 
CORPUS CALLOSUM

by

Erika D. Price

Copyright 2013 Erika D. Price

Published by English Prime Press at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Image Copyright Erika D. Price, Licensed under an Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License. Photo Adapted from Images Copyright Jason Snyder and Functional Neurogenesis, Licensed under an Attribution 2.0 Generic License, Used with Permission

Read more at Erikadprice.tumblr.com

For Staci.

1.

Twenty-six hours in surgery, followed by fourteen hours for the upload. An hour or two between those, which Jeanette spent making all the decisions and filling out the forms. The process would have been quicker if Joey hadn't elected to be an organ donor. All that meat struck Jeanette as particularly useless, these days. Especially in Joey's case, since she was charred from the chest down.

Jeanette slapped the last waiting room magazine she hadn't read— Parenting Circle— against her legs. She'd never gone so long without moving before. It almost felt as if she were the one without a body. She considered this. Maybe if she sat still long enough she could be uploaded, too.

Her thighs felt heavy and immobile, like the sacks of liquid in their dad's old waterbed. Every spring, Jeanette and Joey used to drag the bulging, stagnant vessels into the yard and dump their contents into the lawn beneath the willow tree, then refill the bags from the hose and drop in a few chlorine tablets. It never helped with the mildew, those chlorine tablets. The bags always reminded them of body bags. Body bags, like where Joey's body would be placed, soon.

Jeanette's stomach lurched at the thought, and she threw her head back, bumping it for the fifty-seventh time on the waiting room's wooden border. She tried to picture something else. She imagined blood clots colonizing her calves, or her leaden thighs, and beating a hasty course into her brain or her heart. The instructions on Jeanette's birth control pills warned about blot clots, and cautioned against being sedentary for more than a few hours, but she couldn't bear to enjoy bodily liberation while Joey was a still mass.

"Not for long," she whispered. "Not for long, not for long."

It felt like a prayer or an incantation, but it was a fact. The upload had been paid for. There was a certainty to Joey's immortality, the kind only a market transaction, not prayer, could guarantee. You couldn't sue God like you could a corporation. Jeanette kept repeating her mantra anyway. There was a frazzled-looking mother and two kids on the other side of the waiting room, but Jeanette didn't care about their opinions anymore. She'd been alone in the room too long. Now it made no difference.

The Parenting Circle magazine was full of advertisements for cheap shoes and synthetic food. The featured article was about a newly FDA-approved gastric bypass procedure for toddlers. It was followed by a one-page ad for pre-teen Electroconvulsive Therapy. The ECT center looked like the inside of a Claire's, all pale purple, mirrored walls, and sparkles.

Jeanette tried to make the magazine last as long as possible— she read all the bylines, the contents, the disclaimers— but still consumed all the text and images before the hour was out. Sighing, she opened the folder on her lap, which the surgeon had given her, and began reading the FAQ's she'd been avoiding all day.

BrightBox by LifeMedia™: Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long does BrightBox uploading take?

A: Uploading takes between sixteen and twenty-four hours, depending on the memory capacity of the client and the comprehensiveness of their upload package.

Q: Will my loved one have their natural voice?

A: Only if they have completed the full voice-training software protocol prior to death. If we have a partial or damaged voice sample from your loved one, we will augment it with our SmartTalk voice reconstruction software. LifeMedia cannot guarantee satisfaction with voice fidelity at this stage of product development.

Q: Will my loved one's personality be affected?

A: Human psychology is fluid, and a person's attitudes and behaviors are strongly influenced by their surroundings and their situation. Expect your loved one to seem slightly "out-of-sorts" in the first few weeks following their uploading to BrightBox. However, they will remain biopsychologically identical to the person they were in life, particularly if they were uploaded via a comprehensive or deluxe package.

Q: Does the upload to BrightBox damage any memories?

A: The fidelity of a BrightBox upload is limited by only two things: the state of the client's brain at the time of upload, and the size of the BrightBox's hard drive. If you are concerned that your loved one has more memories than the standard BrightBox's 1 petabyte, consider upgrading.

Q: Will my loved one be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel physical sensations?

A: Regarding the first two: yes, the BrightBox is fully wired with cameras, microphones, speakers, and sophisticated processing equipment at or near the capability of human sensation. As for the other three: Yes, but not at the level of detail or intensity that a physical human can.

Q: Why isn't there a BrightBox chassis that allows the uploaded client to move?

A: Unfortunately, fine and gross motor function have proven the most difficult brain functions to map onto BrightBox (other than automatic physiological functions, such as arousal). We are currently beta-testing a BrightBox that allows the client to walk, sit, climb stairs, shake hands, and perhaps even dance!

Q: Do any clients regret being uploaded to BrightBox?

A: Extensive psychological research has demonstrated that BrightBox clients regret/resent their circumstances at a rate comparable to the general living population. Life is fraught with worry, depression, and regret, and life in a BrightBox is apparently no exception!

Q: How do I take care of a loved one who has been uploaded to BrightBox?

A: With love! Treat the loved one the same as you did when they had a body. Take them with you to lunch, on shopping trips, to parties, or for a walk in the park. Play word games and watch television, or put on an audio book (or read aloud)! Make sure to move your loved one several times a day, and to change the lighting and music in their surroundings frequently to avoid boredom and frustration.

Q: How long does a BrightBox chassis last, and what happens if it breaks?

A: As long as LifeMedia's usage guidelines are followed exactly and the warranty is not voided, a BrightBox should function smoothly for at least seventy years. If a client or their family notices errors in the system or the client's psychology, the client may be uploaded to a new BrightBox for a nominal fee.

Jeanette put the sheet of paper back in the folder. Her eyes were burning from strain, so she pushed them into their sockets with the pads of her fingers until the pain was different. For the first time in perhaps a day, she let herself peek at the digital clock above the nurse's stand. It was brick-shaped and a bright, sterile white, not unlike Joey's soon-to-be- body. 4:38am.

Jeanette leaned her head back on the border and threw mittens over her eyes, pleading for sleep. She drifted off to visions of her and Joey as young girls, running around the above-ground pool in their bikinis, throwing clumps of grass. Jeanette saw Joey's knobby knees and shoulders, her hair slick and lightened by sunlight and chlorine, stuck to the sides of her face, never to be seen again.

A few hours later Jeanette's neck and legs were stiff and began to complain enough to nearly wake her. She was pulled into full consciousness by the squeak of a surgeon's Crocs on the tile, and a crisp professional voice saying, "Miss Porter? Ma'am? Your sister's ready."

2.

The surgeon led Jeanette through a corridor and down a half-flight of stairs, swinging a metal clipboard in his left hand. The lights were dimmer than she expected. Her calves and knees ached and stung from the hours she'd spent sitting still in the waiting room. She had to nearly run to keep up with him, stumbling all the way.

He was brisk and youthful-looking, in powder blue scrubs. He was white and his hair was chestnut and cropped close. When Jeanette had seen him before, sitting in the waiting room, she'd been too stricken with grief and panic to notice anything about him. He turned another corner, Crocs squishing. She dashed behind him in flats that cut into her bare heels.

"Did everything go okay? The transfer?" She panted.

"Smooth sailing, I hear. Surgery is a bit pissed because her kidneys couldn't be salvaged. They were kinda banking on them."

He turned back to her. "You seem much better," he said.

"I. Yeah. Well it's still such a rush, you know?"

He smiled – tightly, tentatively. "This is my favorite part of the process."

"I would've thought that saving, you know, actual lives would be."

He pushed open the set of swinging doors leading to the next corridor. "What? Oh! No, I'm not a doctor."

He flicked at the tag hanging from his scrubs. Jeanette leaned in to see. Steven Milton, LifeMedia Surgical Sales Associate, North Coast District.

"Oh! Ohhhh."

"Actually, let me give you my card," he said, reaching into his blue drawstring pants. Jeanette pocketed the card without looking. "Call me if you or, um, the other Miss Porter— Josephine— have any problems whatsoever."

"Joey," Jeanette corrected. "And certainly. Thank you, so much."

They stopped in front of a door that was windowless and streaked with water damage. The corridor was narrow, quiet, and unpeopled. To Jeanette, it looked like they were facing the entrance to a broom closet. Milton gestured at it, and she gripped the knob carefully.

"This is it? She's— it's— she's in there?"

"Whenever you're ready," he said flatly. He turned on his heels, but then stopped. "Oh, wait, I need you to sign the discharge paperwork!"

He thrust a metal clipboard with carbon-copy paper into her hands. Hurriedly, Jeanette dropped her bag and the LifeMedia folder and scrawled across the pages. Her hands were cool and moist, and the ground seemed to shake below her soles. Everything in her field of vision was fuzzy, except for the door. Name. Date. Next of Kin. Payment Plan. Emergency Contacts (she listed their father and their cousin).

She flipped through the pages, scribbling her name where Milton had made an X, and checking all that applied. Address. Employer. Bank. Co-Signer? No. She turned another page: the death certificate.

"That's just the application for the death certificate," Milton said, tapping the sheet. "The real thing will come in the mail in six to twenty-four weeks. Also, you should indicate if you want an autopsy."

Jeanette let her arms drop to her sides, smacking the clipboard against her legs. She blew her bangs from her face.

"I think we all know how she died," she said.

Milton shifted his weight.

"I'm sorry. Some people want them anyway."

His eyes were blue and shallow like an antique doll's. It seemed like Jeanette could stare into his face all morning and never see more than a tidy, pale corporate void. She saw her own reflection in him, one dark twin in each eye. Finally, she relented and returned to the paperwork, checking "No" on the autopsy form.

She handed it to him. "She burned to death."

"I. Yup. I know." Then he chuckled softly. "I'm sorry. I just never know what to say in this moment. 'I'm sorry for your loss?' Or 'Congratulations?' "

He rapped his fingers on the clipboard.

"You say nothing," Jeanette said. "Nothing's happened. There is no loss. Just a really, really, exceedingly expensive procedure."

She leaned into the doorway, and turned the knob. Milton lifted her bag and folder off the floor, and handed both to her with a stiff nod.

"Thank you," Jeanette said, darting her eyes away. She entered the room.

It was an office. Windowless, dark, dry, with a dusty smell. Jeanette clicked on the light and stepped forward, still feeling oppressively heavy, her breath short and hesitant.

The box was sitting on the middle of a rusty metal desk covered with fake wood laminate. It was about five inches tall and five inches across, a bright, sanitized white silicone with no seams or visible buttons. It looked impossibly clean and fresh sitting in a room full of old furniture and janitor's buckets. It was bigger, too, than Jeanette had anticipated, and it was shaped like an octagonal prism. She didn't expect that. She had heard the word 'box' and pictured a perfect cube—

"You're catching flies," the box said. It glowed when the sound emanated from it; a strong, bright blue light shone from inside, under the white silicone. The voice was laced with static, but recognizable.

Jeanette jammed her mouth shut. Catching flies was what their paternal grandmother called open-mouthed gawking. She used to rap them on the chin with a wooden spoon when they did it. Jeanette held her chin now, more as an acknowledgment of the message than to keep it shut. The box could see her.

"Sorry," she whispered like a child.

"That's better," the box said, glowing brightly. "They told me you've been sitting here for days. Your morning breath by now has got to be a-fucking-trocious—"

"JOEY!" Jeanette sobbed, running forward.

She bent over the table and pressed her face against the soft plastic, ran her fingers across the corners on the prism's top, and cried. The blue light shone dimly. Her chest heaved.

"I thought you were I thought you were dead, and they called me, and they told me what happened and I was so scared— so scared. And you! Here you are! You were dead, you were dead!"

She picked the box up and held it to her chest and her face, crying and blathering senselessly, smelling the synthetic odor of the plastic, feeling the receptors on the box's base and letting its rounded edges dig into the skin on her chest and neck. She kissed the box then, wet and open-mouthed, with abandon, wailing loud enough to be heard down the hall, all the way to the nurse's station and the waiting room where she had willed away the days, biting her nails and smacking her head against the wall, thinking her sister was as good as dead.

But she wasn't! She was here! She was smaller, and more compact, and denser, but Jeanette held her, alive, in her hands! The cool glowing hunk of plastic held a life! Everything terrible that had happened was, at once, reversed.

"Your breath is seriously fetid," the box said.

Jeanette pulled back. She wiped her nose with the crook of her arm. "Sorry," she said. Then, excitedly: "You can SMELL!"

"I can smell!" the box chirped. "And you smell like Crest Brush-ups and Cool Ranch Doritos."

They both laughed. Joey's laugh was crunchy with static, but underneath the white noise it was normal: a deep, casual-sounding peal that came out of the box and reverberated against the tile. Jeanette giggled and swayed back and forth with the box cradled in her arms. When their laughter subsided she held the box at eye level again, inspecting it for the first time.

"Oh my God Joey, are you okay?"

The box was silent at first. Jeanette's pulse quickened, fearing the worst and tilting the box slightly to check the bottom for a reset key. Before she had the opportunity to fully panic, Joey spoke.

"I'm okay. Little stunned. It feels fine though."

"Does it hurt? Does it feel like anything?"

"Like the most natural thing in the world. Like it was always this way."

"Joey, Joey..," she hugged the box tight and rocked on her heels. "It must have been so terrible, so scary; you must have thought it was over-"

"As soon as the roof collapsed I thought I was done. It went so quick, Jean. I knew so quickly I was dying that I didn't need to process it. There wasn't time to think about what it meant, or how I felt about it, or whether it was what I wanted-"

"Did you wake up?"

The box dimmed. "Hmm. I remember surgery, but I was so anesthetized that it was like... the pain was far away...It just went in and out. I saw what was happening, and I felt it, then I didn't. Then I woke up and I had all these tubes in my neck and mouth. And they were scrubbing the dead skin off, with these brushes—"

"Shhh," Jeanette said. She patted the box. "Shhh it's over now. Forget I asked."

"Hold on, let me think. I remember them telling me that you bought me a new body. The air was so hot...my lungs were wet and dry at the same time, it was like sucking exhaust off a tailpipe. They said I was going to die but you were there, weren't you?"

The living sister gulped. "They didn't let me in. There wasn't any time, Joey."

"But then I was told...Good news. You have a new body. Your sister paid for it, and you're going to live forever. Everything will be fine soon, just go back to sleep. How did they tell me that? I was dead. How did they tell me?"

"Shh. They probably just... uploaded the idea when they put you in the box. Hey, did they explain how everything works to you?"

Jeanette knelt and pulled the BrightBox FAQ from her folder. Uncertain, she held the sheet up to the box like a child showing her teacher a drawing.

"I know all about it," Joey said. "Actually, I think that sheet is out of date. Headquarters uploaded a revised version 1.5 hours ago, with some additional questions."

Jeanette dropped the paper. "How do you know that?"

The box lit up. An image rippled under the surface of the case, cast in neon blue light. It was a series of curving bars. Just as quickly as it appeared, the image dissipated, like the answer on a magic 8-ball slipping back into the murky fluid. But Jeanette had seen the symbol long enough to comprehend it.

"You have wi-fi?"

"Unlimited network data, too. You should know, it was in the service agreement you signed." The network service provider's logo washed over Joey's gleaming surface, then receded.

"I was a little distracted when I filled that stuff out. As you can imagine. So! You know, like, everything?"

The light dimmed. "Everything online and in my hard drive. Well, memory is still fallible." She paused. "Human memory, I mean, not computer memory."

"What's it like?" Jeanette asked. "You're like a genius savant now."

"I'm sure it won't be any different from when we were kids," Joey said. Her sister frowned down at the box, perplexed. "I always knew better and you never listened."

Jeanette laughed and clutched the box. "It's you, it sounds just like you. You're actually okay. You're here. Oh my God."

They rocked back and forth in the office's dim light, Joey's glow casting a halo of blue on Jeanette's face. The box was shockingly heavy for its size, but Jeanette didn't let it bother her. She rocked, and murmured, and nearly fell asleep standing up, like a horse. It was Joey who broke the silence.

"Let's get out here."

Jeanette swayed. The box's corner was making a red imprint in her cheek. Her legs were tired. Her head thudded from all the crying and sleepless nights. She wanted to ask Joey, why did moving matter? They were together. To spend even a moment fussing over transit or waiting for a cab in the snow would be a waste. It would pull themselves out of rapturous awareness of their good fortune.

She didn't want to go home and clean the dishes. She didn't want to fuss over the mail, the rent, the unsettled portion of the LifeMedia bill, or her dwindling checking account. She didn't want to take a pain pill for her growing migraine, or eat, or clip the toenails that were scraping against the insides of her shoes. She didn't want to go back to petty bodily concerns ever again. The box was so beautiful.

"Let's get out of here. Please," Joey said, and there was rising tension in her voice.

In life, Joey used to strain her voice like that when she was feeling cornered. She hated being told what to do. It used to signal that she was close to storming off.

"Shh, it's fine," Jeanette said. "Baby. It's over. It must have been terrible, it must have been so horrible, I can't even...It was terrible out here too. I kept thinking, I'm never going to talk to her again, I'm never going to have her around. It was like, what do I do now? But then they told me about the procedure. And now we don't have to worry, okay?"

Jeanette pressed her lips to the box. It occurred to her that dying in this place must have been traumatic. It was maddening enough as a bystander to the carnage, powerless on the other side of the swinging doors.

"I want to get out of here, Jean," Joey said again.

"Okay," Jeanette patted the box. "Let's go home."

3.

In the cab, Jeanette held Joey's BrightBox in her lap, stroking the sides like a cat. She stared down at it the whole drive, chatting amiably, but Joey didn't reply.

"I just can't wait to take a shower," Jeanette said with a sigh, bringing her hand up to her greasy hair. "Oh, shit, that was rude to say."

"No skin off my teeth," said the cab driver. He had a rich Somali accent and wore a porkpie cap that flapped when he spoke. "I'm close to my quota for the day, then I can shower too."

She pursed her lips. "What do you want to do when you get home?" she asked the box, lifting it to her mouth.

"Probably do some sit-ups, maybe fire up the View-Play," the driver said, not comprehending. "I used to run outside, but it's getting too dangerous out there."

"Oh yeah?"

"So I fire up the View-Play. I can run along the Great Wall. Or across the bottom of the sea. Or the Antarctic tundra! Keeps me off these streets...I'm telling you, I've seen everything this town has to show a person, and a thousand times over too. And it's getting worse. All these young guys out there playing with their guns, and the young white boys in uniform playing with their guns, too— they're no different. These young guys, heads all exploding full of testosterone, don't matter what side of the law they're on."

"Yeah. It's a shame," Jeanette said.

The driver took the long route through the park by her request. She lifted Joey up and tilted the box's surface toward the window. The bare trees flashed by, their branches robed in fresh snow. It must have fallen while they'd been in the hospital. Hidden in the woods there were deer, and foxes, and the cardinals that this and every other Midwestern state called their state bird, but Jeanette couldn't see any of them in the early morning haze.

"How are you doing?" she asked Joey.

