It’s not indentured servitude.
WILLIAM VALE
Then what would you call it?
INTERVIEWER
A fair trade.
WILLIAM VALE
Ah, I get it. And to trade, I need something of value. This isn’t about my mental stateat all. You just want to know what I have to offer you.
INTERVIEWER
Well, to be quite honest, we are curious as to why you came to us.
WILLIAM VALE
It starts with a family. It’s your average family. Two parents, a big brother, and a little sister. An apartment in a nice neighborhood, drone-delivered dinners, and the occasional trip out of town.
I’m nothing special. I like playing video games and guitar and I’m on the swim team, and my grades are thoroughly average. My sister, Persephone—but everyone calls her Percy—is the smart one. My parents say that she was reading almost before she was toddling about the apartment. She builds cities out of plastic blocks and reads technical manuals she steals out of Dad’s briefcase.
Dad works for the Department of Transportation. It doesn’t pay the greatest but I hear my parents talk about health care and benefits. Mom does freelance cybersecurity work from home.
Aunt Carla is Mom’s best friend. She visits every few months, bringing gifts andtaking us on day trips out of the city. Mom says they met in college as roommates. They were both into computers and programming. But while Mom ends up freelancing as a white hat hacker, Aunt Carla goes in a different direction. She begins working on stopping environmental disasters—trying to keep corporations accountable and governments aware of the costs. She founds a collective with other believers—and my mom scoffs at her. She has other priorities: work, me, my sister, and my dad.
I’m fifteen when it all falls apart.
There’s an incident at Dad’s work. That’s all anyone will tell me. It takes a search on the internet for me to find out what really happened: A gun slipped past security. A man looking to wreak as much pain as he could on the world. Five government employees killed.
Among them, my father.
I know you don’t care about him—because he doesn’t really matter in the grand scope of the world. He wasn’t vital to national security. He wasn’t a brilliant hacker or master criminal. He worked in human resources. His name wasn’t even in the news. But this is being recorded, I know. So I’m going to tell you about him. What you won’t find in his file or work history is that hewas the best at making waffles. The fancy kind, with the pearls of sugar and the dough that had to sit overnight. He could braid hair better than Mom, and Percy always demanded that he put her hair in a French braid before school pictures. He knew how to listen—really listen. He liked hearing from people. And he never judged. Not once.
He was kind. He was warm. And he made everyone around him the better for it.
At first, in the wake of his death, everything is chaos. There is a funeral to plan, lawyers to speak to, casseroles to be eaten or tossed in the garbage. It’s easy to lose myself in the bustle of it all. I try to shield Percy from the worst of it, but she comes home crying from school because another classmate told her about the shooting. Aunt Carla is there the whole time, organizing the chaos into something manageable. Mom is pale as a ghost, going through the motions that grief demands.
Mom is many things, but she loved Dad. And when we lost him… it was like something in her died, too.
Weeks pass. The guests trickle away. Aunt Carla flies home. The casseroles go moldy in the fridge. Mom goes to bed… and she stays there. At first, I try to gently rouse her. I burn scrambled eggs and scrapethem into the garbage, then ask Mom to help with breakfast. I don’t know how to turn on the washer and end up having to look it up online. I walk my sister to the bus stop. I learn how to pack her lunch and make sure we both get our homework done.
Then, five months after Dad dies, Mom seems to wake up.
There are days I wish she hadn’t. Because I barely recognize her. She’s thinner, colder, and doesn’t answer questions.
She takes us away from the apartment. She does it at night, makes us leave all our computers and visors and games behind. She puts on clothes that she says will help scramble facial ID cameras, and then we’re paying for bus tickets in cash.
We move to the opposite end of the country. The place used to belong to some paranoid tech billionaire who bought a ranch near Redding. It’s off the grid, and it’s where Aunt Carla has founded her little movement. She and several others are determined to help stop climate change through any means necessary. A worthy goal and a good group of people.
We spend two years living on that ranch. At first, it isn’t bad. Percy and I are homeschooled and we learn from the other members of Aunt Carla’s group. There’s ahacker called Bud who teaches me the basics of programming. A former professor conducts history lessons in the backyard. The group brims with idealists driven to drastic action. Under Carla’s leadership, maybe they could have built something wonderful. Maybe they could have achieved the change that we so desperately need.
But it isn’t Carla’s movement. Not anymore. Mom takes it over, installs herself as its new unofficial ruler. Like termites creeping into the foundation of a house, by the time anyone notices, it’s too late. She stokes everyone’s anger, takes idealism and hardens it.
My dad made people better. My mom makes people worse.
It takes a year for this fun little vacation to become something stale and monotonous. I read plenty of books, write practice essays, and even wrangle an SAT study book out of Carla. Percy retreats into herself. She has always been a quiet kid, but after Dad’s death and our exile, she will sometimes go days without saying a word. I have to coax her into going outside. I do it with stories of my childhood—about school and classmates and the pranks we pulled on substitute teachers. These little dramas both entertain and remind usthat there is a whole world outside of the bunker.
