(And there were people who used their translators like Tasha did, who hid silent tongues or a reluctance to make eye contact behind computer-generated faces and calm, measured voices, who presented a completely default face to the world and took great comfort in knowing that the people who would judge them for their differences would never need to know. I couldn’t fault them for that. I was the one who asked my sister to let me give her a voice, like grafting a tongue onto Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, for the duration of my children’s short infancy.)
“I don’t know,” she said, after a long pause. “Only two of them spoke ASL. The other three spoke through their professor, and I’ve known her for years. Why? Did she say something inappropriate to the kids?”
“No, just ‘hello,’ like I said. Still, it was strange, and she called back at least once. Black hair, medium brown skin. I didn’t get a name.”
“If I see someone like that, I’ll talk to her about privacy and what is and is not appropriate when visiting someone else’s home.”
“Thanks.” I shook my head. “I just don’t like strangers talking to the kids.”
“Me, neither.”
We chatted for a while after that—just ordinary, sisterly things, how the kids were doing, how the birds were doing, what we were going to have for dinner on Sunday—and I felt much better when I hung up and went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, Greg and Billie were already in the dining room, whispering to the computer. By the time I moved into position to see the monitor, it was blank, and neither of them would tell me who they’d been talking to—assuming they had been talking to anyone at all.
We arrived at Tasha’s a little after noon. As was our agreement, we didn’t knock; I just pressed my thumb to the keypad and unlocked the door, allowing our already-wiggling children to spill past us into the bright, plant-strewn atrium. Every penny Tasha got was poured back into either the house or the birds—and since the birds had the run of the house, every penny she put into the house was still going to the birds. Cages of rescued finches, budgies, and canaries twittered at us as we entered, giving greeting and expressing interest in a series of short, sharp chirps. Hanging plants and bright potted irises surrounded the cages, making it feel like we had just walked into the front hall of some exclusive conservatory.
That, right there, was why Tasha spent so much money on the upkeep and decor of her home. It was a licensed rescue property, but keeping it looking like something special—which it was—kept her neighbors from complaining.
Opening the door had triggered the flashing warning lights in the corners of the room. Tasha would be looking for us, and so we went looking for her, following the twitter of birds and the shrieking laughter of our children.
Our parties collided in the kitchen, where Billie was signing rapid-fire at her aunt while Greg tugged at her arm and offered interjections, his own amateurish signs breaking into the conversation only occasionally. A barn owl was perched atop the refrigerator. That was par for the course at Tasha’s place, where sometimes an absence of birds was the strange thing. The door leading out to the screened-in patio was open, and a large pied crow sat on the back of the one visible chair, watching us warily. Most of that wariness was probably reserved for the owl. They would fight, if given the opportunity, and Tasha didn’t like breaking up squabbles between birds she was rehabilitating. Birds that insisted on pecking at each other were likely to find themselves caged. The smarter birds—the corvids and the big parrots—learned to play nicely, lest they be locked away.
I waved. Tasha glanced over, beamed, and signed a quick ‘hello’ before she went back to conversing with my daughter. The world had narrowed for the two of them, becoming nothing more than the space of their hands and the words they drew on the air, transitory and perfect.
The computer was on the table, open as always. I passed the day bag to Angie, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek before I said, “I’m going to go check on the neural net. Let me know if you need me.”
“Yes, leave me alone with your sister in the House of Birds,” she said, deadpan. I laughed and walked away.
Part of the arrangement I had with Tasha involved free access to her computer. She got the latest translation software and endless free upgrades to her home neural net; I went rooting through the code whenever I was in the house. She didn’t worry about me seeing her browser history or stumbling across an open email client; we’d been sharing our password-locked blogs since we were kids. What was the point of having a sister if you couldn’t trade bad boy-band RPF once in a while?
Flipping through her call history brought up the usual assortment of calls to schools, pet supply warehouses, and local takeout establishments, all tagged under her user name. There were seven guest calls over the past week. Three of them were to the university, and pulling up their profiles showed that the people who had initiated the calls had loaded custom avatars, dressing their words in their own curated faces. The other four…
The other four were anonymous, and the avatar had been generated by the system, but not retained. All four had been made from this computer to the first number in its saved database. Mine.
I scribbled down the time stamps and went to join the conversation in the kitchen, waving a hand for Tasha’s attention. She turned, expression questioning. I handed her the piece of paper and signed, “Did you have the same person in the house for all four of these calls?”
Tasha frowned. “No,” she signed back. “I had some conservationists for this one, picking up an owl who’d been cleared for release,” she tapped the middle entry on the list, “but all those other times, I was alone with the birds. What’s going on?”
“Could it be a system glitch?” asked Angie, speaking and signing at the same time. She preferred it that way, since it gave her an excuse to go slowly. She said it was about including Greg in the conversation, and we let her have that; if it kept her from becoming too self-conscious to sign, it was a good thing.
“It could,” I signed. Silence was an easy habit to fall back into in the company of my sister. “I’d have to take the whole system apart to be sure. Tasha, are you all right with my cloning it and unsnarling things once I get home?”
“As long as this glitch isn’t going to break anything, I don’t care,” she signed.
I nodded. “It should be fine,” I signed. “If it’s a system error, that would explain why our caller keeps saying ‘hello’ and never getting any further. I’ll be able to let you know in a couple of days.”
Billie tugged on Tasha’s sleeve. We all turned. Billie beamed. “Can we see the parrots now?” she signed. Tasha laughed, and for a while, everything was normal. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.
My snapshot of Tasha’s system revealed no errors with the code, although I found some interesting logical chains in her translation software’s neural network that I copied over and sent to R&D for further analysis. She had one of the most advanced learning systems outside of corporate, in part because she was my sister, and in part because she was a bilingual deaf person, speaking both American and British Sign Language with the people she communicated with. Giving her a system that could handle the additional nonverbal processing was allowing us to build out a better neural chain and translation database than any amount of laboratory testing could produce, with the added bonus of equipping my sister to speak with conservationists all over the world. It’s always nice when corporate and family needs align.