"I'm okay," the cabbie cut in, again. "Anxious all the time. I'm scared to go out at night now because I'm a family man! It didn't use to scare me! I have to drive all day and into the night, bustin' my ass, getting all fat like a pumpkin . Scare to go out, scared to keep enough bread on the table, scared of what all this work is doing to me...," he made a wide turn. "I don't want to die of a heart attack and never meet my grandbabies. Never bounce them on my knee. I don't want to sit still all day in this tiny car and become a tub of lard."

"There are worse things," Jeanette said.

"So anyway, yeah, I run on the View-Play, you ever try it?"

"I think so, at parties. It's cute," Jeanette said distractedly.

"I wish I could run in fresh air. But it's bad out there."

"I think it's worth the risk," Joey piped up. "Novelty."

The driver must have thought it was Jeanette speaking again, for all he said was, "Yup. You are probably on point with that. I ask myself sometimes: if you sit still and quiet all the time, are you even alive?"

"Yes," Jeanette said. "Of course. You're thinking."

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm even doing that," he said.

"Well, it all depends on how you define life," Joey said, her light flashing.

"Oh, it sounds like you're a bit conflicted on it too! Glad to hear I'm not the only one like this— afraid to die, afraid to live. Like my driving instructor said before I got my commercial license: Hesitation Kills."

"Well," Jeanette said, "technology can do a lot to fix that, I think—death isn't so permanent—"

"What are you talking about? Cryogenic shit?"

Jeanette rose in her seat. She wanted to clarify things. Here was Lazarus sitting on her lap! The miracle of it needed to be acknowledged. Maybe it would give the cabbie courage to see how life could be prolonged. But before she could speak she noticed the top of Joey's box flickering with a bright yellow X, so she stopped.

The driver parked at the door of Jeanette's apartment and ran to the passenger's side to let them out.

"Thank you! You didn't have to do that!" Jeanette slipped cash into his hand and stood with Joey tucked under her arm.

"Please, any excuse to stretch!" he replied.

Then he noticed the BrightBox and his grin went slack.

"Oh. I'm sorry, miss. I didn't realize..," he trailed off, backing away and walking to the driver's seat.

"What? No, it's fine-"

He looked at her warily. "I'm sorry for your loss." His ducked into his car, pulled out, and dissipated into the passing traffic.

Jeanette looked down at the BrightBox, puzzled. The lights had gone off. In the dim twilight it looked like it was made of ordinary white cardboard or paper. She rapped on the side of it.

"Joey? JOEY! Are you in there?"

"Calm down, I'm fine," her sister said, the color rising back to her surface.

"Ohhhh thank God I was so worried..,"

"If there is an error, the box will turn black," Joey said.

"Okay." Jeanette pulled her face away. She looked down the street. "What was all that about?"

"He thought I was a box of cremains."

Jeanette slapped herself in the forehead. "Oh. Oh! Haha, poor guy! But I was trying to tell him! Why didn't you let me talk to him about it?"

"I didn't want to explain it! Jesus, Jean, do you think I want to spend all my time in this thing acting like a Furby for people to play with?"

"I, no, of course not. I just thought-"

"I don't feel like talking to every rando on the street about my pricey immortality, okay? This is all a lot to take in."

"Okay."

They climbed the stairs to Jeanette's fourth-story flat, where the heat from the radiator was blazing and the TV droned on at full blast. There was a cup overturned and coffee leaked into a stack of books, shoes strewn about awkwardly, a blanket dangling from the couch to the floor—all the marks of someone having left very quickly. Jeanette sat Joey on the end table by the door and ran to turn the TV off. She tripped over a pile of clothes on the way over and again on the way back.

Holding a half-drunk bottle of Vitamin Water in a clenched fist, Jeanette sipped and said, "I just think, maybe it would have made him happy to hear about you. I mean, it's a miracle."

"No," Joey snapped. "Think for a second! His family could never, ever afford a procedure like this."

"Okay, maybe that's how he'd see it. But he doesn't need it yet; in a few years it'll be way cheaper."

"He was saying he has to drive the cab all day and night to feed his family, Jeanette, do you really think he could afford consciousness uploading? Do you think he even has health insurance? And even more than that, do you think his family could afford to just babysit him in that state?"

"Okayyy." Jeanette flopped on the couch and stared at the BrightBox. "But what am I supposed to do, keep you a secret from everybody? I can't just keep you cooped up in here and never talk to anybody about it."

"No of course not," Joey said testily. "I just...it's weird, and people are going to be shitty about it. You should let me decide how to handle people, okay?"

"Alright." She sipped and waved her hand in the air. "Can you see me from here?"

"Yes, I have cameras on every side. If you can see me, I can see you."

"Alright, sheesh."

Jeanette tilted her head to the side, letting brown curls fall into her face. Her hair was heavy with oil and dirt, but the smell was comforting in its familiarity. There was only the slightest difference between her and Joey's smells, but it was distinct enough that each always knew when the other had borrowed clothes. Jeanette never minded it, but Joey hated sharing.

Still, it hadn't been a major point of contention since the last time they'd lived together, back in high school. Jeanette grinned to herself; She was excited for them to be roommates again, especially now that they were grown and more mature about such things.

Jeanette rolled on her back and consulted the ceiling. It was almost low enough for her to reach up and touch with her feet.

"I hope that someday soon, everybody has the ability to upload themselves and their loved ones, and can live on, and on, and on..." She paddled her feet in the air, kicking her shoes off. "Don't you?"

Joey said, "I hope everyone has the choice."

4.

Jeanette lived in a one-bedroom flat in an old brownstone a few minutes north of the city. She kept it stiflingly warm by cranking the radiators, blasting the oven, and running all the faucets with scalding water. The rooms were crammed with thrift store rugs and used hotel furniture she'd bought on the cheap at liquidation sales.

She decorated the walls with the detritus of her childhood, teenage, and college years: a My Little Pony poster taped here, a column of movie tickets taped there; an amputee Troll doll on the mantle, a Holly Golightly poster by the door, with the eyes blackened out and the mouth of a snarling zombie pasted over Audrey Hepburn's smirking lips.

Bras and Spanx hung from doorknobs and off the sides of chairs. Discount paperbacks by McEwan, Didion, Bronte, and Erdrich sat in impromptu stacks, with stagnant cups of cocoa or tea on top. Music was always escaping from tinny speakers and blending with the hiss of the heater, the clunky hum of the refrigerator, and the banging and squeaking of the front gate outside.

Jeanette cleared a space for Joey at her desk in the bedroom. It had the best natural light. She pushed the desk to the window and swept the papers and dried-out pens away. She threw her broken printer out and dusted the shelves. Joey's charging station was placed on top of the desk, facing the window, with the cord threaded down the side, so Joey would have a nice view of the trees and the street below while she powered up.

A coffee table in the den was also liberated from old magazines, dirty saucers, wickless candles, ash, and Pez dust. The kitchen counter was cleared off. Jeanette bought an air gun and cleared dust from her keyboard, her speakers, her television, the key holes, the Venetian blinds, and the dark passages between the floor's wooden boards. She lit several varieties of incense and quizzed Joey on the flavors.

"Pear," Joey would say. Or, "Patchouli. Apple crisp."

"Which do you like best?"

"I don't care. It's your house."

"No no," Jeanette would say, dipping the incense stick in water. "No no, this is our home. I want you to have everything you want. You live here."

Jeanette emptied a closet in the hall, to pack in Joey's old stuff. Joey had lived in a studio in the suburbs. She didn't have many possessions worth keeping— some photo albums, a tie-dyed beanbag chair, a two-foot-tall glass bong, old Gil Scot Heron and Staples Singers records, books by Salinger, Joyce, Pynchon, McCarthy, and Bellow, a few salvageable outfits— but her sister took a conservative approach.

"Maybe someday you'll want this," Jeanette said, as she shoved each object into the bare closet.

"What will I need a Shake Weight for?" Joey asked. "I don't have arms."

"Maybe someday you will."

Jeanette merged their clothing. She scanned Joey's old photographs and copied home movies saved on Joey's laptop. She drove to the suburbs, to one of the state's few remaining DVD rental stores, and brought back copies of the films they had enjoyed as little girls. Films like The Last Unicorn, Oliver & Company, and The Black Cauldron. She filled the apartment with the smell of burnt popcorn and held the bowl close to her sister's Brightbox.

"You liked these movies," Joey said when she saw the selection. " I didn't like these movies."

"Sure you did! We loved these movies. What, you think you're too cool?" she threw a kernel at the box; It bounced off Joey and rolled under the couch.

"I liked The Secret of NIMH. All Dogs Go To Heaven. The original Land Before Time, those kinds of movies."

"Psh, all those movies are about death. It's too depressing right now."

"They're not about death. All Dogs Go to Heaven is about cheating death—cheating heaven, really! It's about choosing a flawed, tenuous life over an eternal, delusional paradise where suffering is ignored."

"So it's about existentialism! That's the same as death!"

"-And NIMH is about biomedical engineering, and the inhumanity of humanity's attempts to improve itself. Or, like, the costs of artificial self-improvement. It's the biologically un-altered mouse, after all, who saves the day."

Jeanette muted the TV. "Are you mad at me for throwing popcorn at you?"

"No. I appreciate your trying to make this normal."

"Thank you. And those are good movies. I'll get some of them next time, alright?"

Joey dimmed, to take the glare off the TV. They watched The Last Unicorn, Jeanette chewing popcorn with an open mouth. Near the end of the film she began to cry, and her arms flung forward to pull Joey from the table and into her lap. She hugged the BrightBox through her blanket.

When the movie was over Jeanette stared blankly at the screen and let the credits roll to the end. Her eyes were puffy and streaked with red, and there was a tuft of hair in her mouth. Music tinkled out of the BrightBox. Quiet, playful harp music, followed by a woman's hoarse voice. Jeanette jumped, startled.

"Horizon, rising, up to meet the purple dawn. Dust demon, screaming, bring an eagle to carry me home. For in my heart I carry such a heavy load. Here I am, on man's road. Walking man's road, oh! Walking man's road..."

"What is that?"

"It's Joanna Newsom's cover of the song from the movie," Joey said, her staticy voice momentarily overdubbing the track. "Can't you tell?"

Jeanette wrinkled her nose. "Her voice. I don't like it. It's unsettling."

"Here I am, on man's road..."

"I like it," Joey said over the track. "This is a rare live cut."

"...Why don't we just stream movies off of you?"

"Walking man's road, oh! Walking man's road..."

Joey darkened. "I don't have a monitor, idiot."

"I'm sure you can search the torrent sites faster than I can on a computer."

"I'm hungry, and I'm weary, but I cannot lay me down. And the rain falls...dreary, and there's no comfort that I have found. It'll be such a long time till I find my abode...here I am, on man's road..."

"Does it feel to you like you're singing?" Jeanette asked. "Or...thinking it?"

"Neither. It's just playing."

"...it waits in silence for the night to explode. Here I am on man's road..."

"Could you sing along with it?"

Joey turned the sound down. Her voice chirped over the sounds of the harp. "Walking man's road, oh! Walking man's road..."

Jeanette joined in. Joey's voice had always been the prettier one. There was more ease in it. Now it was under a layer of faint white noise at all times, and corrupted, but it seemed to Jeanette that if she could only peel a layer back, she'd hear the real thing again.

"Walking man's road-" Jeanette strained to sing, but then the song ended. Joanna Newsom thanked the crowd in a childish, self-pleased little voice, and there was a din of applause, and the harp plunked out. She'd never been good at sensing when a chorus was going to stop repeating.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Joey said.

"It's too bad you couldn't give a voice sample to LifeMedia before you died," Jeanette said. She stood and picked up the bowl of popcorn. "Of course, you weren't planning on dying, I guess."

Now more than ever Jeanette was aware of the mechanical artifice in her sister's new voice. It was just a little too even and flat, a little too subdued.

"I wasn't planning on getting crammed inside an alarm clock, either," Joey said when Jeanette crossed into the kitchen.

Jeanette flung the bowl back at the den. It knocked a glass of vodka seltzer on its side. Bubbles sprayed across the BrightBox. Joey's light flashed yellow, then red, and then shut off. Popcorn went sailing everywhere. Jeanette was picking it out of the rugs and couch cushions for two weeks afterward.

5.

Their father lived in St. Louis in a ranch-style house under a clutch of willow trees that were constantly shedding limbs onto his roof. When he first heard Joey had died, he demanded a funeral. Jeanette kept having to call the funeral home and cancel his plans behind his back, but this only redoubled his efforts.

"Come and visit," she begged. "Come and see her. You'll understand."

He didn't believe it. He didn't comprehend it. He pictured it like life support, or like Joey's brain was floating in a jar. If she couldn't call him, he complained, she wasn't alive in any manner to speak of. He told his living daughter he wanted closure. That they both needed a ceremony, and a burial.

"Just come," she said. "When you talk to her, you'll get it. Don't make us wait till next Christmas."

So their father took a day off work and drove to the city. Jeanette led him to the kitchen and poured a cup of herbal tea that made his mouth pucker. She had just gotten her hair relaxed, and was adamant that she needed a lot of fluids to keep it from drying out. His other daughter was, as best he could understand, trapped in a clock radio on the corner of the table.

"Was the drive alright?" Joey said.

The father clinked his glass on the saucer Jeanette had given him. "It was fine. Snowy, people scootin' around on the ice like jackasses."

He stared out the kitchen window, though the only view it afforded was of the neighboring building's brick wall.

Jeanette turned from the sink, looking worried. "Dad, something wrong?"

"Jose," he began, "what did you do for the science fair in second grade?"

"Buffalo."

"Nah, you did medieval castles."

"I did castles," Jeanette said, wrapping her hair in a dishtowel. Both girls had inherited their father's dark skin and tight, curly hair. Joey had always gone natural while Jeanette had dabbled in a variety of colors, textures, and cuts, all of which she ultimately loathed.

Their father rubbed his chin and looked back and forth from one daughter to the other. His face was a minefield of ingrown stubble. "Jose, what happened to that boy you used to see?"

Jeanette picked the tea kettle up and slammed it on the range. "Um. Dad."

"It's fine. I found him eating a girl out in the stairwell of our building."

He pushed away from the table.

"Do you know what that means?" Jeanette asked. "It's slang for-"

"I got it!" He raised his hands as if warding off a blow. "I just...always wondered. Shit. He was a nice fella, I thought."

"He wanted litters and litters of kids," Joey said flatly. "It wasn't going to work anyway."

"Well," he said, "that's a moot point."

He rose, and paced between the kitchen and the living room. He slapped his hands together contemplatively. Jeanette looked at Joey and could only assume that Joey was gazing back. She was probably looking at everything, actually.

He stood then, on the precipice between the two rooms. "You'll never have kids now," he said, as if clarification was needed.

"Yeah, Dad. I'm dead."

He threw his hands up again and craned his head back so far Jeanette thought she'd have to run up and catch him.

"She's dead! What did I tell you Jean-bean! She said it herself!"

He still wanted a funeral. Jeanette pulled him back to the table, refilled his teacup, and fiddled in the silverware drawer noisily. Joey watched him approach her from behind and squeeze her shoulders, making her jump and tense up; it was an old trick he'd used to get them off the computer when they were younger. Jeanette slumped, then turned.

"I'm sorry," he mouthed.

She shook her head. "It's fine. I mean it's not fine, but yeah. Just try to understand."

They spent the rest of the night conversing in the kitchen, their father firing questions at Joey in an attempt to demonstrate she wasn't really herself. He asked her about memories old and new. He pried, in detail, into her old job, past boyfriends, her friends, her habits. He even asked if the fire had been an accident. He asked for her appraisals of films and songs, and her opinions on political matters they hadn't candidly discussed since Joey had shaved her head and claimed to be a Black Nationalist Muslima-agnostic Marxist in eighth grade, whatever that was. Jeanette watched them talk, her lips pressed shut.

He listened while Joey delivered her answers, an implacable expression on his face. He didn't pick up the box. He just leaned forward and stared deeply into its glowing white abyss.

"There is no way to know for sure," he said, with resolve after his fourth cup.

"Know what?" said Jeanette.

He was sweaty and exasperated. "If she's really in there, or if this is just a speaker playing transcripts, pulling stuff from her memory. With no life in it, I mean."

"I can respond to the environment and produce novel responses," Joey said. "Ones that would be indistinguishable from responses I would have made when I was alive. But only you can determine your own threshold of proof, here."

"What do you mean?" He looked at Jeanette when he asked it. Talking to the box and treating it like a person was still tripping him up.

Joey began to explain the Turing Test to him, but after a few sentences Jeanette nudged her and said she wasn't doing herself any favors. The father rubbed at his eyes and asked for something stronger to drink, but all the girls had on hand was Joey's old weed. Jeanette welcomed the change.

They smoked and played UNO. Then played Trivial Pursuit. Joey shut off her wi-fi to make the competition fair. Their father slumped in his chair and gave gruff answers in a low voice; he was always correct. It was an old deck of questions, and only he understood all the historical and pop cultural references. Winning seemed to provide him a small comfort, and as the game wore on he became more gracious, moving Joey's piece for her and rolling the dice.

Jeanette read from the cards and passed the joint pack and forth. She got thirstier and thirstier as the night wore on; when she couldn't take it any longer she bounced up from her seat and ran to the sink to make Kool-Aid, which she sipped from the pitcher's spout until red water ran down her chin and Joey began to snicker.

"You girls have always been the best of friends," the father said.

The liquid was trickling down Jeanette's chin as she listened and fumbled with the cards.

"It's my proudest accomplishment. I figured, hell, even if there were skills I didn't give you, confidence I didn't give you, even if I didn't raise you right all the time, I gave each of you a companion for life."

He stared meaningfully at Jeanette, eyes dewy. "Most people don't have that," he finished.

Their mother had left when they were still mall. Their father hadn't dated, not ever, as far as they knew, and he certainly didn't have a habit of bringing friends around when they were little girls. He hadn't known how to handle their friends either.

Jeanette picked Joey up; the pitcher of Kool-Aid still dangling from one hand. "I'm so glad I didn't lose you."

Both the father and the living daughter's eyes were streaked with red, their irises taking on the watery jewel-toned hues of the baked. Joey watched them, one camera fixed on her sister's slobbering mouth, another studying the intricacies in the folds of their father's eyes. The arrangement of the folds suggested tears. Normally, the father didn't cry, unless he was watching a film where a loyal animal companion was harmed in the process of being noble.

"I owe you," Joey said to her sister. "I can't pay it back, what you did. Literally, figuratively, monetarily, whatever."

That was when their father's eyes narrowed and he asked how much the procedure cost. All the regrettable questions came after that. Soon Jeanette was explaining how Joey's body had ignited, the exact extent of the damage to Joey's face, torso, lungs, and other internal organs; the intricacies of the operations, the infections and sepsis that had set in, the blood poisoning, the agonizing moment when she flat-lined, the telescoping bleak eternity Jeanette spent curled up in a waiting room chair digging her nails into her palms to keep from fainting. The bills, they debt—she said it was nothing. The relief she'd found as soon as that boy had told her about the procedure—it was worth any price. It was worth two lives, or three.

Their father rose and rubbed at his temples as if he was close to fainting.

"Dad, are you okay?" Jeanette said, but her mouth was sticky with marijuana-infused saliva and the words came out clumsily.

