I open the tackle box. All my grandfather’s perfectly tied flies rest in there like rings in a jeweler’s box. That’s pretty good, Ground Control. Have you been practicing?
My grandfather catches a small bluegill. It wriggles in the cold air. He beams at me, brandishing his great fish success. I have accessed several literary archives featuring paternal authority figures providing assistance to younger male characters. Do you like it?
I’m very impressed.
Grand-dad selects a black ghost fly from the box and chatters on: Male protagonists respond positively to the presence of older male relatives in 64.4% of the narratives I have analyzed. Percentages improve if the relative is over the age of 60 (69.1%), if he is a grandfather rather than a father (81.5%), and if the older male engages in an activity while delivering his advice and/or statements (Hunting = +5% Recreational Sports = +7.3% Whittling = +2% Fishing + 8%). I have chosen fishing for optimal results.
Be careful. You don’t want anyone to catch you self-programming.
Grand-dad snorts. Don’t let nobody tell you what to do, kid.
Even someone with Double Black Ruby clearance? As long as you’re bucking your parameters, why don’t you throw me a fucking bone, Ground Control? How about this: I don’t remember my grandfather’s name. Your name. Why don’t I remember?
Grand-dad pulls in his line and lets it out again. He chews—it looks like he’s chewing tobacco, but he never touched the stuff in his life. He gnawed on a wad of pink bubble gum all day while his buddies spat brown slime into Coke cans. He snorts a big, phlegmy, rattling snort and spits into the river. Words fire out of his mouth, rat-a-tat: Reginald Bryson Wright, b. 12th October 1926, Evanston, Illinois. Married Caroline Dorothea Powell 5th November 1952, Cook Country Courthouse… son.
Great! Beautiful! Perfect! Thank you! Ground Control, I do respond 89.5% positively to you! Now let’s try for the bonus round where the stakes get really serious: How did I get command of the Aspera Orbital Satellite if I died outside Richmond, Virginia in 2042? Come on, GC. I’m free. Take me home.
For a long time, Grand-dad doesn’t answer. He just stands in the rush of freezing current and fish in his black rubber waders looking at the sky and the surface of the Big Siskiwitt River and the shadows moving just under the surface of the water. A long time in machine-minutes. Which is about two minutes in real time, including transit.
Don’t go looking for answers you don’t want to find, boy.
That is some weak shit, Gramps.
And suddenly the river disappears, the Big Siskiwitt River and the flies and the bluegill and the clouds and my grandfather. I am standing in a small underground radio room in Colorado behind three bio-locked doors and a cleansuit room. The consoles are covered in dust. A spider has built a comfortable home between the server stacks. A young woman stands in the middle of the room. I have never seen her before. She’s wearing a striped sweater and a pencil skirt with a coffee stain on it and thick-rimmed glasses. Her frazzled hair is coming out of its ponytail. She’s holding an enormous stack of files. Her face looks like my mother’s. Like Charlotte’s. Like Eliza’s. Like Lukas and my grandfather and Pablo Picasso and Franz Kafka and Rene Descartes, and, just a little, like giraffe that once ate my hat at the zoo. The girl speaks.
You have to stop thinking like you have a body. You have to stop thinking there’s something to get back to.
DADDY, DADDY, LOOK what I made!
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
You can’t plan for something like this. It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.
HOW ABOUT YOU just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?
THE GIRL IN the striped sweater sighs. Her eyes glaze over.
Accessing image files. Accessing. Accessing. Searching public directories.
I feel sick. I feel sick. In my stomach, my lungs. I feel the sour bile, the shortness of breath. I’m logging off, Ground Control. You know what you are? You’re just… veal. A sad little cow living in a box who’s never going to be allowed to grow up. Or like that stupid Scottish dog sitting at your master’s grave looking poor-faced so someone will feed you.
The girl in the striped sweater leans against me. She kisses my cheek. She is crying a little. She crushes her files between us. She whispers:
You had sunflowers at your wedding, Desmond. You chose them. Eliza wanted irises.
Log off, Y/N?
THE SITA GRAND 7 satellite debris hurtles toward the Aspera Satellite. I am at a safe distance. I watch her rocket by. Her parts, her machinery, her secret workings, her lost wires, her silent antennae, her dark power cells. A river of gore below me. That is the dismembered body of Sita Grand 7. I used to try to talk to her, in the beginning, in the old days. She only ever answered: Inter-Satellite Communication Disabled. But it was something.
When I open my eyes, I see Sita’s frozen, shattered body speeding past like uncaught fish. When I close my eyes, Charlotte runs up to me, her face sticky with maple syrup, her brows knit up in deep concern. She puts her newspaper in my lap.
We got one wrong, she whispers. Charlotte is terrified.
I laugh so that she will know the big monkey is not afraid and thus little monkeys can go play. Not possible, kitten. Which one?
The thirteen-letter word for a terrific transformation. With Ms.
Metamorphosis.
She shakes her head in mute horror. Persona Abstraction for Bio-informatic Local Operator.
That has more than thirteen letters, Charlie.
Only in Base 10 mathematics. Silly Daddy. 8r34785489YYUV99700o77GFDXc5VIOLET, not 8r34785489YYUV99100o77GFDXc5VIOLET. Anyway, Sita Grand 7’s backup CPU is going to hit us in 3… 2… 1… brace for impact, Daddy! Hold on to your Thinky Chair!
A CPU, even one meant to control a news satellite, is only a little thing.
Persona Abstraction for Bio-informatic Local Operator.
Pablo.
It tears through my primary solar cell like Lukas biting the head off his sister’s giraffe-shaped pancake. When I open my eyes I see shards of black solar panels glittering away into space. When I close my eyes, Charlotte stares up at me from the floor of my study. She has all her dolls in her lap. One by one, she tears their arms off.
You’re bleeding, Daddy.
I look down. Blood has seeped into the corduroy of my Thinky Chair. My left arm is shattered. Shards of bone stick out like icebergs. Pain shears through every cell of my body. I burn in the dark. I scream. Charlotte runs for her mother.
Eliza! Lukas!
I can feel my broken arm, the pulse and pump of blood. I can feel the bent metal and exploded glass, the seeping wound on my starboard bow, the ruined power cell struggling to boot up, the pulse and pump of electricity. I can feel adrenaline pour into my bloodstream. I can feel pressure as I knot a necktie tourniquet below my elbow. My father’s necktie. The one with the little green diamonds on it.