Time of Leaders, Part 8 of 11

My hours at work were shorter, so I got home a little sooner than Jade did. One afternoon in late summer I was halfway home, cutting through the parking lot of an old strip mall when I heard sirens, which was extremely rare. They were from vehicles heading north down the main drag, then past me as I worked between houses that were marked abandoned, near the house where we lived. So I could see that there was nothing burning, at least nothing nearby, but the sirens continued, louder, joined by others coming east. If there were house fires, especially in isolated areas, they were usually just contained, since most of the buildings were empty. This was a sad, passable policy by default, and those prone to mayhem would always consider what Bob would think.

            But I realized that there were exceptions to all this, and the vehicles had all grouped heading east. Instead of going through the alley, I walked up the concrete steps and around the house. It was better to avoid the vehicles and not get caught up in all that. They went up the road just north and parallel to ours, going toward the old prison. I made it to the alley and could see a police car and fire department ambulance. I could have gone down the alley, but for some crazy reason I cut through yards instead. I wanted to keep those vehicles in sight once I realized where they were going. There were people in the houses on our block, we knew some, and knew of others. I sprinted through a yard, bouncing away from a dog that, luckily, was on a chain. Someone shouted. I didn’t care.

            I loped down the road in the direction the vehicles were going, now they were slowing; it definitely had something to do with the prison, and they joined other vehicles near the gate where there was a small, varied crowd. Locals, candidates, guards. I continued in their direction seemingly without the use of my legs. There were some injured on the ground, being tended to. Charlie was there on the periphery, but I could see no one in white. I stopped, stifling the impulse to get closer and get in the middle of all that, just trying to get a glimpse of a particular color. There was every color but white there. Then I saw a flash of white inside the walk-through gate of the prison. A mask was being lifted and I thought that it would be cruel if Jade were there on the ground dead or being treated in all that mess and someone would be waving her mask at me from inside the gate, but then I saw more white and her wavy hair side-parted, so it was her. Of course it would have been wrong, difficult and unnecessary to go to her but she was very safe.

            So I backed to the alley and took that route back home. Later, I realized how stupid it was for me to be sprinting through people’s yards just to keep the vehicles in sight; through that, gaining some sense of control.

            Jade was aloof when she made it home a little later than usual. I got a few details out of her. A group she had walked in had agreed to give up their weapons when they reached the road, but one then claimed that a knife he had wasn’t a weapon, and another took matters into his own hands and shot him, and wound up critically injured himself. She was already near the gate after having brought them in. She told me this and then went to the dining room to her stationary bike. 

           I’d been hearing faint music as I’d dressed in the mornings in the early fall. I thought that it was from a house nearby, but Jade had been tuning it in from a crank radio in the kitchen. She decided to leave it on when I joined her there one morning. It was a continuous recording of a broadcast from the past. The music was from forever ago, along with bright, chipper commercials that included some obvious humor that I didn’t understand. Commercials for cigarettes, cars that weighed tons, and life insurance. I grabbed an oatmeal cookie, munched and listened. Jade gave me an apologetic smile which I answered by clenching my buttocks tight and shimmying around. She stood up, took my arm and put it around her waist.

            “This is how they did it. We went over it in gym class once. Humor me.”

            We rocked back and forth, and I attempted to ‘lead’, following Jade. We went through a few actual steps. She didn’t mind me finishing my cookie in the meantime, so it wasn’t an unpleasant way to start the morning, getting crumbs in her hair. Textbook pictures flashed through my head of people in dance halls and nightclubs, having also come through hard times. Clothes fitting tight, mostly through the thickness of fabric. Taffeta and corsages. Sharp eyes and ruby lips caught in a flash. And the flowers; visually, lyrically, musically, and Jade was in some sort of trance. The thought flashed through my head that this wouldn’t be a bad way to take a nap. She would whisper things like: ‘We’ll always have Quarrytown’, and chuckle. I remembered when we went east to a retro department store and I toddled behind a woman as she entered and they spritzed her with perfume. Some of the music was like this. It was floral hell. Big bouquets. Red cherries and apple blossoms, rose gardens and then, oddly, cardiovascular disease. Perhaps a public service warning woven into the lyrics. Hearts breaking, hearts being torn, hearts that can’t be mended.

            But I got into the spirit of the music, and Jade was certainly there. I thought that she was all ready to make a baby. Although it was time to leave, we continued to dance to this love music that included warnings, which Jade seemed to disregard, teaching me mutely how to lead her in a spin.

            At work that morning, the computer blinked a few more times than usual and asked me if my day had been fine so far. If there were any problems. Then toward the end of lunch Matthew found me, and told me that I shouldn’t overreact to the surprise the computer had for me. It had pulled some of Jade’s DNA off me and come up with a picture of her face.

            “These networks can be smart-asses,” he told me, “but they mean well.”

            “I wanna see it.”

            “Okay, okay.” He rubbed his brush-cut back. “But you should be prepared. Definitely a sit-down moment. They don’t do it on request. We haven’t figured out what motivates them to do things like this.”