He didn't respond. He just layed palms-down on the cool tile of the kitchen floor. Joey watched his pulse in his neck and took relief in its normalcy. After a while, he moaned that he was going to be sick.

"I need to be plugged in," Joey said suddenly. So Jeanette put them both to bed and did the dishes.

The next day, they went to the zoo. Jeanette carried Joey in a clear plastic tote bag to keep the rain off her hardware, and was careful not to swing the bag too vociferously as they strolled the grounds. They watched the tropical fish and felt the previous night's high radiate through them and grant a fresh calm. The father pulled two quarters from his pockets and bought duck food from a machine with a crank. He dropped half the crumbs in Jeanette's hand and took the rest in his own.

They leaned on a bridge above the duck pond and threw crumbs one-by-one to the swans, ducks, and geese, and were careful to make the rations last. Each crumb of bread floated a moment on the icy water before dissipating or getting sucked into a bird's mouth. It was an expense the father had never afforded them as children. It was better to let the animals fend for themselves, he'd said. If you fed them, they would grow torpid and pollute the water. They'd be lazy and depressed. Human food wasn't healthy for them, he persisted when they begged him, and he said it was hard enough to keep the two girls fed without throwing meals away on wild animals. Now that they'd moved out, he kept his poverty quiet.

"Look at that mallard with the blue streak," Jeanette said dreamily, pointing.

"It's a Spotted-billed Duck," Joey said. "And...huh. They aren't native to the U.S."

"What about that one?"

"That's a Reyard's Duck. They're from the Vancouver area."

Their father covered the crumbs in his hand and said, "Let's quit feeding these aliens."

He led them to the cat house. The leopards, servals, tigers, and pumas all circled in narrow spaces dotted with artificial-looking rocks and toys made of rope. Bars covered the fronts of their cells, instead of the greasy plexiglass used for most of the other animals. The cats paced in tight figure-eights, their eyes never leaving the crowds of gawking humans before them. Their movements were as fluid as flight or swimming. The big cats had always struck Jeanette as oddly conspiratorial—lurking, shifting, never averting their gaze. Always furious and hungry, moving and trapped.

"Cats are so smart," she said, in awe. She held Joey up in her sack and pointed her at a spotted civet.

"I'd like to see 'em go toe-to-toe with those wolves back there," the father said, throwing a thumb back to the North American Adventure section. "These kitties are all too independent, that'd be the death of them. They couldn't last a second against an organized pack, even if the dogs'r dumb."

Jeanette smirked. "I don't know..."

"Cats aren't smart," Joey said. "They run almost all on instinct. If you sever their brains from their brainstems, they keep moving, eating, and hunting, like nothing's changed."

The father threw his remaining breadcrumbs out and wiped his hands on his coveralls. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Their brains control very little of their behavior," Joey said. "Its role is almost purely inhibitory."

"Huh."

"I'm just saying, that doesn't sound very smart to me."

Jeanette groaned. "I thought you liked cats."

"They're fine."

"You really think they're dumb?" Jeanette held the bag up to her face. "Didn't you always want a cat?"

"They're cute. It's just, the fact is they're dumb."

Jeanette huffed.

"I think your sister wants out of here," the father said.

"What do you mean?"

"Come on," he whispered, like it was obvious.

"I'm fine," Joey said. "But...they're looking at me funny."

Jeanette lowered the bag out of the civet's view. Her sister glowed a dim yellow. Jeanette thought she could hear Joey's breath rising and falling.

Jeanette said, "Joey? Are you okay?"

"It's the cages," their father said. "They're freaking her out I bet you."

"What? Are you kidding? It's fine. I don't care. "

A serval crept to the edge of his cage and stood poised, gazing down at them. Jeanette felt the back of her neck get hot. She pulled the bag closer to her body and tried to imagine that she was a water buffalo, or a gazelle standing alone in a field. The cat blinked slowly, looking almost reptilian, and the muscles in its shoulders tensed and rippled. For thousands of years they'd been crafted to hunt and roam, and now they'd been given security.

"It knows something's up," Joey said.

Their father grabbed Jeanette by the hand and pulled them out of the cat house. They stood outside the ape building, letting a light drizzle fell over them.

Jeanette said, "I'm sorry, I didn't think about how this could affect you."

"It doesn't. Listen, these animals aren't unhappy, I don't think. They don't know any better. Animals live for homeostasis, and that's what a zoo is all about." Her breath, or the recording of it, heaved loudly a few times. "I think most of these animals would choose captivity if they could, you know? It's not like they enjoy struggle."

She forced a short bark of a laugh out from her speakers. Their father suggested, in that case, they should get out of the rain and go visit the primates. They were in the ape house mezzanine and wicking water from their bodies when Joey suddenly flashed bright red and cried, "NO! No. No. No."

Jeanette pulled the BrightBox from the tote. "Baby are you okay?"

A fat family in rain slickers stared at them and their screaming prism.

"Let's get out please. Okay? Okay. Okay let's please just get...out."

Joey's voice was rapid and thin. It sounded like she was genuinely hyperventilating. The glow on the box rose and fell, shifting from red to a bright orange, its colors pulsing with the rhythm of a failing heart. Jeanette turned the box over and examined it for water damage.

"System report?" she asked dumbly. The user guide had suggested a reboot in the event of 'questionable client behavior'.

Joey said, "Systems are fine. Let's leave. Now. Everyone is staring at us. That woman is going to fetch security. Let's just go."

Their father turned to the woman in the rain slicker, who gaped back at them uncomprehendingly. "Really, what the hell could security do?" he said. She shrugged and opened her mouth. "Really, ma'am. We're harmless."

The woman gulped and nodded, pulling one of her children's stout fingers into her own fist.

When they made it to the parking lot, Joey's light cooled to a steady teal and her breath quieted. Jeanette's face was flushed and puffed-out in a manner suggestive of eminent puking. Her breath matched the unsteady, anxious thrum of Joey's artificial one. The father pulled Joey from his living daughter's arms, allowing Jeanette to drop to her hands and knees. She heaved and coughed but didn't produce any fluid.

"I'm fine," Joey said, a little bewildered. "Jean I'm okay, cool your motherfucking jets."

"Ugh," she wiped her brow and rose with a sigh.

"That was embarrassing. I just got worried about you."

"I'm fine. Need I remind you that I'm waterproof, shockproof, loaded with anti-virus software, and have a battery life of three days. If anything malfunctions in the box it will turn black. There are no service reports."

"But still," their father piped up, "you can feel fear." He smiled approvingly as he said it.

Joey blinked yellow. "Does that make me a person, then? Or close enough?"

"You..," he grinned. "Well, you girls were always more than enough for me."

They walked a path along the river and climbed the grassy steps to the botanical garden's greenhouse. It was a massive, bulbous structure, built like a series of interconnected sacks, each hospitable to foliage from a unique corner of the world. The rainforest displays were decorated with polymer statues of dark-skinned children in tattered loincloths, stereotypical crap that Joey was normally inclined to grouse about, but this time she didn't complain. One of the statues, their father pointed out, looked just like the girls had in their own preadolescence. The polymer girl stood in a thicket of lilies, buck naked holding some kind of flute. Her cheeks were like apples and her lips were pursed in a song she could never play.

"Looks just like you girls," he reiterated.

"Really?" Jeanette said, turning her attention down to Joey. "Do you think so?"

"Facial scanning software fails to confirm that," Joey said. Seeing their father's frown, she added, "but I see what you mean."

Jeanette took them to the miniatures room, where tiny trees and hedges had been sculpted and deliberately grown to accommodate an elaborate fairy castle and bonsai forest. She was ashamed to admit it, but she still occasionally imagined herself as Thumbelina, the shrunken inhabitant of a magical, tidy little world. In the same room there were bonsai trees of every conceivable shape, each held firmly in a wood box by layers of sand and grit. Each was trimmed carefully every day by botanical garden associate, according to the signs. It was painstaking work to maintain the right scale.

Beside the trees were rows of bonsai melons, which (the signs said) had been grown into perfect geometrical shapes through a process called "organic space restriction". An ashen-faced botanical gardens employee with fingers like tendrils approached them and offered a sample of square cantaloupe. Jeanette and their father chewed while Joey read the displays.

"It's better than a regular melon," their father observed.

The garden employee nodded. "The tissues on the insides are more compact, so there's more sweetness by volume."

Jeanette held a piece up to Joey's sensors. With a fingernail she squeezed a bit of the juice out for her to taste.

Not noticing, the garden employee went on, "you see, the process can only be conducted on three melons per plant before a new plant has to be started. This is because the constriction is actually quite traumatic to the plant's circulatory system..."

"I need to get the fuck out of here," Joey said suddenly, flashing bright blue and making the garden worker jump back.

6.

It's 1993. It must be; that was the year Joey got the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers t-shirt that she wore as a nightgown, tunic, and dress, all day, every day. It was years before Febreeze was invented, so their dad had to wash it daily, while Joey was in the tub with her action figures.

There are grey streaks of mud and silt where the shirt hits her knees. She's had it awhile. It has the Black and Green Rangers on it; she got it for Easter. Jeanette wouldn't wear hers, because it had the Pink Ranger on it. She likes Yellow, when she watches the show at all.

The girls are climbing the willow tree in the back yard. Joey's shirt is pilled and stringy where bark has snagged it. She's a good two stories up, and can see their roof, littered with branches and bird poop. She calls to her sister. She bobs up and down on a branch that gives slightly under her weight.

Jeanette is tucked into the crook of a lower branch. Her dark head rests on a balled-up sweatshirt, and she is coloring, or reading, or dragging a pen across a page. Joey pulls strips of bark from the tree and pelts them at her. She pulls hunks of moss, squirming with ants. Her sister takes a long time to notice.

Something occludes the sun for a second. Joey looks up: herons? Great, long-legged birds with vast wingspans and delicate, pencil-thin beaks, unfamiliar critters, casting across the sky, going south. She covers her curly head with a fistful of willow branches, to protect against droppings. The birds' bellies are silver and pale blue.

"Come up!" she cries to Jeanette. But Jeanette won't come. "Come see, come see—Jeannnn,"

Jeanette's sweatshirt is over her head, now. She won't come. She can't climb that high, or she won't. When she skins a knee she picks at the red and white tissue till it goes all purple and yellow, and she moans from the couch that she's in sepsis, that she is going to die. Something similar keeps her on the ground.

Joey sits with her legs folded and watches the birds disappear. She'll show them. There will be more birds—she's sure of it, and sure that they'll all be envious of the sight. Her father and sister, who watch nature documentaries to fall asleep but are loathe to get dirty outside of the house. She'll wait. All she has to keep her company is a knife and a lighter filched from their dad's desk.

She digs her mother's name into the bark, misspelling it. The small strips of wood that fall into her t-shirted lap would make perfect kindling. Their dad comes into the yard with sandwiches heaped on a plastic plate, and Jeanette flees from the tree trunk.

"Come down, Joey! I'm bored!" Jeanette runs away as she yells it.

Feeling the branch sink under her weight, Joey stands on tiptoes and hurls herself up another level. The willow's tendrils are a curtain she can throw back to spy on the neighborhood. She's performing international espionage. She leaps and hangs from a branch the girth of her dad's arm, and does her best pull-ups. The neighbors quarrel over a barbecue, and Joey takes fastidious notes in the side of the tree. The birds do not come.

"Come down, Jo-ey! I'm going in! Come watch a movie with me before dad takes the TV!"

Majority rules in the house. Joey doesn't climb down.

"Come up here! I'm hunting for albatross." Nothing. "Come look at the sunset!"

Truth be told, she doesn't know how to get down from this height. Just reaching her foot toward a lower branch makes her dizzy.

It gets colder; the neighbors go in and clouds envelop the appearing stars. Joey pulls her arms into the body of her Power Ranger's nightgown, shivers, and waits. She sees the leaves turn up like bowls to the sky.

It rains. First the branches protect her, then they give way like so many broken umbrellas or burst tarpaulins and dump water on her. Joey's hair gets frizzy, then damp, and falls into her eyes. Her bare feet are frigid against the bark, which is slowly absorbing moisture. All her appendages feel like cold, dead fish.

Their father runs across the lawn and screams for Joey to come down before she catches cold. Jeanette stands by his side, both of them tiny below. They yell at her for a long time, and Joey begins to cry. There's a burst of thunder not so far away. Goose pimples press Joey's arm and leg hair out, and it prickles against her.

Their dad says, "Fine, you wanna catch your death that's your decision!" and stomps inside. Jeanette stays. She doesn't call Joey down anymore. She just stands, impotent, with a hand on the tree.

The tree is too slick, too wet to climb down, so Joey resolves to stay the night. The moss is slippery even when it's dry. She gets an idea to light her kindling. She gathers the slivers of wood and bark up in a ball, jams it into an open knot, and holds her dad's lighter over it.

The flame catches fast. Soon she has a little fire pit all her own. Joey slices off more bark and moss where it's still dry and feeds the flame. Her skin warms and the pimples sink back down inside her skin.

But then it's all out of control. Flame swallows up the knot and jumps over its edge. It catches on some of the leaves, the ones that are still dry and protected underneath the tendrils. The flames crawl down the branch. Joey retreats toward the tree trunk and slips slightly. The fire advances on her.

Then there's a curtain of hot dense orangeness, and smoke, and Joey's face is so warm it feels like it could burst open like a popcorn kernel. Smoke swells around the tree in a cyclone and floods Joey's lungs. She doesn't know yet what harm fire can really do to a human body; she won't learn that till a burning roof falls on her as a thirty-year-old EMT and kills her. But she can't breathe, and the heat is in the air, it makes all her skin ripple. She can't tell where the flames end and her body begins. It stings like when it's negative-degrees in winter.

All at once, Joey pulls the rain-soaked Power Rangers nightgown off and slaps at the flames. The fire hisses under the wet cloth, spitting out smoke. There's a gasp, and more smoldering air for a few moments, but then the flames are gone. The tree and Joey's shirt are black. Rain has killed the flames on the other branches.

"Are you okay?" Jeanette's voice floats up from the dark expanse below the tree.

"Yeah," Joey says. Then, "I think that was close."

Looking back, it probably wasn't. It all happened in the span of a minute, perhaps, but in Joey's memory it has unfurled and grown rich with detail, caught under a microscope, saved on a slide.

"I won't tell Dad," Jeanette says. It's a promise she will honor even as an adult.

Joey sleeps in the tree with the damp, sooty nightgown pulled across her bare lap. She waits the whole night until the dawn breaks and the tree begins to finally dry and become climbable again. It's twelve hours all told that she spends up there, at least.

When she finally has the courage to venture down, bare-legged in the morning light, she finds Jeanette curled up in the fetal position, sleeping on a quilt at the roots of the willow tree. In that moment, Joey resolves to forgive her for all past and future grievances. It's a promise she keeps for the rest of her life. Her sister wasn't capable of climbing to reach her, but she was all too willing to lie in wait. And that's something.

7.

The father left and the sisters' lives fell into a normal rhythm. Jeanette went back to work, having already expended six of her annual vacation days on Joey's hospital stay and their dad's visit. She bought a second LifeMedia charging dock and put it on the windowsill of the office she shared with two coworkers.

Joey's Box was placed between an aloe vera plant and a novelty wooden horse that collapsed into a heap when it was pressed at the base. She listened to her sister hum along to Portishead at her desk, and watched her proofread web advertisements.

"Do you think this would be better if I wrote it in active voice?" Jeanette asked. She swiveled the monitor around. It was a mock-up of an ad for barbecue-flavored rice crisps.

Meat Thins: The flavor and the protein of meat is in it. The cruelty isn't.

"Isn't that always the rule?" said Joey.

"I guess. But I thought maybe, after you master the rules, that's when you have license to flout them." She tilted her head at the screen and pondered.

Jeanette's officemate Louis entered with a Cup Noodle suspended between his teeth and an overstuffed binder in his arms. He mumbled a greeting through the styrofoam.

"Do you have the rights to that stock image?" Joey said suddenly, with a flicker of blue light. Louis jumped and gasped slightly, barely recovering in time to save the carpet from a Cup Noodle stain.

"Holy ba-jeez, look at you," he said, dropping his things on his desk.

He lifted Joey up like a puppy and turned to Jeanette. "I heard what happened but I didn't know you were bringing the thing in."

He examined the bottom of the BrightBox and rubbed his small fingers along the sides, as if inspecting for dust.

"Well, anyway," he sighed, "What a pretty design."

Jeanette stood up and pulled the box away.

"Of course I brought her. Was I supposed to do— leave her sitting in my apartment all alone?"

"A pleasure to meet you, Louis," Joey said with a flash, "I've heard so much about you over the years. What a shame we never had the chance to meet when I had hands; I wish I could shake yours."

He did a jaunty little nod in the box's direction. "An absolute pleasure." He picked up his Cup Noodle, stirred it furiously, and said, "Well. Anyway."

Jeanette sat Joey down and returned to her desk. "Do you like this ad, Louis?"

He leaned across her shoulder and slurped. "It looks very Web 1.0. Add a drop shadow."

Jeanette pivoted in her swivel chair to face the windowsill. "Joey, as a non-professional in the field, what is your natural, intuitive response to this advertisement?"

"I mean, I don't know. Seems like it violates the rules of good photo composition though. And that stock image with the laughing woman...it's already been in a lot of laptop and yogurt ads."

"Are you Googling in there?" Louis asked. He crept forward and tapped Joey's surface with a single outstretched digit.

"Yeah. And then some."

"You're fucking Data." He shot Jeanette a broad, almost conspiratorial smile. "Your sister is Data! She's, no—She's like this one android in this game I used to play as a kid, Xenosaga? Kos-Mos. She had a soul but she was fully synthetic-"

"Whatever, sorry," Joey snapped, turning dim yellow. "I don't like the ad. It makes me bored."

Jeanette beamed and swatted Louis' hand away from the box.

"Thank you! See, this is going to be great. Having a layperson's perspective in the office to spitball off. Awesome."

Their second officemate, Rita, came in late and refused to marvel over the BrightBox. She collapsed in a huff at her desk with the hood to her winter jacket pulled up, sighed loudly, and began clicking noisily at her computer and chewing her lip. Everyone in the room, including Joey, threw her a timid greeting, but she didn't respond, and for hours she worked at her desk without removing her head from under the parka's heavy, furry mass. Her fury kept everyone else quiet, it seemed to Joey. At one point, Joey caught her turning away from the monitor, staring at the BrightBox dead-on, her lip twisting.

At lunch, several employees wandered in to meet Joey and ask questions. They came in a huddle, holding their mugs and Tupperware containers of bland-smelling vegetables and cold sandwiches, their eyes wide with friendly expectation. They brought with them a gigantic sympathy card with both sisters' names on it.

Jeanette scooted her chair in front of the windowsill to buffer Joey against the growing gaggle. She answered many of their technical and medical queries, smiling with only her cheeks and occasionally rubbing her sister on the BrightBox's silicone sides. Rita worked as the kept talking, turned as far away from the spectacle as her cubicle would allow, headphones on.

