Behind the front counter leans a young man whose eyes glisten with the sheen of cyberization. When Ify draws near, she hears none of the humming and whirring of the gears and machinery at work inside of him and figures his central processing unit must be state-of-the-art. The twinkling nameplate on his chest says VIKRAM.
“You called me with an update?” Ify asks.
A goatee makes his otherwise shaven face more angular. There’s an agelessness about him. He could be fifty years old or just a few years older than Ify. Or he could be a fifty-year-old man in the body of someone who looks only a few years older than Ify. He holds up her Bonder with one hand, elbow pressed to the glass counter. Tattoo ink swims in designs over his forearm. “The update is there is no update. You have a minute?”
Ify surprises herself with an exasperated sigh. “Sure.”
Vikram leads her behind the desk and into a back room with the complete opposite ambiance of the store floor. In here, lamps illuminate small, seemingly random circles of a space otherwise smothered in shadows. Tools litter workspaces, and Ify finds herself stepping awkwardly over Bubble Wrap and empty boxes and glass cases strewn all over the floor. Nimbly, he makes his way to his desk, where mini projectors and tablets and small, cube-like data processors lie in a neat semicircle. He sits in a hoverchair and seems too preoccupied to offer Ify a seat until he extends his arm and a chair speeds out of the shadows and lands close enough for Ify to fall into beside him.
He connects the Bonder to one of the data processors, then connects that to a larger device and enables a wireless connection that Ify can feel in her temple, connecting the Bonder to half a dozen devices on the desk. It powers up, and up from one of the tablets pops a holographic projection of its screen. The fingers of Vikram’s right hand break apart, and his wired fingertips blaze across a separate touchboard. Down scrolls the text of the Bonder’s data. A swirl of letters, symbols, and numbers.
“I wasn’t able to recover the lost data, but I was able to stop the virus from eating any more of it.”
“Virus?”
“Yeah. Once you connected the Bonder to an outside device, whatever was in there just went nuts and started eating all your data.” He shifts in his seat. “You sure it didn’t contract a virus from any of your other devices?”
“I regularly have every piece of tech in my home checked. It couldn’t have come from them. I would have noticed data loss earlier.” She only half believes herself. Worry settles in the pit of her stomach that the virus had been hiding in one of her devices all along, devices that she has connected to in the past. What if the virus is inside her? The urge creeps into her to remove her Whistle from her temple and put it in a garbage disposal unit to be jettisoned into space.
He turns in his chair to face her fully. “Can I ask what you were doing when this happened?” He holds up the Bonder when he speaks, even though wires still hang from it.
Ify resists the urge to squirm. How can she confess to breaking office protocol and performing an invasive search of a patient without their consent? Even if this man doesn’t know the full extent of Alabastrine law, he’d know she was up to something suspect.
“I was inspecting materials I’d downloaded.”
Vikram frowns. “What kind of materials?”
The word memories almost slips out of Ify’s mouth. “Cerebral data. I work in a hospital.”
He holds his frown for a moment, then his face loosens. “Possibly a damaged braincase, then. Either way, the virus has crept into the Bonder’s other functionalities. It’s useless at this point. Most of its projection capabilities have been corrupted beyond repair. And if you were to connect to it, you’d be in for a world of pain. And you’d risk corruption yourself. You’re not connected, are you?” It sounds like a statement coming from him.
“No. Red-blood.” She pauses. “I do use Augments, however.” She points to her temple. “My Whistle. Here. It activates an implant at the base of my neck, connecting to my central nervous system.” She pulls back the collar of her shirt to show him the scar that will never heal. “It is removable. But that is what I use.” She lets go of her collar and straightens in her chair. “The Augment is for heightening my sensory perception—seeing farther, hearing more clearly—and it’s connected to my bodysuit for information transfer. It also enables remote connection to wireless devices. The Whistle is just for communication. Making and receiving calls, translation, that sort of thing.”
“Like a phone,” he says absently.
“A what?”
Vikram waves the Bonder in the air like it’s just some disposable piece of tech. “Well, whatever you downloaded is likely the source of the virus. I’d recommend a clean sweep of whatever devices you used to connect with this. And I’d suggest having it decommissioned and put in a steel box to prevent accidental remote connection with anything—or anyone—else.”
“That bad?” Ify says, trying to joke.
“It might try to connect on its own.”
“What? Without my turning it on?”
“Yeah. Without you even turning it on.”
Fear settles in Ify’s stomach. The cyberized girl’s memories: a poison. A virus. Her eyes grow wide with the question that rings between her ears.
How many of those refugee children are cyberized?
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Paige and Amy take Peter to an artificial lake a brief walk from their cul-de-sac where teenagers wearing waterskates glide and twirl and leap as though they were skating on ice. Amy has Peter in a hoverchair with a blanket over his legs.
Upon his return from the hospital, his arms had been leaden and he’d had to be fed his liquids with a spoon. Paige had felt too nervous to feed him intravenously. He still has a listlessness about him, a lack of reaction to most stimuli. But it is a relief to Ify that he still squints when lights shine too brightly and that he will shrink away at something that might cause him pain. And now with an artificial wind blowing in his face to simulate springtime, the slightest of smiles crawls across his lips.
A pair of white, middle-aged neighbors waves to Amy. Amy lets out a loud squeal and beckons Ify to Peter’s hoverchair. Then Amy and Paige hurry over to join their neighbors and huddle in the mirthful buzz of excited conversation sprinkled throughout with cannon bursts of laughter.
Ify walks slowly to Peter’s side, and for a long time, they watch the kids skating in silence.
“I won’t remember this,” Peter says, at last.
“What?” Ify looks down at him, this unmoving boy who suddenly contains a sadness so unbearable it can’t possibly be false. She wants to believe that every word out of his mouth is an attempt at controlling her, steering her in the direction he wants. But the stillness in his voice, its lack of tremor, rings too true in her chest.