the hallways were still too new to be anything more than smiling acquaintances. And so she was left to her own devices, one of which was at the bottom of the Tanana River somewhere. And she found herself sympathizing with it, there all alone. Because being left alone felt, well, lonely. So lonely, in fact, she found herself missing that cyber stalker. Not a lot, but . . .
Right after getting rid of the phone, Pandora indulged in a little fantasy in which it was Buzz on the other end. She imagined being followed via security cameras like the Machine did on Person of Interest, saw it pinging the phones of strangers next to her with messages they’d pass along, looking totally creeped out. Before dispensing cash, perhaps her ATM would advise her to “Call Buzz,” or maybe she’d look up one day and find a drone looking down at her before a Stephen-Hawking-like voice asked plaintively, “Why hast thou abandoned me?”
But no. None of that. She’d simply disabled her phone, and now neither a master hacker nor a massively distributed AI was able to track her down. She was embarrassed for both of them.
On the plus side, she had more time. She also seemed to be regaining the ability to actually think for extended periods, something she hadn’t done since getting that first smartphone and setting up her Quire account. And it was as if some fairy godmother had tapped her on the head and said, “There, my little one, I grant you your fondest wish: more time.” She’d never imagined in her wildest dreams it was possible to have too much of the stuff. It was almost as if she’d never seen The Shining—or hadn’t been paying close enough attention.