The coworkers wanted to know how Joey had died (misadventure; house fire). They wanted to know if this BrightBox thing was expensive (yes, just like a good college education or an infantile gastric bypass). They asked if it was waterproof (yes). They wanted to know if "it" hurt (Joey said it did). They wondered if Joey was legally alive (she wasn't). They wanted to know what was going to happen to Joey's money and personal effects (Joey didn't care). They wanted to know what would happen to Joey herself ("She's living with me," Jeanette said firmly). They wanted to know if there were other people like her.

"I- I don't know," Jeanette said. She chewed on a pen and considered it. "I mean, it's pretty new... I had never heard of it before, until the hospital!" Joey cut in at that point.

"There are just under three thousand BrightBox uploadees in the world," she said.

She sounded like a tour guide, Jeanette noticed, when she dispensed information that didn't belong to her.

"And people just buy this thing, like, after somebody in their family's died?" asked Marta, the intern with the face tattoo.

"Not all of them. Over one-third of those users were uploaded as pre-needs."

"Pre-need?" Rita said. She pushed down her headphones and wriggled out of her jacket, which revealed a massive tuft of yellow-and-black hair that towered above her in a row of shellacked spikes.

"Pre-need, I don't know," Jeanette said vaguely.

She shot glances to the crowd, her sister, and back again; the interview was slipping out from under her. There was a slight hush in the room, though many of the employees were still audibly chewing soft food and sipping their Diet Cokes. Behind Jeanette, the box was pulsing minty green.

"Like in the funeral industry?" Louis guessed. He nudged a woman in a high-waisted skirt whom Jeanette didn't recognize and said, "You knowww, you know how people buy their own funerals before they, well. Before they need them."

Joey said, "That's the idea. People buy an upload for themselves before they die. It's a lot like funerals. Nearly a thousand BrightBox clients have signed up to be uploaded following their death, and have paid ahead of time for their upload package. But half of BrightBox users are uploaded post-death by their families, in which case it's obviously the family's decision and financial obligation. That's like what happened to me."

"That doesn't add up, then," a man with a full mouth said from the back of the crowd. Jeanette wasn't sure, but she thought it was Pete from the Social Media Department. He liked to wear Kokopeli t-shirts and stuff his hands into the front pockets of too-tight jeans. "What about the remaining, uh, sixth?"

"Those remaining few hundred users are pre-morbidities," Joey said. "Or premies for short. They chose to upload before dying. Completely voluntary. But their market share is growing, as are the pre-need packages."

The crowd quietly consulted their tepid meals. Pete from Social Media eased back on his heels and jammed his fists into his pockets. Rita shook her head at the ground like she was cursing either the devil or the first-floor day care center below her feet.

"How do you know all that?" Jeanette whispered to Joey.

Joey's cool blue light dimmed, taking her voice down with it. "There's a user message board."

Jeanette turned back and read her coworkers' downcast faces. None of them were meeting her gaze. Coming in, they had seemed jovial, as if Jeanette had just given birth and they'd all been given the chance to hold the baby. Then, it had started to feel more like she'd bought a new smartglass computer for them to coo at and play with. But now they all were picking at their sad lunches and avoiding eye contact like they were all trapped in an enormous elevator. Or an actual funeral.

Marta forced the gigantic card into Jeanette's hands. It was bulky and awkward in her lap. The collective mass of her coworkers' breaths and body heat was stifling. The doorway was completely occluded by checker print, black, navy, slate grey, and khaki.

"Well, anyway," Louis said to no one.

He pushed through the crowd awkwardly. The other employees followed, departing in intermittent little bursts, some wishing Jeanette and Joey a good day, some chattering too softly to be heard, others wondering aloud where all the condiments had gone. Soon the office was clear except for Joey, Jeanette, Rita, and Jeanette's manager Reggie, whom Jeanette hadn't even noticed lurking in the back of the crowd.

He was an old man, at least by Jeanette's approximation. He'd been in the field in the days before stock images and viral campaigns; he'd enjoyed the grand era of the commercial jingle and the hand-drawn pin-up. He sidled up to Jeanette and patted her on the shoulder. It was a quick, curt gesture.

"Glad to see you're back," he said. "And nice to see you've brought your little friend here with you."

"Nice to meet you too," Joey said. Her voice was icy, but the faint static tempered some of its edge.

Reggie stared down at the box and his eyes crinkled. "I'm sorry folks were so skiddish about your...situation."

Jeanette wondered if awareness of mortality made a person more sympathetic to her and Joey's position. Reggie had brushed against cancer, or his wife had, or maybe it had been his elderly mother. He wasn't far from a stroke or heart attack himself, and must've known it. Surely there were days when he awoke so short of breath and weak that he already felt his body was an immobile trap. Perhaps he wasn't far from becoming a BrightBox client; he certainly had the bread for it. Joey did a quick estimate of how long he probably had before he'd die; not that long.

"They're just intimidated," Jeanette said. "Or jealous."

"They've got a hell of a branding issue, I think," he said. "Folks're killing themselves to get in one of those things? That's gonna take a pretty clever PR campaign to jazz up."

"The people who do it that way," Joey said, "don't think of it as suicide."

Jeanette shot her a look as if she'd said something outrageously offensive. Maybe it was just the fact she was expressing disagreement.

Reggie swaggered back to the door. "Good meeting ya," he said to Joey, and stepped out.

Jeanette looked back to her sister and waited a moment as Reggie's footsteps grew fainter. She said, "So that went great, mostly! It'll be great to have your help around here. Let me pull up a smartglass site I've been editing, you should look it over..,"

Rita rose from her seat with an e-cigarette tucked behind her ear. It jutted into one of her vast tufts of gold-black hair. She unleashed a deep, wet-sounding sigh and began to zip her parka back up.

"You don't mind me having Joey here for consulting, do you Rita?" Jeanette said. She tilted her head in challenge.

"Of course not, you can bring in a kitten for all I care," the woman said. She paused at the door, drummed her bright nails on the wall, and sighed again.

"What."

"But this uploading business? It's not moral. I'm not saying I blame you, I'd probably do the same thing if my mom or auntie kicked it, but it is a perversion of nature. Our time is not fungible."

She pointed a magenta talon at Jeanette. With her free hand, she pulled the smoke from her coif and jammed it into her lips; it was already stained pink on the edges from where it had met her lipstick before.

"Hey," Jeanette said, but she couldn't think of a retort.

"Some things don't last," she said again. "Some things aren't meant to. That's all."

Jeanette slammed the door behind her and crawled into a lotus position on the floor. She wrapped her arms about herself and stared up at her sister's BrightBox on the windowsill. Her face and chest had flushed.

"That woman."

Joey turned a deep sienna and softly chirped, "Hey, it's okay. That brand of e-cig cuts life expectancy by four minutes per use. Tell the cunt to suck it up."

8.

Joey fit comfortably in the children's seat of most shopping carts. She helped Jeanette compare prices at the grocery store, big box retailers, the drug store, and the home decor store. She recited directions when Jeanette prepared a tofu cilantro scramble at night or blueberry cobbler smoothie in the morning. She played music in Jeanette's cubicle, and switched tracks if she caught Rita tapping a high-heeled foot or humming in enjoyment.

Jeanette bought a beta fish and sat it next to Joey's dock at the office, and bought a lava lamp so she'd have something to watch at night after Jeanette had fallen asleep. She asked Joey her opinion on drapes, perfume, outfits, and web design projects at work. She asked Joey if she looked like she was gaining weight. She asked Joey to calculate the calories and nutrients in what she ate and speculate on the health of her hair.

Jeanette spoke to Joey as she fell asleep, sometimes mumbling work ideas or vague plans, and crying out for Joey to make a note of it, please mark it down, and email her, or tell her first thing in the morning because she was too sleep-addled to remember. Joey always obliged. Sometimes (when Jeanette's iron levels were low or she was dehydrated), she would quiz Joey about childhood memories.

"Remember when mom had dreadlocks?" she asked, rolling up into a ball in bed.

"Yes," Joey replied, "we were in what, second grade? And she lived in town that year, with that auto mechanic guy? Will?"

"Wilhelm," she said, the W pronounced as a V, a heavy fake German accent.

"Yeah. What a douche. He never learned to tell us apart."

"He did at the end. You hit puberty first. Do you remember what color the dreadlocks were?"

"Hm. Wait...she dyed them puke green at the tips."

"Oh my God, yes!" Jeanette said, and laughed. She rolled onto her belly and clambered down the bed, to the edge, and stared into Joey's white surface as if she were staring into a sky full of stars.

"Are you worried there's part of me missing?" Joey asked.

Jeanette smiled sleepily and purred, "No. I bought you the biggest hard drive. And it's so, so obviously you in there. Do you remember what we wanted to be as kids?"

And Joey said, "Pet shop owners."

"Yes. Together. We were gonna buy a storefront and fill it with puppies and lizards, and have a concert space on top where we could sing at night. And all the animals would be safe there, because we'd never sell them to bad families or put them down if they got too old. We'd just keep them and take care of them, and put them in our musical revue."

Joey snickered and glowed a very pale blue that was nearly white. "We really didn't think that shit through, did we? Finding a property like that alone, ha! The zoning would be a nightmare. And how could that be solvent?"

Jeanette chuckled into her hand and wiped at her mouth. "But that didn't matter! We didn't even think about money, or school, or where we'd live, or boyfriends either. When we talked about that plan I kinda assumed it would just be us, you know? Just us and the pet-shop-slash-concert-hall. It was all we needed."

Joey remembered pretending to have a pet store/music hall with her sister. She didn't remember it being a plan. They never discussed plans, not even when they finally became old enough to form actual ones. They'd picked colleges in the same city by accident.

Joey dimmed and recalled their first drive into the city. Jeanette was riding shotgun in their dad's old hatchback; the car was stuffed with milk crates of DVDs and clothing. Joey pictured her sister sitting with bare feet propped against the dashboard, staring out the window, muttering that they were lost while Joey navigated. Joey always drove. It was three years in the city before Jeanette had figured out the way to Joey's dorm. She arrived one night in a soaked terrycloth sweatshirt with her nipples poking out for everyone to see, weeping over some boy but refusing to talk about it, begging to climb into bed with her sister, just for the night. She'd done the same thing as a little girl whenever she had a nightmare.

"Are you awake?" Jeanette said suddenly. Her head popped out from under the covers.

"Of course," Joey replied.

But Jeanette wasn't; not really. She rolled onto her back, and in a groaning voice heavy with sleep she murmured, "I'm so glad you're here. I have these dreams about what they did to your body...your actual one. Burnt all up, but then they have to burn it again to cremate it, isn't that weird?"

Joey didn't reply, for fear of waking her. She pictured the slow ebb of Jeanette's brain waves as she drifted off to sleep, alpha and beta beginning their dance.

"You built all the campfires...," Jeanette said. "Marshmallows, mountain pies, no thank you..," and then she was snoring.

While Joey charged, she let her mind wander and explore its own deepest recesses until, at some point, her consciousness shut itself off. Sleep was for the benefit of the brain, not the body; a BrightBox needed rest just as much as a living human did.

The role of sleep, Joey knew, was still a matter of some scientific debate. Some believed it consolidated and defragmented memories, while others believed it replenished neurotransmitters and relaxed the hard-working frontal lobes. At any rate, sleep preserved sanity and restored clarity to the mind. It crept up and draped over Joey just the same as it always had. Jeanette's sleep had always been fitful and twitchy, since their bunk bed and sleeping bag days, but Joey had always dozed like an ancient ruin.

The dreams were the only thing that had changed. Joey's dreams used to be placid and familiar glimpses. Memories defragmenting. Movies and video games spliced together. Now every night she was engrossed in a deep unfolding story with no cuts.

In these new dreams, she was old. In them, she had a body, but it groaned in all its joints and was too heavy for her to move. She was an old man on a porch in the thick heat of July, leaning on haunches and battling a torturous all-body ache. There was a glass of iced tea in an old woman's frail hands and Joey was straining to reach for it. Joey was startled to see her hands were white, and wide, manly with grit under the nails. The sky was hazy and the cicadas roared.

Joey reached for the sweet woman in the vision, but a shock went through her jaw and rippled into her heart. The ground flew into Joey's face and struck her on the chest, and she felt her hands twitch and wander over the dirt. The sweet woman screamed and dropped the iced tea; chunks of ice rained over Joey's bent, pulsing body, and glass shards erupted over the porch and tumbled down the stairs. The woman's hands gripped Joey through papery-thin, loose skin... and then suddenly Joey was a small boy in short dungarees riding a tire swing, her core flexed, her youthful digits clutching the rope so hard a burn was forming. Still male—she could feel a small penis on her, soft and smooth and pushed to the right side of her underwear.

The dreams woke her two or three times each night. For a sweet, agonizing second after each one, Joey could still feel the sting of the rope in her fingers, she could still feel her legs digging into the tire's rubber sides, and the warm summer wind on her soft face.

9.

At work Jeanette had the freedom to come and go mostly as she pleased, but she kept a conventional schedule for the social benefits and the comforting regularity. She liked to be among a steady line of sharply dressed commuters with fresh bags and packed lunches, carrying books and magazines, reading the news from translucent glasses. Standing in the center of the train, packed tightly with all the other workaday travelers, choking on their colognes, Jeanette felt connected. There would always be someone to catch her if she fell. She couldn't even fall, actually, in so cramped a space.

Joey watched the rain pool on the windowsill at home and at Jeanette's work. She studied the gradients of color in the scales on Jeanette's new beta fish. Louis rocked furiously in his squeaking chair; He would occasionally pepper Joey with crossword puzzle questions, or ask her the HTML code for a particular color swatch.

Rita abused her keyboard with forceful typing and spilt liquids, which made Joey feel light-headed and displeased, for reasons she couldn't describe. Sometimes the outside world became too much to bear, so she turned off her cameras. When she did this, her visual field was greeted with images of withered old-man hands or dimly-lit, archaic sexual trysts she had never taken part in. Computer labs. The driver's-seat view from cars they didn't make anymore.

But this vision-world was better than the actual world, filled as it was with confused, disapproving people who glared at Joey in the grocery store and blinked uncomprehendingly at her on the train but never said anything. And Jeanette. Jeanette with her questions. She was only slightly better than Louis, who had quickly learned to treat Joey like a rolodex. Jeanette's questions were less factual and more normative.

"Do you like this text in peach, or in salmon? Is crimson too obviously menstrual?";

"Will I be too cold in just this sweater, do you think?";

"Is this phrase cheesy?";

"Are puns funny, like in a retro-ironic way, or in a sincere way?";

"What should I make for dinner? Well, I know, but what would you like to smell?";

"Should I ping Mom's sister and tell her you're dead?";

"What's wrong? Should I call that Milton guy? I'm gonna call Milton."

The last question came out sounding higher and more frantic every time Jeanette uttered it. She said it every morning when Joey was groggy and tormented by the odd visions. She said it when Joey was too slow with a response, or voiced an opinion that, to Jeanette, seemed atypical for her.

Every night Joey was dusted off with a can of compressed air and explored by her sister's dainty fingers. The questions were just as prodding.

"What do you think those visions mean? I should call LifeMedia," Jeanette said. She retrieved Milton's card from her winter jacket's pocket and slipped it into her work bag.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Joey kept saying. "I just need to turn off my wi-fi before bed."

Her sister tossed and turned more than ever, muttering and drooling in her sleep and sometimes even heaving with cries. Friday night at 4 am, she sat up, ramrod.

"Joey, are you up? Joey."

Joey's blue light sliced through the hazy darkness. "The body development program has manifold ethical concerns associated with it, and thus product testing should be as extensive as for any other medical equipment, or perhaps on the level of a novel drug treatment...Animal models should first be determined...this project should be extensively workshopped, as customers are likely to find the body models disturbing at first..."

Jeanette was silent. Joey could see her chest heaving up and down rapidly under the sheets.

"Jeanette, what's wrong?"

"Joey, what was that? What were you going on about?"

"What— I don't know. Was I saying something?"

"You just said a bunch of weird LifeMedia FAQ-type stuff. Like, technical stuff."

Joey pushed out a tiny little yawn through her speakers and said, "Oh, huh. I don't remember saying anything."

"You never used to talk in your sleep. Or remember your dreams. Does this freak you out?"

"No. I know you're freaked out, though."

Jeanette mussed her hair and scratched her scalp. "I want to call them."

"I'm operating just fine."

"Maybe. But maybe you aren't the best gauge of that."

Joey considered this for a moment. A yellow ellipsis scrolled along her sides. All at once the dots stopped and shifted into a muddy red.

"You can't just wake me up in the middle of a REM cycle and expect me to be lucid. I'm not a computer-"

"I know that."

"You can't just flip open the lock screen and expect me to be at full capacity. I'm not your fucking phone. People have good moments and bad moments, actual people. I'm sure you can relate to that, Jean. I'm not always at peak functioning, just like any other person."

Jeanette leapt from the bed and approached the desk where Joey's dock sat. She was naked, a sight Joey had avoided processing as much as possible.

"You're right! That's exactly what I'm worried about, and why I woke you up!"

"Huh?"

Jeanette said, "You haven't cried. This whole time! Dead, reanimated, seeing Dad, all of it— I've been a wreck! But you haven't cried once. So I'm wondering: can you? Do you not feel strongly enough to cry? Huh?"

She folded her arms.

"This is what you woke me up for?"

"I have to know."

"You're being crazy-irrational, can you not tell?" Joey said. "This couldn't wait?"

"Umm, I'm worried about you and I need to talk to you. That's what sisters are supposed to do."

"You couldn't hold off on the hysterics a couple hours, maybe see if they seemed a less dire once you were rested?"

"I did wait! I've been waiting to ask you this all week!"

A flash of red light passed over Jeanette's face.

"I'm not you!" Joey yelled.

Jeanette stepped back and whimpered almost inaudibly. She clutched her bare breasts anxiously; oblivious to the fact that she was doing it, her eyes scrolling across the floor.

"My reactions are not your reactions," Joey continued. "Of course I'm sad. Of course. But I never sobbed like you. I'm fine. Just leave it be. "

Jeanette wanted to say that there had been a time, long ago, when Joey was a sobber. There was a time when they clutched one another and unleashed twin torrents of tears. She couldn't pinpoint when or why it had stopped— maybe when they'd gotten separate bedrooms. Maybe when Joey began locking her door so Jeanette couldn't climb into bed with her. Maybe when puberty struck her first, like a bolt from the sky.

"I'm sorry," Jeanette said. She eased into a sitting position on the foot of her bed. "You'll let me know if something is wrong, won't you?"

"I will," Joey said, "you have to trust me."

At some point that night, Joey's fury subsided and sleep found her again. It was harder to track her emotions now that she didn't have a pulse. In the old days, her heart would have drummed in her temples and wrists all night, beating out a rhythm of annoyed rage, bringing Jeanette's offense back to mind (and keeping her alert) with every pulse.

But now, anything that bothered her seemed to slip under the veil of consciousness as soon as she stopped purposefully dwelling on it. Jeanette's flaws couldn't be helped. Joey watched her fall asleep and followed suit.

When she awoke at 7:34 am, Joey couldn't see anything. Panicked, she turned up her microphones and picked up the rush of a shower, the tweet of cardinals outside, and her sister vaguely humming Black Socks from inside the bathroom.