            I went into the fishbowl and the computer already had her picture up on the screen, in sepia. It was Jade, but without makeup, looking like she’d come out of the womb at age 23 without having had a care in the world. A message popped up at the bottom of the screen:

            “They told you.”

            The shop wag and the monitress had a good laugh on the other side of the glass, but I wasn’t paying much attention to them. The computer came up with another picture, where Jade had more of an expression like she’d had that morning.

            “That’s only in working memory, but it’s too personal,” the computer said. “I’ll delete it.”

            The original picture re-appeared and stayed. I noticed a slight difference, though. Eyeliner and faint freckles.

            “With the eyeliner, I presume that’s the look she chooses.”

            I shouted a bit at that point. Just a short, nonsense syllable. The crew on the other side of the glass was unusually quiet. I shook myself to attention, remembering that I had access to the keyboard.

            The computer asked: “Was that laughter?”

            “The sound I made? I don’t know what that was. How did you come up with the eyeliner?”

            “You still had a mote of it on your cheek. I know how it’s used.”

            The fishbowl gallery reacted as expected to that one. A chorus of ‘Awws’. The computer explained that it had found files on Jade but saw no need to look at them at that time. The images were a gift to me. Then the computer made sure that I understood that they weren’t generated for a reaction to study, but that it wanted to take some time for me to explain my reaction to them. Meanwhile, it was mayhem in the fishbowl. Matthew appeared, looking on almost proudly. The machine told me that a print of the original picture would be available at reception, and that Jade could visit anytime during business hours. I asked the machine how it was so sure that Jade would want to visit.

“Damn right I wanna see her!” Jade exclaimed over snail faux gras on cattail crackers later that afternoon. “This goes in the album.” She lifted the photo up by a bottom corner, stared and cocked her head. “She says that she didn’t open any files on me.”

            “That’s what she…it said.”

            “It looks like the ‘after’ photo in a botox ad. How exactly did she get it, then?”

            “We think she sniffed your dander off me and processed it.”

            She grimaced.

            “Matthew said that they don’t grow it or anything.”

            “Good,” she said. “That’s amazing. Of course, I don’t have dandruff.”

            “Of course,” I said. “I mean, I think it was just the one.”

            She placed the print on the table, munched, and looked at it. She chuckled and shook her head.

            “That’s what I’d look like if I grew up in a bubble with a stick of Revlon. Yep. I’d give my pituitary to meet this chick.”

Jade took that next morning off to visit my boss. She joked that if she came out with a freshly-sewn pink seam from chin -back to nape- I shouldn’t trust her in the least. Matthew was okay with the meeting since the computer had requested it. Jade did have to sign a consent form, though, and told Matthew that since the machine had already replicated her, the consent was retroactive.

            I waited in the reception area, and picked over old issues of magazines. I stood to check on her, taking a few steps into the center of the room to look through the glass. The receptionist grinned. The computer had Jade working the keyboard, so their meeting wasn’t entirely verbal. Later, Jade was laughing loud, and I had to take another look. The receptionist was all fluffed and snerky over that.

            After she came back from working that afternoon, Jade told me that she was right in assuming that the computer was a ‘she’. It had given her an eye exam. Jade was a bit near-sighted, like me. The glasses were delivered to the prison gate, and I had the cost deducted from my pay, along with the cost of books the computer assigned to her. Jade guessed that I had been given the task of receiving and delivering the books to her ‘because they may be iffy’. She came home the next day wearing the glasses, which had plastic frames, a small, oval lens design and three small rhinestones along each side.

            “They’re me,” Jade said. “Deb knows what she’s doin’.”

            “Deb?”

            “I named her. Like ‘em?”

            “You look like a teacher. All you need is a five-year service pin.”

            “I know! Today. I am a knower. I finally look as smart as I am.”

            “You do,” I told her. “I want to kiss your brain.” I followed her through the dining room back through the kitchen. “I want to french your brain and suck out your pituitary.”

            But she would have none of that. It was just the slow, sweet chase through the bathroom hallway, me telling her that I ‘Must Obey Deb’, past the bedroom and back through the living room. Jade raised her hands as she floated before me, seeming to enjoy the sensation, as I told her that ‘She Suspected Nothing’. I went back to the kitchen table, leaving her to continue being chased through her own momentum. She whipped past in her circular escape seconds later.

            “The floor seems so close! The leaflet said this would happen, but that you get used to it…”

            I got up and started to steam the afternoon manna.

“The walls are closing in!” I heard her say in the living room. Then the dining room… “I have to enjoy it while it lasts. Next best thing to Charlie’s homebrew.” And through the kitchen… “Watched pot never boils. Must obey Deb…”

            The water did boil, against all aphorisms, and Jade swooped in from the other direction. I flashed back to school days: She was a teacher come to tell me that fair wasn’t good enough. Performance anxiety returned. I chuckled, there at the camp stove, and she sat at the table.

            “You’re the funny looking one. Even from here you look two inches tall. She laughs, you know.”

            Jade was getting weirder and weirder. I asked her who.

            “Deb! You don’t know that she laughs? Her screen goes blank.”

            I gave her a blank stare.

            “And you work with her 25 hours a week. Artificial intelligence, my pituitary. She’s just plain intelligent. Laughs at my jokes.”