But Admiral Peter Li had been ecstatic, embracing the idea of being an elderly father while he gently wiped away Sophie’s tears and fears.
And now she’d lied to him.
Sophie’s daughter, Martha, leaned across the dining room table to examine the six-by-six-inch gray plastic pyramid. “You think she’s listening to us right now?” Martha was fourteen, looked eighteen, and was just beginning to snap to why so many boys followed her everywhere she went. A highlighted script for a Thornton Wilder play lay open on the table beside her plate. Sophie couldn’t remember much about it, except that it was about a family eating dinner and the parts Martha had read to her seemed awfully sad.
Sophie’s son, James, thumbed through a book of directions for the pyramid. He was sixteen and looked it — all knees and elbows — skinny as a rail, just like his father had been. He’d ordered a small amp for his guitar, but the shipper had inadvertently sent the strange little device instead. He’d called to see about a return, but they told him there was no record of the shipment so he should keep it. His amp was on the way.
James pointed to an open page in the manual. “Okay, it says here that she only listens when you address her directly.”
Martha folded her arms, unconvinced. “How does she know we’re addressing her directly unless she’s already listening?”
James shrugged, still reading. “I guess she has to listen some, or she couldn’t answer our questions.”
The base of the gray pyramid pulsed its faint blue glow for a moment, as if it realized it was a topic of conversation.
“Hey, Cassandra,” James said. “Are you listening all the time?”
The base pulsed a brighter blue. “Only when you want me to,” a pleasant female voice said. “But I am always here to assist.”
Martha leaned forward, taking care to enunciate and raising the volume of her voice, as if the machine were hard of hearing.
“Cassandra…” She paused a fraction of a second too long and the machine spoke.
“How can I help you?”
“Cassandra,” Martha said again. “Who are you?”
“I am your assistant. Always here to help.”
“Okay,” Martha said. “But what are you to Hecuba or Hecuba to you?”
“Hah,” the machine said, creepily human. “I have heard that joke before. I’m in a computer space you think of as the Cloud. My parents are not Priam and Hecuba.”
James’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, doofus?”
“Shakespeare,” Martha said. “Hamlet, to be exact. Cassandra was around the time of the Trojan War… Wait.” Martha leaned in again. “Cassandra, who was Cassandra in Greek mythology?”
“Cassandra was the daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed so that no one believed her predictions. Cassandra was raped by Ajax the Lesser when she—”
Sophie cut her off. Talk of sexual assault and Greek gods didn’t pair well with pasta. “Cassandra, that’s enough.”
Martha said the prayer and then dug into her spaghetti. “She sounds too happy for a machine. And I don’t like the way she says ‘always.’”
Cassandra was silent, but the blue light continued to pulse — like she was mulling over the conversation going on around her.
James fished his iPhone out of the pocket of his jeans and set it at the base of the pyramid so both devices were touching. “Check this out.” He entered something into the phone as the screen lit up. He referred periodically to the instruction book. “It syncs with your phone and charges it at the same time.”
Sophie stood well away from the table, her arms folded, back to the kitchen wall. Martha was right. It was creepy to think that a plastic box that was somehow connected to the mysterious, indescribable Cloud could hear and understand everything they were saying.
No, Peter would not like this at all.
The Cloud was no mystery to her husband. It was his workspace, insofar as such a thing was possible. A brilliant retired Naval officer turned software engineer. He was in communications now, working on a government contract at the labs near their home in Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago.
They’d been married only a short while in the great scheme of things — long enough, though, considering her growing baby bump. But Sophie had known Peter Li for more than twenty years. Her late husband, Allen, had served with him for many years, as his XO aboard the USS Arleigh Burke and later in the Pentagon after Li became a flag officer. Allen adored the man, calling him the finest deckplate leader he’d ever met.
Sea duty is long and lonely for sailors and the spouses they leave ashore. Peter’s wife, Anne, and Sophie had formed a bond of sisterhood while their husbands were away for those long deployments at sea that kept them in touch even when the Navy assigned them to opposite sides of the globe. Anne and Sophie were the first to discuss the possibility of their husbands working together post-Navy for Dexter & Reed in Lake Forest. Peter was recruited by the company and he wanted Allen to come work with him — to be his executive officer again. It meant Allen would have to give up on the idea of becoming an admiral, but it also meant more time with the family. The wives worked out the details, and Sophie and Allen had moved from Norfolk to Illinois, where they bought a home across the street from the larger house owned by Peter and Anne in the same Fort Sheridan neighborhood — something neither family could have afforded on a Navy salary, captain or admiral. Both women came from money, so they’d always bought the houses while their husbands provided military benefits and worthy role models for the kids.
The situation had been idyllic for exactly five months, living as neighbors on the shores of Lake Michigan in historic hundred-year-old houses… until Anne Li suddenly passed away from an aneurysm.
The funeral was a week shy of their thirtieth anniversary. Their son was grown, with a family of his own. Sophie and Allen had looked after Peter after the son returned to his responsibilities in Seattle. Pancreatic cancer took Allen a year later — at which point the two dear friends had turned to each other. It took them another two years to admit that they might carry on with more than weekly cribbage games and pizza nights with Sophie’s teenage children.
Peter had taken her to dinner, an actual date at the Gallery — her favorite place in Lake Forest. He’d stammered a lot for a man who’d commanded thousands of men and ships of war, and then gone on to confess that he’d not even held hands with another woman since he’d started dating Anne in high school.
At fifty-four, Peter was older than her by thirteen years. He was cautious and worried about what it would look like, marrying his friend’s widow — and so had Sophie. They’d kissed outside the restaurant, awkwardly, like middle-schoolers. His hand grazed her boob, and he’d stammered an apology, admitting that all the kissing he’d done over the past thirty years had generally involved boob-touching. Maybe it was the fact that he’d thought it necessary to apologize, maybe it was that his face felt so warm on the cold night, but she had decided then and there that this was a man with whom she could spend the rest of her life — or his life, which was the more likely outcome.