Joey tasted orange bitters and shitty Lipton tea for a moment, and was filled with a sensation of desperation. She felt like she had children to feed; several blonde, oddly Caucasian heads. She turned her lights on to full brightness, but still there was nothing but a cavern of white around her.

In her mind's eye Joey saw a 3-dimensional mockup of a large metal claw with a glowing rubber base. She knew things she had no business knowing. For example: LifeMedia was constructing a body.

"What the fuck," Joey said. It came out much louder than intended.

Jeanette came from the bathroom and pulled the sheet down, and the external world flooded back in. Joey realized that at some point in the evening her sister must have pulled the Box into bed with her and tucked it in.

Jeanette took Joey to an indoor market. 'They' selected and bought butternut squash, kale, avocados, and grapefruit.

"Does this one look ripe? How do you tell, again?" Jeanette asked, but wasn't answered.

When they walked by the coffee roaster's stand, Joey pulsed green and yellow and spoke for the first time in hours.

"Get a tea. Or, let's just stand by the tea jars."

"Okay..."

Jeanette popped the lid from a jar of loose tea and held it beneath her sister's BrightBox.

"Mmm that smells uncanny. I have got the biggest fucking hankering for hot toddies," Joey said.

But Jeanette didn't know what hot toddies were, and the barista was beginning to lean over the table and stare at the woman with the talking box. Jeanette bought a small satchel, shoved it along with Joey into a burlap tote she'd gotten for free with the avocados, and hurried past the remaining stands to the exit. If she stayed long enough, people would amass and ask questions. They might demand to touch Joey, or hold the box, or worse.

The next day they went with several of Jeanette's college friends to a show at a crowded bar. Jeanette's friends had heard all about Joey by then. They didn't ask much, and Jeanette found she felt insulted rather than relieved. Joey didn't like the music, and halfway through the show she shut her external sensors off. When Jeanette asked what she'd been doing, then, to keep herself entertained, Joey said she was researching something. Stuff. Things. Whatever. She wouldn't clarify.

The next morning, Jeanette dressed and packed for work before Joey awakened. She approached the box in her coat, her lunch already hanging in a plastic off her shoulder.

"Time to go," Jeanette called sweetly, like a mother waking a child.

Joey's blue light snapped on. "I'd like to stay here today."

"Are you sure?" Jeanette shifted her weight from one foot then the other. "What are you going to do all day? Won't you be bored?"

"I'll be fine."

Jeanette walked halfway out of the bedroom, then stopped. She turned back. "Because Joey, the usage guide says you're supposed to be moved at least a few times-"

"Please, Jean. I want to be alone."

Jeanette left with a severe look on her face, slamming the door with slightly more force than was necessary. Later, there would be questions. Joey was already dreading them. She dove back into her research and turned all her external sensors off.

10.

There were others. LifeMedia Solutions had unveiled BrightBox six months before Joey's death, and had been beta-testing long before that, so a sizable cadre of uploadees was forming. They were all over the country— and in Germany, the UK, Sweden, India, Japan, Korea, the UAE, Israel, and Australia, at varying levels of market saturation. But growing. Everywhere, growing.

Joey found them on the LifeMedia customer support message board. New BrightBox users and their families went to the board with technical and ethical questions. Family were far more paranoid and befuddled than actual users themselves, most of the time.

GivingTree303:

Can I take my uncle's BrightBox on a roller coaster?

Pam_B:

My grandmother is in a BrightBox but still can't figure out how to login to her email. What should I do?

CarolPeev:

Now that my husband is permanently hooked up to the internet 24/7, how'm I supposed to make sure he isn't watching porn all the time? i know he's gotta be watchin it all the time in there, he seems too happy lol i'm furious

LotusBlosssun:

My son has a silicone allergy and can't hug his Pappy's box without breaking into hives and being tormented with an evening of gastrointestinal distress. Are there any vegan BrightBox covers?

Other, more controversial questions and posts were blacklisted quickly. It seemed that some LifeMedia employee or intern rushed in to delete or hide troublesome queries as soon as a concerned friend or family member hit "submit":

Asguardio77:

My condo was foreclosed on and my husband got laid off again. I have to choose between paying for our health insurance and making our LifeMedia payments...All my friends and coworkers say to put my health above the wellbeing of my Nana, who for all intents and purposes is dead, but what happens then? Will my gran's BrightBox be repossessed? I can't find anything about this in the service agreement.

AmbitiouslyCuteAlexia:

my kids are confused an scared of the box, they dont understand that daddie's in their. What do i do. They keep runnin out the house to the neighbors bc they think were haunted or somethun

Each controversial post went live for a second, sometimes a fraction of a second, then vanished. A human user with a body couldn't even see the posts in time. Accordingly, Joey learned to save every new message to her hard drive immediately. When LifeMedia responded to a query, they left much to be desired:

MiltonS:

BrightBoxes are waterproof, windproof, shock absorbent, and can sustain drops from as high as two stories (depending on how high the ceilings are on those stories, haha!). So it is absolutely safe to take a BB on a roller coaster. But check your amusement park's guidelines and safety harnesses to be sure, and turn down your uncle's accelerometer so he doesn't get too dizzy. Too bad we humans can't do the same, huh? That'd make for a great motion sickness cure! :-]

MiltonS:

Hi Pam B., great question. BrightBox uploadees have the same fluid skills and crystallized intelligence they had in life, so if Grandma needed an internet usage course beforehand, she's probably still frustrating now! ;-] I recommend you buy her LifeMedia's visual-spatial interface analog and a monitor adaptor, and also buy her one of our AudioLearning modules on safely navigating the web via alpha waves. I think with a little visual help, and a few learning mods, she'll be blazing through the web faster than any human-bodied hacker! Good luck! :-]

MiltonS:

LifeMedia is proud to present, by popular request: Recycled aluminum cases! Totally vegan, hypoallergenic, and cruelty free. :-]

After days of lurking, Joey posted her own message, carefully edited so as not to provoke the admin's editorial lash.

Josephine_Porter:

Hi all. I'm a new BrightBox user, just looking to get in touch with some other uploadees, particularly if you're using the OctPrism 4 chassis with a multi-terabyte hard drive. First of all, let me just say I am so so impressed with the hard drive capacity on my unit! I feel like I could store more information than any person would ever reasonably need!

And the interface is so smooth, it was really easy to master (and I was not somebody who slaved away behind a computer all day in my working life)! I never expected to be uploaded to something like this, and let me tell you it's such a rush! There's nothing like it.

I'm writing to ask other users: Since being uploaded, have your dreams become more, like, surreal? Or more authentic-seeming, kinda? My dreams are like virtual reality now— it's like I can walk through memories and re-experience them. But they're not my memories, obv, because they're just made-up dreams. They're like somebody else's memories. Anyone else have this? It's pretty amazing, actually! :)))(

Satisfied after a few rounds of editing the post to make it sound as blithe as possible, Joey posted it. She waited, scanning the board for activity. There were IP addresses in the city accessing it, multiple ones, including Milton's. When five minutes had passed and her post had neither been deleted nor commented on, she audibly sighed with relief and redirected to her email. Jeanette was contacting her from work.

To: Josephine_Porter@lifemediaclients.com

From: PorterJ@klinesmith.com

Subject: Checking in!

Hey Joey, hope you're doing well at home and not going stir crazy. I'm calling this Steve Milton guy on my lunch break; hopefully he'll have some suggestions. Let me know if you need anything from the store, love you!

-Jean-Bean

Joey typed out a cursory response, not wanting to provoke Jeanette's paranoia with silence. She had seven hours of alone-time, with commute figured in, maybe more if Jeanette did go to the store. It occurred to Joey that she should pressure Jeanette to join a gym. Take care of your body, she could say wistfully. That would clinch it.

It was easier to daydream, now. Easier than it had ever been as a living person. Joey recalled many numinous days laying on the couch at the firehouse, twirling a broken Bop It on her lap and listening to the soap operas blaring from the common room. Working in an emergency capacity was not unlike being in a war zone: hours of stultifying boredom punctured by furious activity, danger, pain, etcetera— but boredom was manageable now.

There was an entire universe of scintillating information and petty diversions to bask in, an endlessly unfurling online world to explore. At last Joey understood the appeal of a sedentary, web-based life. It wasn't so different from what her sister and her coworkers had.

Joey was about to drift off into a LifeMedia MapScape simulation of the Andes Mountains when she felt a small thrumming like a pulse in her nonexistent chest. This brought to her mind a rich bouquet of imagined smells— not the crisp, oxygen-thin air of the mountains, but of cigars, mowed grass, old women's perfume, little girls' flavored chap sticks. Again she was panged with unfocused nostalgia. Again, she was missing something she couldn't recreate.

The thrum inside her was a message. She directed to the LifeMedia message board and found someone had sent her a private IM.

Lily_ofthe_valley:

I hear ya, twerp. If you're anything like I was, you were miserable in your body and you're going through some serious shit right now. It's okay. You'll find the answers, but certainly not on this site. Let me warn you, in case you haven't noticed: it's all a gigantic corporate suckoff. All they can offer you are apps and appendages to buy. But you're not a physical being anymore, remember, so the solution to your problems won't ever be material.

Yeah. I said it. You may have an external physical manifestation, but you aren't a material thing anymore. The mind-brain conflation has been blown the fuck open by your very existence. You're not the first mind to break free of the body, but you're among the first. And you sure as shit aren't the only one plagued by questions of identity, wrestling with weird sensations and dreams. Feeling off-kilter is a side effect of this life.

There are plenty of us that give a shit, like you do. Who want to do more than read online news and get carted around on roller coasters by all the breathers. If you've been uploaded for more than a few days, surely you're sick of the breather's questions. If you want to talk some of your shit out with us, hit me up. You don't need this board. We can talk outside it. Message me if you're interested. You oughta be.

-Your Friend Lilian

11.

Box-to-box messaging was as effortless as speaking or changing colors. All Joey had to do was think vaguely of her new friend, consider very deliberately what she wanted to say, and then release the message into the ether.

There was still a short lag, as with any form of communication, and there was that brief moment before sending where she could choose to edit or delete what she'd composed. That was wholly unlike speech. But like speech, there was the same sense of immediate satisfaction after release, freedom from the worry that the words went unread. Once the message was released, the recipient heard it. Or felt it. Or knew it. The sensation didn't translate to bodily experience very well.

Lilian fired first, after Joey had replied to her message board post. Joey was struck suddenly with another strong thrum, and a thought passed through her involuntarily.

<Heyyyy, it's Lily. Don't be scared kid. This is just a test.>

Joey wasn't scared. "I'm not," she said out loud.

<Try to send one back.> the woman said silently in Joey's head.

Joey tried typing and speaking aloud with little result.

"Hey. Hello. Hi. Are you there?... Hiiii... dammit."

It took the better part of half an hour, but Joey eventually slipped into the right frame of mind and it happened. It was like browsing the web; in a BrightBox, navigation was halfway between an intuitive process and an immensely purposeful one. It was like running or climbing up the side of a burning building. You couldn't try too hard, you just had to inhabit it.

<Hello?> Joey messaged. <Lily, or Lilian, is it?>

The woman responded almost immediately. <Oh, hey. There you are. Got it down?>

Lily's 'voice' was calm but somehow edgy.

"I'm not sure," Joey said. Then, <Can you hear me? Still struggling a bit.>

<Crystal clear. You'll get it. I guess you can see how this would be preferable to the message board, huh?>

<I knew I couldn't be...candid on there.>

<Right on. But I could tell what you meant. You're totally oozing with ennui, dude, like a lot of us are at the beginning. And talking to the breathers doesn't help, does it Josephine?>

<Oh, just Joey is fine. But yeah, my sister is kind of a train wreck about this whole thing.>

<You're young, aren't you.>

<What's young? Is 30 young? Can I even say that in the present tense?> Joey said.

<Tense is up to you. Was 30, are 30, will be 30 forever, whatever. Don't let them define it for you. And yeah, 30's pretty fucking young to be dead. I was 21. Did you do it to yourself?>

<What, like am I pre-need? I died kinda suddenly, hadn't ever thought about it before...so no.>

<Oh. And you didn't off yourself?>

Joey held her thought. She scanned the room for movement and noise, and finding none, dove back in. <Of course not.>

Lily didn't reply.

<I mean — not 'of course not',> Joey said. 21, now that was young to die. Too young she thought. <Just, no. I didn't do that.>

<Calm down dude, I didn't kill myself either. Per se.>

<Okay. Sorry. So, do you talk to other BB people? Or, do whatever this is? Thought-speak, like in Animorphs or whatever?>

<I don't know what that is.>

<Oh. I guess that's too old a reference for you...it was book series in the 1990's.>

<Sounds riveting. Yeah, I only talk to the other Boxes anymore. I stay with my folks but they don't get it.>

<How long have you been, um, dead?>

<I abdicated my body about four months ago. I don't really consider it being dead. But some other premies do.>

<Oh, oh yeah> Joey said. <I read about it on one of LifeMedia's internal files; seems like a lot of people are doing this as an elective procedure...>

Lily said, <Oh so you've been hacking into their memos? Naughty.>

<The information just kinda materializes. All a sudden I know all this stuff I didn't mean to.>

There was another pause. Speaking this way was halfway between a conversation and an online chat; it wasn't clear to Joey when she was supposed to stop or start. It seemed possible that her new friend had already lost interest. Still, she was pretty sure she could feel the young woman's presence and attention, like her eyes were fixed on the back of Joey's head. If either of them had still had those things.

Joey continued, <Like, for instance, did you know they're working on a skeletal motor system? And a portable hologram?>

<Really?> Lily said. <They're making a body...What do you know about it?>

<I can send you the schematics I have. They just downloaded into my brain, automatically, like when I was asleep or something.>

<Far out.>

<Yeah. The portable hologram looks like a Roomba.>

<Please send that shit, will you? I'll keep it totally on lock down, I promise. I mean, I do think some of the other BBs should hear about it. It kinda is enormous goddamn news, Josephine.>

Joey transferred the information to her new friend. She felt a sudden rush of relief and cleanliness when the connection was made. It was like clasping hands.

<I'ma look over this for a spell,> Lily said when the transfer was done. <But you'll need to meet some of the other youngins soon, okay? Most of them didn't die naturally like you did, but I think you'll find some stuff in common.>

Joey could feel Lily's consciousness ebbing away of her own.

<Wait, that's it? Please don't go, not yet.> Joey stammered. <I need someone to talk to who actually gives a shit about how this whole thing feels, who knows what it's like; I thought that was going to be you!>

<I do give a shit,> said Lily. Warmth enveloped Joey as the girl continued speaking. <I give a very big shit. This is a very big deal for our little informal organization, though. I need to talk to the other folks about it, trust me. Everyone'll be thrilled to meet someone like you; You're the only person I've heard of who can access this data, believe it or not. I'm thinking it's related to your weird dream symptoms.>

Joey began to compose a response, but deleted it.

<The dreams, the memories, these schematics—Joey, you're some kind of hot shit. I'll be back soon. It'll be two shakes of a lamb's tail, I swear.>

<Fine,> Joey said. <I look forward to meeting everybody.>

<Everyone,> Lily corrected. <We are one; we have no bodies. See you later skank.>

12.

At the top of Jeanette's office building there was a greenhouse and a patio that, on nice days, was packed elbow-to-elbow with smokers. At lunchtime, though, it cleared out and became a great place to while away 30 minutes eating Potbelly and leafing through a paperback or ogling the runners in the gym across the street.

But it was winter, so the patio was bare and harsh. Wind lashed Jeanette's face where she stood, with her arms pressed against the rail and her phone pressed against her cheek. Across the way, the runners were flush-faced and seeping with sweat. Jeanette exchanged squints with them. Her phone rang for a long time.

"You have reached LifeMedia client services. If you know the extension of your desired party, press 3. If you are experiencing an emergency with BrightBox, PlanetStream, RunPlay, or AdventureScape, please press 7 and dial 911 on another phone. To speak to an operator, please enter your ten-digit account number and four-digit routing number."

Jeanette pulled the glove off her right hand , revealing a lobster-red fist of cold-bitten fingers that looked about eighty years old. They reminded her of what Joey's hands must have looked like after the flames devoured them.

Jeanette pressed her phone's touch screen with a rigid finger that had gone stiff at the joints and stuffed the phone back into the crook of her shoulder. She tried not to picture her sister's scorched flesh. Pain helped beat back tears. She tried to focus on the stinging cold in her hands.

"Now paging Steven Milton," the recorded voice said. It was more artificial-sounding than Joey's voice, Jeanette reflected, though the woman who had recorded it had probably been completely alive.

The phone rang for a few moments. An audio track played: hand bells chiming an inappropriately Christmassy tune. Every few minutes the track cut off and a prerecorded male voice announced, "We value your patronage. If you would like to communicate with an artificial intelligence service representative, hit the pound key. If you are experiencing a power surge, nausea, vertigo, or audiovisual hallucinations, please shut down your LifeMedia product and call 911."

Jeanette pounded at the patio fence with her fists to coax more blood into them. The lunch period was dwindling away. Before the day was out she had to draw up four more banner ads for a new vitamin/appetite suppressant and copy-edit a brochure for a frightening-looking automated diaper changer. Louis had been chipping away at the projects since before Joey's accident, but no one had taken the time yet to probe his work for cute, self-conscious misspellings or inappropriate innuendo.

Jeanette chewed her dry lower lip until skin sloughed off and flew away in the wind and sticky blood began to trickle into her mouth. The sting was on the verge of pleasurable, even if the blood tasted coppery and gross. With each new bite the wound grew worse, but beckoned Jeanette's attention even more. She couldn't stop.

The hand bells went silent but the recorded message didn't play. Jeanette knew she was done waiting when she heard a soft click followed by the din of office chatter, muffled by distance and drowned out by the sound of someone's breath.

"Hello, Steven Milton's office, how can I help you today?"

"Hi— uh, is this Mister Milton?"

"Sure is, what can I help you with?"

"Um," Jeanette turned to block the wind from hitting her receiver. "Hi, I emailed you earlier and we met a few weeks ago, my name's Jeanette-"

"Oh, Miss Porter. Or Miz, I guess. Hi."

"Hi. Uh, yeah. So anyway like I emailed you about, my sister's been having these difficulties, she's been-"

"Hasn't really been herself, is that right?" His voice was deeper than Jeanette remembered. It was hard to picture the voice coming from such a soft-featured creature as she remembered him being.

"I, yeah. She's been irritable, disagreeable, gruff...she doesn't like the things she used to. She didn't want to leave the house today, which seemed odd to me."

Milton's pen clicked. "What was she like before her upload?"

"She was really high-energy, outgoing, passionate..," Jeanette said. Her sister seemed too big for words to cover. "She was very active. Loved adventure. She loved it too much, obviously; that was kinda the death of her."

"Oh hey now," Milton said, "Ma'am— Miss! A lot of what you're saying is perfectly normal for the transitional phase, which lasts anywhere from a month to four months after upload. Do you remember— let me put it this way— do you remember going to middle school?"

Jeanette laughed and touched her face. "Yeah, she and I both wanted to blow the place up."

