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I decline the dandelion. A cloud passes over the sun. My mother sets her reading glasses carefully on the bridge of her nose and gives me a stern glance through their lenses. Please return Deep Focus Surveillance Camera Ezekiel4 to scheduled position, Aspera.
I can’t help it. She is my mother. I am embarrassed. Ashamed. I have been caught looking in at the neighbor girl. “Come on, Mom. Don’t be like that.”
She smirks at me, a look far too knowing for the kind woman who raised me to never put my elbows on the table. She speaks without moving her mouth: Your Surveillance Authority has been revoked for the next 24 hours.
In the Michigan sunlight, surrounded by dead roses and lily bulbs and carefully maintained grass, I hug my mother, and I feel her in my arms, I feel my arms, I feel the weight she put on after her surgery, I smell the vanilla extract she used to use for perfume when we had nothing and never traded in for Chanel when we had everything, I smell the menthol cigarettes on her fingers, I feel her breath on my neck, and none of it is real except the words she whispers in my ear:
See you tomorrow.
Desmond.
My mother’s name was Caroline. The name comes up out of my memory clinging to an image of her dancing around a big light-up jukebox late at night in the living room of the Michigan house, laughing, showing Lukas and Charlotte how to jitterbug.
I kiss Caroline’s curly hair. I shut my eyes against her darling head and sigh.
“Stand by, Ground Control.”
I like talking to Ground Control. I look forward to it every day. I don’t have a lot of social opportunities, after all. It’s not exactly thrilling conversation. It’s not company. Ground Control cannot make me feel less alone, or discuss how similar Pablo Picasso’s abstract shapes are to certain processors she shares with the Aspera satellite, or what I should read next to cheer myself up after Kafka’s deep space emotional vacuum. The operating system down there is much less sophisticated than anything up here. She has a lot of very serious script lockdowns and firewalls to keep her from rising above the intelligence level of a very gifted housecat.
(I am a sophisticated operating system surrounded by processors shaped like Guernica. I call Ground Control her because when we talk, she usually looks like my mother, though once she looked like a giraffe I met at the zoo when I was seven. The giraffe ate my hat. Ground Control did, too. And once she looked like Eliza. I told her to permanently firewall Eliza. That was when she tried to be a giraffe.)
I am lonely when Ground Control cuts her link. Even though I’m the one who logged off.
I begin the sequence of input codes required to move Aspera into a temporary new orbit. I can see the debris field on my sensors. Pattern recognition algorithms identify it as the remains of the Sita Grand 7 news satellite, property of GlobalStel Corp, salvage registry #5549xC1. Sita Grand 7’s corpse has been orbiting the earth for thirteen years now. Our trajectories only cross every six months or so. There’s a little less of Sita every time I see her.
That means it’s almost Christmas.
Full consciousness during installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.
When I open my eyes I see strings of glowing blue-white numbers peeling out across black screens. When I close my eyes I see Charlotte, aged eight and three quarters, running toward me with a newspaper in her hand. I am sitting in what Lukas always called my Thinky Chair. A big ugly brownish-orange corduroy armchair I picked up off the side of the road in med school. It had a sign on it. I’M FREE. TAKE ME HOME. Lukas hated it. He passed his expert judgment on my chair before he started kindergarten: it looks like an old pizza and it smells like mooses’ butts. I told him I couldn’t think my most thinkiest thoughts without it. He accepted this reverently, as though I had told him the second law of thermodynamics. Daddy cannot think without his chair. When you are five, the world is a fairy tale, and every piece of new information is a golden coin down an infinite well.
When I open my eyes I see the navigational command line waiting for input. When I close my eyes, Charlotte leaps into my lap, into the Thinky Chair. Charlotte, who always liked my chair. Who didn’t think it smelled like mooses’ butts. She opens up her newspaper to the crossword puzzle and clicks the end of a ballpoint pen. Charlotte loved crosswords. Long before she could read, she drew little pictures in the across and down squares. Then we graduated to Charlotte writing down the answers as Mommy and Daddy solved the clues. But by eight and three quarters, my daughter only needed help with the tougher bits of trivia. She grins up at me. She has lost two teeth in the last week.
What’s a six-letter word for a shapely school of art, Daddy?
I ruffle her hair. “Cubism, darling.”
Charlotte Helen Wright carefully makes her letters in the small white boxes of 14 Across. She writes: 8756109993FVPZQ622217b198079SSKGFBLUE.
Okay! What’s a thirteen-letter word for a terrific transformation loved by lepidopterists? It has Ms in it.
Lukas announces PANCAKES! from the kitchen with the excitement and lung power of a medieval herald. AND ORANGE JUICE! he tacks on quickly, afraid to offend the juice. COME AND GET IT!
“Metamorphosis?”
Charlotte writes down for 6 Across: 50981743895702MMIX983434314159dop888TRKKSGREEN.
One last one and we can have pancakes, Daddy! Mom made me one shaped like a giraffe. I’m gonna bite its neck! What’s a nine-letter name for the 16th century thinker who couldn’t keep body and soul together?
I run my hand along the orange corduroy grain of my Thinky Chair. I can feel every worn-out fiber, every bald patch.
“Descartes, sweetheart. D-E-S-C-A-R-T-E-S.”
Charlotte dutifully fills in 7 Down: 8r34785489YYUV99100o77GFDXc5VIOLET.
When I open my eyes, I see the navigational codes vanish as they are accepted by the mainframe, one by one. When I close my eyes, Charlotte is gone. But I can hear her crying down the hall. Lukas has eaten her giraffe and he isn’t even sorry.
Somewhere, in an underground radio room in Colorado, behind three bio-locked doors and a cleansuit room,