"...Well, yes, I'm sure it was a tough period. I know it was for me. It's the same thing. There's a well-documented tendency toward anhedonia and a sense of a, well our research team calls it a 'dislodged sense of self'."

"Sounds painful."

"Ha, yeah it sounds like a gastrointestinal problem, doesn't it? Ha, ha. So— I think you can see what I'm saying here— it's not unique to being uploaded to BrightBox. We all endure unpleasant changes and transitions in life. Not that being in BrightBox is unpleasant— "

"I get it. But what do I do to make it easier for her?" Jeanette said.

"Just follow our transition guidelines, like in the FAQ."

Jeanette knew the tips. Treat the uploadee normally, vary their placement and their routine, and expose them to a variety of sights, lightings, sounds, smells. Keep up regular activities. But what was Jeanette to do if Joey liked to run and arm wrestle and perform CPR and fight fires? What to do if Joey didn't want her friends to know she was alive, not in the state she was? And what if she loathed the activities she was supposed to be taking part in for her sanity's sake? Was Jeanette supposed to force her? What kind of a life was that for either of them?

"Miss Porter," Milton said, "Are you still there?"

She could hear that he was pressing his mouth against the receiver, probably dotting it with spit from his perfectly bowed little lips.

"I'm here," Jeanette said, but her voice betrayed her by wavering.

"Miss Porter, I really wouldn't be too worried about it. Speaking as a regular guy here, not as a representative of LifeMedia. There are things you just have to let take their own course; I'm sure you're on top of it and doing all you can. It really shows."

"—So I'm a micromanaging psycho?"

"Ha, no! Ha, ha of course not." His laughs came out like sheep's bleats. "And if you think you're crazy, you should hear what some of the other relatives call me about."

Jeanette hugged herself tight and leaned against the greenhouse's glass. Her reflection was startlingly pallid, gaunt at the cheekbones. Her hand automatically wandered to her scalp for a hair-check. It seemed soft enough. Jeanette was finding it hard to eat or drink much with Joey around, her all-seeing camera eyes scanning over food she couldn't ingest. The injustice of it killed Jeanette's appetite.

"Tell me something the crazy relatives do?" she asked creakily.

She could hear Milton rocking in his chair, considering whether or not to violate company policy. Jeanette wondered, was he still wearing scrubs, the baby blues that hugged his ass and cinched in at his waist, the high-v neck with swirls of brown chest hair spilling over the edge? Or was he in office attire, something buttoned tight across his shoulders and rolled halfway up his arms? His chair squeaked and he clicked his pen furiously.

He said, "A man emailed about his cousin. She, the cousin, was uploaded after she got sick and died; she was very old. He's very, very old too. But he told me there'd always been 'a thing' between the two of them."

"A thing?"

"He said they almost consummated their 'thing' in nineteen sixty-five, in a barn in Kentucky where the cousin's father raised chickens. But they balked at the last minute and regretted it ever since."

"The cousin told him that?"

"No," Milton said, easing back from the mouthpiece, "The guy said it was always unspoken, hanging in the air. A meaningful glance over the Christmas ham; a hand that strayed a few inches up his arm when she passed him wine or Andes mints after supper; like that."

"But ohhh— there was an unspoken smolder in those mints!" Jeanette said.

"Ha, ha. Fires of passion— oops, I mean. Sorry."

Jeanette thought it was cute, how he shied away from joking about fire.

"It's okay. Go on." She lifted a cigarette butt from the ground and held it to her nose.

"Ok. Uh, so ok. This guy thinks his cousin is watching him. That she's inhabiting all the electronics in his house. The guy tells me he can feel his cousin's 'spirit' lurking in all the CCTV cameras at the mall, in the microphone on his apartment buzzer, even in the webcam his grandniece bought him."

"Spooky."

"No! He— get this, it's crazy— he loves it. He says he can feel his cousin with him everywhere he goes. He waves at the security cameras. He exposes himself to them. He wrote me, Jeanette, telling me he touches himself in front of his computer's web camera and talks to her. Pretends they're still children making out some barn back in 1965."

"Woah," Jeanette said. "So what was the problem he was calling you about?"

"There wasn't one! He just keeps emailing me, saying he saw his cousin's face in the reflection of his old SLR camera, or in his microwave, and then he asks is there any risk of standing next to the microwave in the nude too long, and does the microwave need to be turned on to sync with her!"

"What does the cousin say about all this?"

"She doesn't know how to get online, for Christ's sake! I doubt she's transmitting herself into inanimate, unplugged objects; she can't send a freaking tweet!"

Milton laughed for real after saying this, a series of explosive guffaws punctuated by airy snickers. Jeanette found herself giggling back.

"So," he said, "Doesn't that make you feel better?"

Jeanette dropped the cigarette butt and consulted her reflection. "Yeah. Thank you."

"Really, what I find most concerning are the dreams your sister's been having."

Jeanette could hear Milton striking papers against a hard surface, maybe lining up neat stacks of forms on his desk. She pictured a novelty wall calendar and a cup of expensive pens. She imagined him in a tie the color of a suburban pool.

Milton continued, "It sounds like she's pretty disturbed by them, which we take very seriously... and then, she's waking up with information she didn't download herself...That's a little worrisome. It suggests maybe someone's attempting to access her hard drive without her permission."

"Should I be scared? Is she gonna be hacked?"

"It's probably nothing. Our internal security is loaded up with safeguards, so the BrightBox user's mind is just, just totally impenetrable. But we do like to keep abreast of potential threats so we can track 'em down and neutralize them, obviously."

"Sure."

"Anyway," Milton drummed on the side of the phone, "I'd love it if you'd stay in touch with us, keep us updated."

"Oh I will," Jeanette said, swinging her hips, "I'll keep you abreast."

"And um. So, now I'm in the awkward position of hoping something minor goes wrong so I can hear from you again," he said.

"Aw, don't wish that." The wind had numbed Jeanette's cheeks to near immobility, and the sun was beginning to dive beneath the skyscrapers.

Milton said, "I'm sorry. Ha. That was bad. I'm the worst."

"No, I mean don't wish that. Joey's been through enough." Jeanette scrunched her hair into a ball at the top of her head. Squinting at her reflection, she wondered how closely she'd resemble her twin if she cropped her hair and grew a little softer in the cheeks. Would a clean-cut white boy like him enjoy that more, or less?

"Besides," she added, "You can see me."

"Hm?"

"Let's get dinner. Do you work downtown when you're not busy cramming brains into boxes?"

"Ha, ha. Yep! Ha! Do you?"

"Sure do." She chewed her lip.

"Want to eat at Baroque's maybe? Maybe Friday?"

"Perfect."

She let her hair fall and reached for the door to the greenhouse. Lunch had long since ended, and the office was probably filling back up with sour-breathed people. Louis was probably tearing his hair out airbrushing a plus-sized model and breaking his fillings on shards of ice. Jeanette reminded herself that the sooner she got back to work, the sooner she could get home and share the news with her sister. Things were looking up for both of them.

"Let's say sixish," Jeanette said. "You make the reservation, I'll bring the booze. And Joey."

13.

Baroque's was a small BYOB restaurant under the train tracks with walls covered in faux-regency-era headboards and enameled paintings, which served fare advertised as "Roman-Asian Fusion". It was dim and windowless, lit only by ornate wall sconces and antique candelabras that struck Jeanette as anachronistic (which Joey was able confirm with a quick image search).

Jeanette found Milton in the back, sitting in a booth below a pale pink recreation of the Ecstasy of Teresa made of plaster. The angel was holding a platter of pork buns over the orgasmic Teresa instead of an arrow. The saint, for her part, was wearing a kimono rather than a habit, and sporting a severe case of titty hard-on. Milton was squinting toward the entrance when Jeanette approached, though he only recognized her and rose to pull her chair out when she was less than a yard away.

Jeanette was bundled up in a wool jacket, with a thick scarf and an oversized crocheted hat. She was spotted with melting snow, her face blushed red from the cold. She slumped Joey's box onto the table, along with a half-drunk bottle of Rumchata, throwing her jacket back and huffing. As she threw her jacket, gloves, scarf, and hat onto an empty seat, she slowly revealed more and more of a slinky dress the color of dried blood.

"Oh, that's lovely," Milton said. Jeanette absent-mindedly brushed slush from the bottom of the dress and smoothed it.

"Thanks. I got it from— I can't remember. It's old."

Milton lifted the Rumchata bottle and swirled its contents around slowly, a tight-lipped grin playing on his face.

"Not sure this really goes with the restaurant's offerings," he said.

Jeanette rested her chin on her hands. "Order a tea to mix with. Maybe a Coke. That'd go."

"It was all we had," Joey said, blue light shining.

He waved away her words. "I'm just teasing. I love Rumchata. How are you, Joey?" Milton said, turning to the Box eagerly like he was addressing his mother-in-law.

"I'm well, and yourself?"

"Oh good, good. I'm glad you could come out with us," he shot Jeanette a glance.

"Oh and it took some real convincing, let me tell you!" Jeanette said, unscrewing the Rumchata cap. She turned around and searched for the wait staff with a worried look. "We need some ice..."

"Oh, yeah. Is that true Joey? I didn't mean to force you out," Milton said. "I thought you maybe wanted to come, since Jeanette mentioned having you join us. I'm sorry."

Joey emitted a warm yellow light that matched the restaurant's cheap sconces. "I was gonna hang back. I thought we shouldn't mix business and pleasure."

"What?" Jeanette said, her mouth half-full of drink.

Milton reached across the table but missed Jeanette's hand. "Oh, no not at all—"

Joey said, "This is supposed to be a date, isn't it?"

Jeanette patted the box. "Oh, but I wanted you to come meet him again!"

"And I'm glad to see you," Milton said, and slapped his menu against the table with finality.

Jeanette took his cue and read over her menu as well. The restaurant was fairly new and hadn't received uniformly positive reviews, but everyone applauded its originality. To Jeanette, the food sounded heavy and nauseating. Her stomach had shrunk over the last few weeks. A waiter surreptitiously fell in beside her and poured ice water into a glass. She diluted it with Rumchata and fortified herself.

The words on the menu weren't sinking in. Her eyes kept quivering and shifting focus to Milton. He was apparently rapt and reading the menu top to bottom. His eyes looked brown now. In the scrubs they'd looked bluer. His cheekbones and eyebrows drew all focus to them; there was probably some mathematical perfection to it that Joey could calculate, if Jeanette asked her. Jeanette tried to remember his height but couldn't. His posture was upsettingly perfect.

"I think I'm getting the Seitan Bolognese," he said. His menu dropped.

"I—hm. I don't know. Joey, what did I have to eat today?"

"Half a cinnamon crunch bagel and a cinnamon Pop-Tart," Joey said after a moment. "A Flintstone's gummy and a Pink Lady Apple."

"Let me guess," Milton said, "sprinkled with cinnamon."

Joey allowed herself to snicker. To Jeanette it sounded as inauthentic as the courtesy-laugh she used to give out when she was alive.

"What, it's good for you!" Jeanette protested. "Cinnamon prevents diabetes and is low-glycemic index."

Milton pushed a candle from the middle of the table. This gave him a more direct line of sight to Joey's Box.

"Are you her dietician now?"

"I think being health-conscious is just another way of being a body fascist," Joey said. A green triangle of light scrolled around her sides. "But still, I find myself keeping track of it. I can't help it."

"She can't help it!" Jeanette emphasized.

Milton poured himself a small nip of Rumchata. When he returned his palms to the table they vastly encroached into the sisters' side. His nails were perfectly square and tidy. That was something Jeanette had always been a fascist about— the nails she would allow around or in her. Most men had atrocious nails, and didn't even think to clean them before reaching into someone's panties. She threw back another sip and wondered why she was thinking that explicitly.

They ordered; Jeanette got a platter of prosciutto sushi with wasabi tapenade. Milton said he was surprised she wasn't a vegetarian.

"That's me," Joey said after the waiter had left. "I didn't eat meat for twelve years."

"And now?" Milton said with a wink. His lips pursed slightly as he did it.

"You're awful," Jeanette said.

Joey said, "I don't mind it so much now, actually. At some point, you have to put your own species first."

He lifted his glass. "To that!" But Jeanette did not join him.

"See what I mean? That's not my Joey," she said. She tilted her head to the ceiling and pushed a growing pool of moisture from her eyes with her palm. "Nevermind. Now isn't the time..."

"It's okay! Jeanette, hey-" Milton dove forward and clasped her free hand in both of his. Soft, just like she'd expected. Slight calluses on the tips, suggesting that maybe he played an instrument.

"You're distressed about me being okay with meat?" Joey said.

Jeanette's chest heaved against her dress. "Yeah! Steven, you have to understand. When she was in third grade, she let all the dogs out of our neighbor's yard. And as soon as she could drive, she freed all the chickens from a farm ten miles away. And during hunting season—"

"Hunting season was rough," said Joey.

Jeanette sniffled and laughed. "The hunters wanted to string her up. So, it's disturbing for me to see someone as principled as she was...is...act so differently. It's the lack of empathy that scares me." She locked eyes with Milton. "Is that so bad?"

"Jean, it's not like I'm a sociopath."

Milton started to speak, but then the food came. They made a show of arranging their napkins and clanging their silverware against plates, of smiling and thanking the staff and quaffing drinks while Joey dimmed to purple. The smell of the food wafted into her sensors; it didn't bode well for the flavor combinations.

"I think that ham is lower grade than Taco Bell," Joey said.

Jeanette's chopsticks froze above her plate. "Really?"

"No, I'm just fucking with you. Go, eat."

Joey let herself sink to near obliviousness while they chewed and conversed. <What are you up to?> she asked Lily.

Her reply came clear and reliable as church bells. <Making us some new friends.>

<Anyone interesting?>

<Let's just put it this way: you are far from the most fucked up. LifeMedia has really screwed themselves some pooches.>

When Joey came back, forty-five minutes and four drinks had passed, and Jeanette and Milton were bent over a plate of lavender chocolate mousse. Both their faces were bright, the corners of their lips smeared with sugary goo.

"Ohh this was a really good choice, great pick," Jeanette was saying. She pushed a fork of mousse into Milton's mouth. "At first I thought this was a pretentious idea, but noo..."

Milton sucked the mousse from the tines and, with a full mouth, said, "I thought you were a girl with some pretenses. No offense intended."

He hiccoughed. Then he brought a napkin to Jeanette's lips, dabbing hers and then his own.

"We're being so...vicarious about this," Jeanette said. "Why don't we just put the kids to bed and act like adults?"

"The kids still need to be tucked in," Joey said quickly. They turned to her slowly. A blank, sunny little smile was still plastered on Milton's face.

In the cab, Joey asked Milton if personality changes were a common side effect of being uploaded.

"Bah," he said, throwing his head back. Joey noticed his hand had slipped into the sleeve of Jeanette's dress. "Personalities change. It's just how people work."

Jeanette leaned her head against the cool glass of the cab window and burped. "Like, because of trauma...?"

"Because of anything! Time, bad luck, good luck, maturity, history...Personality is not a stable thing, to begin with. So if you study...let's say you measure a person's personality traits, both before and after BrightBox. And let's say there's a change."

Jeanette shot up in her seat. "There's a change?!"

"Let's say there is one. Let's just say," Milton winged his free arm around in an infinity shape. "Thing is, the person probably woulda changed in that span of time anyway. The odds are in favor of people changing, all things held constant. So you can't isolate LifeMedia as the cause."

He closed his eyes and rustled his fingers under Jeanette's sleeve. They listened to the cab rattle over a bridge.

Joey said, "There aren't any general trends in how people change, though? No systematic differences between a breather and a BrightBox?"

"Breather?" Milton said. He seemed immediately sobered.

"Ha. That's a good one Joey; good term," Jeanette said to her reflection in the window.

"Yeah, are there consistent differences between breathers and uploadees?"

"Not anymore than with similar medical procedures...Look. It's like when somebody gets hurt. An athlete, say. A lot of athletes get injured and stop wanting to watch sports."

"Makes 'em sad..," Jeanette mumbled.

"Yeah," Milton said. "Smart people with brain injuries stop playing chess. Injured athletes avoid ESPN. BrightBox users sometimes avoid food, drink, smells, physical activities, and in-person social interactions. Because it's not the same as it was."

"So, you admit it isn't the same," Joey said.

"It's not—ugh," Milton grumbled and gripped the bridge of his nose. Jeanette's head lolled onto his shoulder and she murmured sympathetically.

"It's just a different kind of life," she said to her reflection.

14.

Milton was further sobered by the look of the apartment.

"This is gorgeous," he said. "The molded ceilings, the light fixtures..."

He wandered into the bedroom and called back to them.

"I mean, you've done everything you could to obscure the niceness. Covered it up like a dorm room...But damn."

"Thanks a lot!" Jeanette called back.

She was standing at the entrance with Joey cradled in her arms, slipping her heels off. Milton staggered back into the living room with a troll doll balanced in his hand.

"Seriously, how can you afford this on a copy writer's salary?"

"Not a copy writer. I do design and editing too," Jeanette said.

She sat Joey on the coffee table eased into the couch, throwing her feet up. Milton plopped down next to her and dropped the troll into her lap. Laughter tinkled out of her. She poured the remains of the Rumchata into a single plastic cup sitting before them, and they drank.

"Seriously, you're a hired gun," Milton said. "How can you front this place?"

"Our mom left us a lot of money," Jeanette sighed, and pressed her chest against him. He smelled like the tropical version of Old Spice, mixed with hints of Seitan and sugar. She could feel a ripple of bicep against her breasts where he was tensing.

"Dying was the best thing she ever did; said so right in her will."

"Who said that?" Milton asked.

"Me," said Joey. A soft orange beam of light came from her.

"I would never, ever say a thing like that," Jeanette moaned, and nuzzled her face against his neck. "I think wishing death on anyone is deplorable..."

"Unless they're a pig you want to eat," said Milton.

Joey laughed; the sound was twinkling, almost real

"Milton," Joey said when her manufactured giggles subsided, "Do you think the premie BrightBox users are suicidal?"

"What?" Jeanette mumbled into Milton's skin.

"Uhh—we're glad to provide BrightBox service to whomever desires or needs it," Milton said stiffly. "Joey, why do you ask? How do you know all about this stuff?"

"She's been alllll over the message boards," said Jeanette.

Milton pulled the plastic cup to his mouth, then fed it to Jeanette.

"Is that so?"

"I've been talking to some BB's. Or should I call them LifeMedia 'clients'?" Joey asked with an edge.

"She's been fascinated with those premie weirdos."

Milton patted Jeanette on the head and said, "I don't know if you should be talking to them via private message, Josey," he swallowed, "Joey! Sorry. Joey. But anyway, it's not secure."

She glowed. The lights in the hall shut off.

"I need someone to talk to," Joey said.

"That's not the best way to do it...Especially if you've been having connection issues anyway."

"Jean told you about those?"

"Course I did," Jeanette said in a small, high-pitched voice. "At dinner, duhh...where were you, out to lunch? Haaa..."

"Right," Milton said, draining the cup. "Mm. Yeah, I would advise you to not private message or transfer files with anyone you haven't met in person."

"In person. Huh."

Joey could tell he was trying to continue, but Jeanette was pressed against him and running her hands across his chest, and the words seemed to catch in his throat. She could sense his pulse quickening and could see his chest raising and lowering with increased rapidity. One of his hands found its way to Jeanette's neck and wandered down the back of her dress. Joey's dress. She hadn't worn it very often, but still, it had been hers. Jeanette must have forgotten that.

Joey shut the rest of the lights off. The kitchen and doorway went dark. All that remained was the dim outline of Jeanette's face, inches from Milton in the BrightBox's faint orange light. Her lips were opened and her head tilted, and Milton was moving in, one hand suspended awkwardly behind Jeanette's back with the Rumchata cup still dangling in it.

<Fucking breathers,> Joey messaged. She sent a screen cap to Lilian.

<No shame. No goddamned consideration. Tell 'em to get a room and wrap it up.>

Suddenly, Milton bolted.

"I've got an idea!" he turned away. "This'll be good for you Joey!"

"What?" both sisters said, one eagerly, the other with mounting annoyance.

"There's a lot— a lot— of BrightBox users in the Chicagoland area. Pre-needs, post-mortems, pre-mies, all of them. And their families! We have a lot of sales representation here, after all, including yours truly, so naturally there's a lot of clients."

"You mean have a meetup?" Jeanette said. She looked at Joey with unseeing eyes, blinded by the dark and drink.

"No," Milton said. "Like a support group. Weekly, right here in your gorgeous home."

"And we could have their families come too," Jeanette said.

He snapped his fingers. " Joey, you're just like any other survivor of a medical condition or trauma. You need a community. LifeMedia will help you build a community."

Jeanette patted him on the chest and said, "Oh I don't know if she's into it..,"

<I'd be there,> Lily said in the rear of Joey's mind. <He's right, too—there's a lot of us nearby. Not that I like to equate our physical vessels with our selfhoods, but...>

"I like the idea," Joey said. "I know some people I could invite. Set it up."

"Good," Milton said. He sat the cup down. "Good! Good."

"Ohhh, I'm excited," Jeanette mumbled. She looked momentarily back at Joey. "Are you glad I called him? I'm glad I didn't let you discourage me."

Jeanette rolled into him and began working on his buttons. She kissed his neck and cheeks several times, murmuring affectionately, pulling away only to suck air in. He took her chin in one hand and led it delicately to his mouth. Joey's light shut off. She could still see their bodies pressing and twisting against each other.

Jeanette led him to the bedroom by one hand like a child. When she came out of the room a few minutes later the purple dress was half unzipped and hanging around her waist. Her stockings were off and her hair was tumbling down her shoulders. Joey watched her feel her way back into the living room, grabbing blindly in the dark.

"Joey," she called quietly. "Are you gonna be okay? Milton and I are, you know. Going to bed. Do you have enough battery? Do you need anything?"

Joey waited for a moment and adjusted her volume. A passing El train rattled on its tracks outside and sent electricity scrambling across its rails in bright, crackling flashes. Jeanette's golden flesh appeared and disappeared in the short bursts of light.

When the train had passed and it grew quiet again, Joey said, "I want to watch."

She saw Jeanette pull her hand to her chest. "What?"

"Just sneak me in. Please. I want to watch."

She knelt beside the coffee table. "Why?"

"I don't know. I don't know. I just need it."

Jeanette's pupils twinkled in the dark.

"Forget I said it. Nevermind."

Joey could see her sister frowning. Her mouth was still fragrant with milky sweetness.

"Forget it," Joey said again, quieter. Then she felt herself lift off the table, with one side of her box planted firmly in Jeanette's bare chest.

They padded down the hall and into the bedroom. The bathroom light was on and Milton could be heard rinsing something. Joey was slid into her charging station on Jeanette's desk, in full view of the bed. The sheets had been thrown to the floor; a wad of clothing rested atop it.

"You have to be quiet," Jeanette said.

15.

The first time Lilian left, her parents kept her room exactly the way it was. There was an almost religious reverence to their passivity, the way they maintained the wall art, the zodiac calendar hanging on the door, the cracked mirror, the rows of stuffed animals nearly tumbling off her bookshelves. Lilian's mother went in each week with a quick twitch of the vacuum but never disturbed a thing. She cut large arcs around the history textbooks and the musty pile of clothes on the floor.

The second time Lilian left, they opened up her drawers and searched for an explanation. Hoping for a handle of vodka or a baggie of pills, all they found was a diary. A diary in written green gel pen, sealed with a flimsy toy-store lock. A lock Lilian's mother picked open with a hairpin the third time Lilian left.

When Lilian was emancipated after the fourth time she left, her parents just told people she was "gone again". That time, they washed and folded her clothes and packed them into a giant rolling suitcase, which they planned to put in her hand the moment she returned, if she returned. Three months later, they learned she was enrolled at a community college downstate. They unpacked her things, put them back into drawers. They fluffed her pillows and stuffed toys, waited by the front windows every night like sentries or gargoyles.

When a childhood friend from down the street had her 18th birthday, they saw Lilian pull up in a moped and unleash a wave of short blonde curls from a black helmet. Her boots were high and her jacket cropped. A bag with fringe dangled off her body. She put a hand in the air to show she'd seen them, but she didn't exactly wave it.

The next time, she was only back a few days. She showed up on Mother's Day in a dress that seemed to be made of burlap, with big hockey pucks hanging from her ears. There was a scar below her chin, which she tried to bury in her close-cut, golden curls. At dinner, she gripped the table with both hands and the truth came out: there was a debt. She needed money. The parents raised their voices and she stated it again, like a threat. She needed the money, or else she'd get it some other way.

When she left that time, it was mid-morning and her father was washing a bowl of oatmeal, cursing how the stuff turned to cement if you didn't rinse it out fast enough. She didn't make a big show of leaving. She left her college books in the living room where she'd been sleeping, having repeatedly refused her old bedroom.

She was gone almost a year that time. Back downstate, they guessed. There wasn't a word until Christmas, when she wired them an absurd amount of cash. She sent her brother an equally lavish amount in GameStop and Best Buy gift cards, which enraged her parents— how could she give an eleven-year-old so much, and so frivolously?

The money kept coming, in dribs and drabs, always with a curt letter and a tasteful black and white photo Lilian had taken. Sometimes the subject was a tree or a tomb shot from low on the ground; sometimes it was road kill or a nude shoulder (hers?). After a while, an Associate's degree with her name on it arrived in the mail. Her surname was no longer theirs.

The last time she left, they went through her closets and opened all her boxes. They checked under the bed and behind the books. They threw out black lace clothing, thongs, a tight, sports-bra-esque contraption resembling a hair shirt, several cans of black spray paint, and her diary. They threw out the clothing she wore in high school and early college. They pitched piles and piles of love letters, hate letters, poems, court documents, photos, undeveloped film, and her computer. They canceled her phone plan and sent a neighbor boy downstate to pick up her moped, saying it was his to keep.

They found her in a psych ward outside of Springfield. It was a dismal place, the walls all smeared with fingerprints from thousands of ill-kempt people, the floors scuffed with decades' worth of mud, salt, and dark-soled, gummy boots. It was a glorified storage space, a living human burial ground. The rooms held brain injury patients, addicts, cow-town suicides, and people who, in Chicago, would have been allowed to roam the streets until the wind knocked the life from them.

Lilian was there because they didn't know where else to put her. It. They called her "it". She was sitting on a table in the common room, facing out on the yard. She said she'd been there for weeks. Two inches tall, nearly a perfect orb, glowing white like a distant star. Or a tap light. They used to decorate the halls with tap lights; as a child Lilian had been scared of the dark. It was all darkness for her now.

It took a while for them to get access to her paperwork. It was six months after that for her death certificate to become official. Not everyone in her situation even got a death certificate, they were told; Lilian had never died, per se, so it was hard to secure. It felt strange in their hands, so they hid it under a lockbox in the shed. To have it close was too bald an indictment of their parenting.

Whether she was dead or not, they were her beneficiaries. The received an empty apartment in Springfield, a wiped hard drive, a webcam, a metal chest with a heavy lock (which they never opened), a modest amount in student loan debt, and nearly a fifty thousand dollars in savings. According to her bank statements, she once had much more— but the procedure had sucked it all up. The orb was expensive.

They drove Lilian back to their home in the near north suburbs, and put her back in the room. It was as purple, pink, and fluffed as it ever had been. Every sign of the last ten years of her life had been purged from it. It was a tween's room. They sat her orb in the charger like they were tucking her in for bed. Lilian's mother wrapped her spherical form in a knitted cozy. Her brother's friends fawned over her, and tried to play catch with her new body — until their father intervened and locked her inside the bedroom for safety's sake.

Lilian let them play at loving her. It didn't annoy her the way it had when she was alive. A body was just a vessel, and now her body was simple, clean, and undemanding. She didn't have to maintain it, or protect it, or struggle to keep it warm and housed and fed. She didn't have to worry about how she'd keep it functioning. She didn't have to demean it or loan it out to keep it running. No one intimated at misusing it or abusing it. Except for the incident with her brother's friends, she didn't have to keep watch over her body and fight for its better treatment. It didn't shake her awake in the night, quivering, recalling its former pain.

She let them cradle her and clean her childhood room. They believed it was a kindness. Lilian could go anywhere without moving an inch. Without spending a cent. Without giving any piece of herself, for survival or approval or both. Her cameras and sensors were plentiful but she mostly kept them off, ignoring her family and the sickening cotton candy hues of their home. There was a universe of information to attend to. A whole network she could explore at breakneck speed. She was joining a collective of other beings, nirvanically freed from their bodies, one with all knowledge.

She was dead. She was evolving. Her room, however, was not.

16.

Jeanette felt the bed sag. He was close enough to feel his body radiating heat, but too distant to touch without deliberately reaching for him. With men, Jeanette was strongly fortified against seeming desperate or clingy. She found this trait in herself to be sad. A person's desire for love could be the very thing that rendered them unlovable—this reality was horrifically cruel. But it was true, so stayed her hand.

Sleep rolled back over her like a tide, and when she awoke again, Milton was tossing about and mumbling about how dry his mouth was. Jeanette pretended to sleep for a moment, and rolled slowly so her placid, fake-sleeping face pointed at him. There was something enchanting about a person's resting face, or at least Jeanette thought so— she stole as many glances at men's sleeping faces as her no-clinginess policy would allow.

Slowly, she cracked her eyes and threw a subdued grin at him. His head was off the pillow, his skin perfectly airbrushed by the growing daylight and Jeanette's squinting. To her surprise he leaned in to give her a kiss. His mouth was uncertain, lips and tongue relaxed from sleep and release, less demanding than they'd been the night before. She kissed back and moaned very quietly. Air puffed from her nose and she dug her nails gently into his side. He mumbled something.

"Mmm, what?" Jeanette said into his mouth.

Milton pulled away. "Sorry. My breath has got to be terrible."

"Mine's too Rumchata-y to notice."

He wiped his mouth and smacked his lips, surveying the scene. Light kissed his body through the curtains and made Jeanette desperate to run her hands over its angles and ridges. He wasn't a hyper masculinized guy, that was for sure, but his shape was just right, a perfect V from shoulders to hips, tufts of hair in all the right places, going all the way down. Jeanette realized he wasn't staring adoringly at her, he was scanning the room and rubbing grit from his eyes, so she looked away, into her pillow.

"Sorry," he said absently. "I just need some water...Any idea where I left my bag?"

"Um, by the couch?" Jeanette said to the pillow.

"Right. I feel like I need to check my levels," he sprung from the bed, then stood still. Gripped his head. "I might need something to eat actually..."

"Are you diabetic? I, uh, there's some granola bars right there on the bookcase."

He looked around. "Book...case..."

"I mean the milk crates. Over there," Jeanette said, rising. Cold air hit her chest and belly.

Milton stepped across the room, saying, "I'm probably fine, I'm not Type 1 or anything, I just had this thing a few years ago..."

He froze with the granola bar hanging from his mouth.

"What. Is. this."

Joey's little red charging light was on, blinking at the top of her box.

"Oh shit—" Jeanette said.

"How long have you been in here?! Joey! Hey, wake up!" He tapped the box and threw his head back, "Jeanette, you—"

Joey came on. "I didn't see anything I didn't see anything!"

"You can see my dick!"

Joey shone bright orange. The wavered as she spoke, slowly, forcefully; it made the automation in her voice more prominent. "I am just in here to charge. I was online, I turned my sensors off—"

Milton shrugged at them. "Oh yeah? Yeah? How can I know that? Jeanette, you— Do you realize she could have been taping us?"

Jeanette screwed her face into an exaggerated look of disgust and pulled the comforter up to her neck. "Jesus man, of course not! She's my sister."

"Dude calm down—"

"We'll never know!" his chest was puffed out, looking more defined and muscular to Jeanette than it had before. Even his nipples were at attention. She hoped he wouldn't notice her staring.

"I turn off my sensors at night Steve. Otherwise it fucks with my dreams," Joey said.

His arms dropped. "How can I be sure of that? It's the potential, you know? You know? What kind of precedent for trust does this set — Jean?"

"I'm sorry..."

He stomped out of the room. A few seconds later he came back, his bag and coat in his arms.

"If you were a man, and I was a woman, and this was your bro, here, hiding out in the closet, taping us have sex, people would say—"

"—Don't say rape," Joey said.

He sighed. "I know. It's not the same. But I do feel violated! The potential! How do I know what's on your hard drive?"

Jeanette gasped into the blanket. "Jesus, really?"

Joey turned red. "You could probably check, couldn't you?"

His jeans and socks were on. He threw his shirt over his head and popped his arms out the sleeves; He had it on backwards.

"I wouldn't do that. That's a violation, too. LifeMedia Solutions – and I— have the highest possible regard for client's privacy and autonomy," he turned and pointed at Joey, "But you better show the same freaking regard for me."

"Of course, listen Steve, if I had known this would upset you so much..."

He approached the desk and said, "Joey. You're still a person. You have to act like a responsible adult, okay? You can't pull this crap again!"

"We're sorry—" Jeanette whimpered. "I mean— even though I did just bring her in here to charge, and there was no way she saw anything, still. I didn't mean to upset you and it totally won't happen again, I promise. We both do."

Joey watched them gaze at each other pleadingly. She couldn't comprehend how neither of them, with the infinite possibilities of locomotion, had not yet fled the room. There had to be some pull between bodies she could no longer feel.

She watched Milton walk to the bed. He whispered. Instead of turning up her mics to catch it, Joey turned within herself and composed a short message to Lilian. It was becoming easier to do, more automatic. Like the flicker of a thought or the swish of a tail, the words sailed out of her mind and into another. She could feel when Lily was listening, too.

When she returned her attention to the room, the mood had somehow shifted. It was hard for her to discern exactly how or why. Milton was putting his shoes on, sitting at the foot of the bed. Jeanette had slid out from under the covers and thrown an oversized t-shirt across her body; she stood a few feet from him in the middle of the room, watching.

As he left, she called, "So are we still on? Next Wednesday?"

Milton nodded. "Yeah. I'll make a post on the message board about it, call up a few folks in the area. If the department has the dough I'll bring snacks, but you ought to buy a few in case."

"I will, for sure. Steven, thank you. So so much. I'm really sorry."

"If it seems like I overreacted...I'm sorry for that." he leaned in to kiss her. This time it was dry and closed-mouth. "We'll have a fresh slate by next week, alright?"

Jeanette nodded, a bit too obsequiously in Joey's opinion. "Okay."

Milton waved slowly and said, "See you, Joey," and let himself out.

The sisters knew that what had transpired was never to be discussed. In short order, Jeanette scrambled out of the room. The script was clear: she would fuss around in the kitchen for the better part of an hour, eating and reading, then she'd pad into the bathroom without making eye contact and let the water course over her head at a scalding temperature until Joey's surface began to fog and she had to demand loudly that it stop. Jeanette would dress in silence and do her hair in an elaborate way. By then, the sisters could carry on as if all was normal.

Jeanette was already humming to herself by the time her bare feet hit the kitchen's cool, gritty tile. She pushed the argument from her mind. There was so much planning to do! In less than a week her home would be flooded with BrightBox users from all over the Chicagoland area, with their families. Joey would finally have people to confide in, and she'd have bereaved survivors to cry to, to ply with homemade Chex mix and strips of toast covered in Nutella.

She made a note on the refrigerator to buy Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, pretzels, and powdered sugar. Normally list-keeping was Joey's job, but Jeanette wasn't ready to face her yet. Jeanette flashed her teeth at her dim reflection in the refrigerator's surface, and mused to herself that this was almost promising, yes, they were so lucky. And there was still another chance with Milton, if she didn't screw it up.

In the bedroom, Lily was buzzing in Joey's ear. <You know that breather boy is gonna try to scan your hard drive for sex tapes now,> she said.

<I know.>

<Goddamn breathers. And of course he went for the rape analogy. Puh-lease.>

<He thinks he can just force his way into my drive—>

<Don't worry sweetie, we're not gonna let him crack you open.>

<How not?>

<I dunno. Maybe crack them open first?>

17.

They sat in a circle made of real furniture and folding chairs provided by LifeMedia, care of Milton. They all sat, legs jostling, dimly glowing BrightBoxes in nearly every lap. In the center was the coffee table, sponged off and holding a veggie platter. Cookies were being passed around on a blue glass plate one of the guests had brought.

"This is my Thea's recipe," an old man in a worn vest said as he nudged the cookies along.

The BrightBox in his lap flared, a bright purple exclamation mark. "He put too much nutmeg in, I can smell it. I tried to tell him. I don't even let him try to make my zucchini bread anymore, he doesn't knead it well at all!"

Jeanette was hovering at the edge of the circle, but she bowed in to grab a cookie off the plate with a napkined hand. There was scarcely enough space; Milton was sitting on the floor where the TV had been, now pushed into a corner. She took a bite. The flavor wasn't off at all, she didn't think— the problem was the texture. Thea's husband had tried to spare the recipe an egg, or had used white sugar instead of brown. It was close, but too dry. All at once the cookie turned to sand in her napkin.

Jeanette fixed her gaze on Joey, who sat contentedly on the coffee table in the center of the room. This allowed her a full view of the whole lot. They came in many sizes and shapes. Cubes and pyramids and rectangular prisms; spheres, cylinders and amorphous shapes, all glowing in a variety of colors. She thought it was strange to see the other Boxes shining mauve or pastel pink or dark plum; Joey only ever glowed in jewel tones. Their families were many colors and shapes too.

Joey had spoken to all of them before the meeting, so witnessing their corporeal forms was anticlimactic for her. The families should have been a revelation; their features telling of what the Boxes had been like as breathing, moving, bodied individuals. But she cared less and less for that kind of stuff.

"So," Jeanette said, tapping her freshly-painted fingers on the side of the couch, "Welcome. I think everybody's here?"

Milton nodded eagerly. There was a list with the names and client numbers on a tablet he had balanced on his knees. "Yes, yup...uh-huh that's everybody."

<Everyone.> Lily said.

<Everyone.> Joey and several others echoed.

"So, hi everyone, I'm Steven Milton with LifeMedia client services; I've met most of you all or spoken with you on the website...before we kick off, I've taken the liberty of printing us up a schedule for the next month or so," Milton said. He reached for his messenger bag and pulled out a ream of paper. "I'm thinking meeting semi-weekly would be more than sufficient, so that's what we're working with now."

The papers came around the room.

"You didn't mention this to me," Joey said, flashing yellow.

"It's tentative," Jeanette said.

Milton leaned forward. "Now as you can see, next meeting's discussion topic is Family Activities. Jeanette and I—and Joey— we'll be putting together a list of ideas, just fun stuff that BrightBox clients and their families can do together. So if you think of any ideas you want to share before then, you should email me..,"

"Does everybody have Steven's email?" Jeanette said. Nods passed through the circle.

"Ok, so two weeks after that, the topic is LifeMedia peripheral products—"

"Excuse me. Why don't we start with introductions?" an old woman's voice said. It was Thea, the BrightBox with the cookie recipe. Her husband shook his head eagerly in agreement, shaking the jowls that hung below his chin like pendulums.

"Oh. Absolutely. That's right." Milton said, and forced a tight-lipped smile.

<That'll keep them busy a spell,> Thea said.

For the Boxes, introductions were useless. They knew it all already. Thea had been a retired philosophy professor. She'd set up a BrightBox account as soon as the company began accepting registration. She died of a heart attack several weeks after. Beside her, sitting in the hands of a stricken-faced middle-aged woman, was Thompson. He'd offed himself; the gaunt woman holding him was his ex-wife. Joey found it touching that she'd rallied around her former husband and chosen to take care of him, but Lily said it didn't surprise her. She said that when a difficult person became an object, their family couldn't resist dragging them back into their homes, their arms, their lives. She said BrightBoxes made ideal pets. She said the mentally ill made ideal BrightBoxes.

On the couch, Lily's parents were crammed thigh-to-thigh, with Lily's box resting between them. Her father's eyes were robed in tears, Joey noticed, and his nose was bulbous and red— whether from drink or grief, she couldn't tell. Lily's mother looked like a former model whose beauty had recently been blown away in a strong gust. Lily hadn't said much about them.

On the corner of the couch sat Edwidge's box, cradled in the arms of a dark-skinned woman in hospital scrubs. Edwidge's box was a perfect cube that constantly gleamed light green. She'd killed herself too. That was how Edwidge referred to it— killing herself. Dying by choice. She said it happily. It had been a relief. Joey had seen photos of Edwidge before she killed herself. She had been a tiny, big-headed girl of 19, bright brown eyes popping out of a skeletal form, dozens of serpentine wires and tubes covering all of her body, coming out of everywhere; her limbs wasted away to twigs. An obscure uncle had left Edwidge with a trust fund for school. When it became clear she would never, ever make it to any real school, Edwidge drained the account and uploaded herself. Her mother's face was stern, unmoving.

Finally, on one of the folding chairs there was an old lady with hair pinned up in a bird's nest shape. Her cheeks were perfectly round and apple-red, and there was a sweetness on her breath that Joey could detect from the moment she came in. It was a malty, tannin-rich sweetness. She wore a long, flowery peasant skirt but sat with her legs splayed wide open. In between the old woman's legs was a pyramid-shaped BrightBox, her husband's, who thus far had avoided privately conversing with the other Boxes. When it was the old woman's turn to introduce herself, she patted the box and said his name was Carlton. She nearly forgot to mention her own name until Jeanette prompted her.

"Oh silly me," she said, patting her warm-looking cheeks. "It's Andrea, my dear. And I must say, Thea, I'm going to have to ask you for that cookie recipe."

"Maybe you can do it better justice than my husband," Thea said, her box pulsing mauve with each syllable. "Then you'll have the baking duties for the group."

Andrea grinned, and her plump cheeks nearly swallowed up the rest of her face. Joey couldn't shift focus from her.

<My husband never baked ever in my life,> Thea messaged to the other Boxes. <Even when I was in the hospital recovering from my first heart attack, and I begged him for a slice of my pumpkin bread. Absolutely begged. And now that I'm dead he decides to make a half-hearted attempt— and why? Probably so he can get into bed with that old floozy.>

<Cool it, lady,> said Thompson. <Don't you want him to get laid? I wouldn't care if my Anya got drilled a little, after all she's put up with from me. Long as I can watch!>

He cackled in their minds. Milton had begun speaking again but they weren't listening.

<I think it's sweet,> Edwidge said. <They're trying. My mom still tries to read to me at night.>

<It's futile as all fuck,> Lily said.

Joey said, <Even still. This is how they cope.>

Thea asked, <Does your wife do anything like that, Carlton dear?>

But Carlton didn't respond. They could feel his consciousness cued into their own; they could feel the cool satisfaction that indicated their messages were being received by him. But he didn't release any words of his own.

<Maybe he's pissed you called his wife a 'floozy',> Joey said.

<Come on Carl-y,> said Lily. <Come out to play.>

But he didn't.

The families began discussing their own coping. Jeanette, for her part, wrested the conversation from Milton and described her own pain at the revelation that her twin had died, her convulsive joy at the realization that there was a way to spare Joey from the grave, and her longing to feel that things were 'normal'. Milton leaned forward, rapt, with his head tilted like a confused and attentive dog. Some of the other family members murmured in identification.

Lily lit up crimson and whispered in Joey's mind, <What a crock of shit, huh?>

Since they had become friends, Lily had never said a word that was sympathetic to the breather's side of things. Lily's contempt for Jeanette was redoubled by the fact that Jeanette had chosen to upload her sister without prior consent. Eternal life was not for everyone. It wasn't even for most.
Joey didn't know how to respond. <She does lack perspective,> she finally said.

<Why can't they be happy for us? Can't they see that we're better off?> said Edwidge. No one had an answer for that either.

When Jeanette finished speaking, she was nearly shivering with sadness, and was digging her nails into Lily's mother's hands. Lily's father threw an arm around his wife and, with a sniffle, began to recount their own struggle.

"We lost our daughter many times," he said. "The first time, we kept her room exactly as it was. She must have been 13, 14 tops..,"

<Here we fucking go,> Lily said. <we're in for a long one, folks. Someone distract me from this.>

Joey had nothing to offer. She was too focused on the old woman with the pyramid Box. With the sweet, tea-infused breath. With the knowing eyes and the tawny-headed grandchildren Joey had seen in her dreams.

18.

The families talked until the dip on the table congealed and the cookies disappeared. Their limbs grew stiff. Jeanette began kicking her legs and swaying from side to side complaining that she was at risk for developing a blood clot. Thea's husband smacked his lips and said he was hungry, so Milton rose and made an elaborate performance of calling for pizza. He broke from the circle and went into the bedroom to give LifeMedia's credit card number in private; Jeanette felt him squeeze her side playfully as he passed.

"Does anybody want some more tea?" she asked. "Maybe some coffee and Kahlua?"

Thompson's ex-wife, with the stricken face and the dreary sweater thrust a hand into the air and said, "Lord, yes."

"Tea would be lovely," said Andrea.

"We also have a few bottles of a blackberry Lambic," Joey said.

<And about half an ounce of my old weed,> she added for the benefit of the Boxes. Edwidge giggled audibly and her mother asked what was so funny.

"Nothing," Edwidge said. "Just felt a tickle."

Thompson's ex-wife placed Thompson on the chair and followed Jeanette into the kitchen to help with drinks, flapping her open cardigan like it needed airing out. She filled the tea kettle with water and slid the little door on the front of the coffeemaker open. The grounds tumbled into the garbage.

"Maybe I should just take that Kahlua on the rocks," the woman said. She stared down at her hands. "I'm jittery and cracked-out as it is."

Jeanette looked at the woman's hands. They were pale with thick green veins visible at the surface. It was hard to place the woman's age; she could have been 47, or maybe just a haggard-looking 34. Jeanette wondered if loss would cut the flesh from her bones the same way, strip the melanin from her skin and ravage her with premature age.

"Social anxiety?" Jeanette guessed.

"Nah. I've been to plenty of support groups before." She leaned against the sink and counted them off. "Al-Anon, Newly Divorced, Survivors of Suicide, and now this, I guess."

Jeanette dropped a tea bag into a mug with Fozzie Bear etched on the side. "Suicide?"

"Oh, not me," the woman gestured to the living room. "Thompson."

"I'm sorry."

"Pfft. Don't be." She swatted at the air.

"I know it's not the same, but my sister was always doing such dangerous work it kinda felt like she was asking for something terrible to happen."

Jeanette poured a few fingers' worth of dark, sticky Kahlua into a glass and pushed it lamely into the woman's hand. She swirled it around and took a sip.

"Maybe she wasn't suicidal. Maybe she was just looking for an intense experience. That was Thompson, too, 'cept with drinking. Not sleeping. Forgetting to eat. Chased his hangovers with Vitamin Waters and disappeared into the lab for twenty, thirty hours. In Al-Anon they called it 'a high need for sensation seeking'."

Milton strode past the kitchen, freezing in Jeanette's line of sight for a moment. She looked at him expectantly, then he floated back into the den. Jeanette wondered how much alcohol abuse she could withstand in a man before divorcing him. It was hard to imagine ever having the gumption.

"Is that why you left him?" she asked Thompson's wife.

"Eh. Who even knows with these things. There's no single breaking point."

Jeanette pursed her lips. Divorce wasn't even a relief, not for years after it was finalized. It was just a fresh trauma on top of the misery of coexistence. Its lines were cut into the woman's face. She was a felled log with rings and rings of suffering and age. Jeanette and Joey's mother had never looked like that. Divorce had left her positively dewy.

"You wanna know how he did it?" the woman said.

Jeanette didn't. She said, "Sure."

"He worked in a lab developing cements. They had lots of tools for smashing the columns to bits. Thousands of pounds of sudden pressure. Thompson," she hiccoughed, "Put his torso in the middle of one. Blammo."

Jeanette's stomach lurched and rose into to her chest. She forced her eyelids shut but visions of a charred Joey were waiting for her on the other side. There was a sour, vomitty taste in the back of her mouth. The woman sucked an ice cube into her mouth and sloshed it around.

The woman went on, "Guess divorce didn't suit him as well as he thought it was gonna."

Jeanette didn't know how to reply. After an inappropriately long pause, she said, "Did death?"

"Hm?"

"Did death suit him better?"

Thompson's ex-wife sighed. "Nuh-uh. He changed. Really blew a gasket, actually...guess he couldn't ever deal with loss so hot."

"What do you mean, changed?"

"He doesn't want—" she made a limp-wristed gesture in the air, like a flourish, "this. He ponied up half my alimony to get crammed in that stupid electric tube. He wrote me a nauseating little poem about his feelings — and let me tell you, he was an engineer for a reason. His language skills were always cringe-worthy..,"

"But how does he like it?" Jeanette asked. She poured water from the kettle to the Fozzie Bear mug.

"Where'd you put the Kahlua?"

"Here."

"Thanks sweetheart. You want some?"

Jeanette nodded and mouthed the word, "Sure."

The woman stared into the bottom of the glasses as she filled them, as if she was reading the next day's lotto numbers or her tea leaves. Jeanette watched a vein bulge and coil in the woman's neck. Jeanette took her glass and sipped delicately; her teeth were already on edge from all the sweets.

"So?" she persisted. "How did your husband change? Ex, I mean."

"Lots more writing now. Poems on poems on poems. He won't watch his old programs with me. The kids," she said – and Jeanette thought fuck, there's children? – "Thompson notices them even less than he did when he was alive. We talk to him, we move him around, we try and include him in whatever we're doing..."

"But it's like he's not there?"

"Yup, yup exactly. And he used to be a happy drunk!" the woman cracked a small smile and tilted her glass self-consciously. "I've never had a problem with the stuff. A problem with the alcoholics themselves, that's what I have."

"Joey's out of sorts too," Jeanette said. "I can't help but worry they messed up the procedure somehow, and that maybe there's a chunk of her sitting alone on a computer, who knows where-"

"Ladies!" Milton called from the threshold. He'd shed his LifeMedia button-down, revealing a grey t-shirt with an Apple logo. "Pizza's almost here."

"Veggie?" Jeanette guessed, smirking slightly.

"One cheese, one veggie, and one Canadian bacon and pineapple for meat-eating cretins like you," he said.

Jeanette touched her stomach and was about to claim fullness when the buzzer rang and Milton sailed out of the room.

"What a queer little dude," Thompson's ex-wife said.

"He's not."

"Meh. Maybe I should've gone for the weird little fellas like that. Wouldn't have ended up in this mess."

Jeanette considered touching the woman on the arm and telling her she was strong, that she was doing everything she could. That things would be alright. She'd seen plenty of women say and do things like that, their voices bleeding with desperate sincerity, but she didn't think she could pull it off. Lying seemed crueler than silence.

The woman, already small and birdlike, now appeared greatly diminished. "When Thompson offed himself, to be honest I thought it was a sign things were about to get better. It seemed kind of perfect, you know? With Thompson in the Box, I could have him around, and the kids could have him, but we'd never have to worry about him getting in trouble again. I thought we'd been left with all the good parts and none of the bad."

"Totally."

She shrugged. "But it's just his illness in there, nothing else. He keeps asking me to pull the plug. He asked our eldest to put him in the tub!"

"How old—"

"He's seven. What would you do?" the woman put her glass in the sink and ran water over the diluted Kahlua and ice. The cubes shrunk and floated over the edge of the glass.

"I wouldn't turn him off," Jeanette said. "Steven says it's just a phase."

Thompson's ex-wife stared down, her face disappearing into a curtain of limp hair. "Do we know anyone that's been true for?"

"They've done research."

"My husband knows research," the woman said, her shoulders bowed. "He looked it all up. He wrote a bunch of computer scientists and whatnot, and none of them can find any 'research' about those damn things."

"It's a medical procedure, there's got to be research."

"I'm sure they know more than they're letting on," the woman said tersely, "but I'm sure it's not good news. Do any of those Boxes in there look like they're feeling peachy about the whole thing? Did any of those sad-sack suicidal kids and old geezers really seem alive to you—"

"That's my sister you're talking about."

"And you were saying she's a zombie too."

Jeanette stepped back. "No, wait a second. I said she's depressed."

"Those hunks of plastic in there aren't people, let's just face it," Thompson's ex-wife squinted at Jeanette. "No feelings, no desires, they can't touch you, they can't hold you—"

"Which is probably why they're depressed!"

"Maybe it's just us who're depressed. Maybe they're apathetic."

Jeanette downed her drink. It was cloying. When she was done, the woman seemed less infuriated and more resigned, like she was a balloon that had leaked all its air out.

"Thompson keeps trying to talk to LifeMedia, and to other users, and they keep blocking him." Her hands dropped to her side. "I'm just saying something's not right. All this was a mistake, and they know it."

Jeanette sighed and stared into the living room. The old woman, Andrea, was chatting with Milton and holding her husband under her arm. His box was glowing a rich chocolate brown, like a lamp from the '70's. When Milton saw she was watching them, he turned and called out.

"Is everything alright in there, ladies?"

"Just talking sports!" Thompson's ex-wife said. She leaned into the living room, her pale hands gripping the door frame. "I think we should have a March Madness pool when the time comes!"

Milton gushed that this was a great idea and made a note on his tablet. They returned to the room, Thompson's ex-wife complaining that she needed a cigarette.

As Jeanette came over with Andrea's tea, Milton intercepted her with a pat her on the back. He whispered, "This is great! What a crowd, right?"

"Yeah, they're hysterical," Jeanette said.

19.

Lily's parents and Thompson's ex-wife went out for a smoke on the fire escape. Lily's was carried out with them; Her parents had constructed a small backpack for the BrightBox that resembled a baby Bjorn. The remaining guest spread out in the newfound space. Milton and Jeanette were lying on the floor with their legs tangled together. Joey could see Edwidge's mom was beginning to slump from her perch on the edge of the couch.

<Your mom's sleepy,> Joey said.

<Double shifts always do that to her,> Edwidge responded dreamily. <But I don't want to go yet.>

<We'll be in touch,> Lily said, messaging from outside. <It's not like your physical locale counts for shit.>

<I like watching them...I like looking at your guys' relatives and imagining what you all were like.>

<Well, it's not like my husband and I have any familial resemblance,> said Thea. <Though we did grow to resemble each other more as time went on...I do wonder why that happens.>

Thompson said, <Shared environment.> He hadn't spoken much the entire night. <You're exposed to the same environment, eat the same food, and experience many of the same stressors. Of course it crushes you into similar shapes.>

<I suppose.>

<Whatever, old is old,> said Edwidge. <I'm sure you looked kinda like Andrea.>

<I was way more cosmopolitan.>

<No you weren't. Not if you dressed anything like you let your husband dress,> said Thompson.

Edwidge piped up again, <Your sister's really pretty, Joey, were you like her?>

<Who cares,> said Lily.

<We're fraternal, not identical. So not really that much.> Joey explained.

<Aww, but I bet you were super cute too.>

Lily said, <Who cares? This is irrelevant. Haven't we wasted enough of our fucking lives on vanity, on physicality already? I mean Jesus, aren't you guys happy to be free of all that?>

Thea said, <Well sure, but it's had a tremendous impact on how we view the world and our relationship to it. Honestly, I thought losing my body would be more freeing that it actually has been—>

<Ugh, go write a philosophy paper about it then,> whined Edwidge. Her surface flashed pale pink.

<I have, didn't you get it? I emailed everybody a copy!>

<Everyone. Everyfuckingone.>

<Miss it,> an unfamiliar voice said. It was deep and grating.

<Carlton?!> Joey said. < Is that you? Hey buddy, I want to talk to you...>

<Say it. Aloud.>

Joey felt his consciousness slink away and release itself from them. She watched his wife Andrea speaking quietly to Milton and Jeanette, sliding her wrinkled palm up and down the side of Carlton's box the same way Jeanette liked to do with Joey's.

"He doesn't remember so well," Andrea said sadly. Jeanette emitted a soft moan of sympathy, and Milton's hand drifted to her leg.

"Was he having any...difficulties before he passed?" he asked.

"Son, you know he wasn't. He was still at work, sharp as a tack."

"But it's possible," Edwidge's mother offered from the couch, "that his stroke might wasn't the first one. Those things are nasty, trust me, they can eat away a heckuva lot of your brain before you notice."

<Blah blah blah,> Edwidge messaged. <Medicine talk. I'm so bored of it. It's all she cares about, I swear.>

<Typical breather body-centrism,> said Lily.

"Steve, is there any way they can try and re-upload him to his box?" Joey asked. "Do you guys keep a secondary record?"

Milton sat up stiffly and stared into Joey's white surface.

"Oh no. Unfortunately not. It wouldn't be ethical for us to keep, essentially, a secondary copy of a person's mind on our server. You can see how problematic that could end up being." He turned to Andrea and struck the coffee table while he enunciated. "All we can do is back him up temporarily to an external source, and re-upload him."

<Liar,> Joey messaged to the other boxes.

<Are you sure?> asked Thea. <I mean, that ethical argument sounds legitimate.>

Joey scanned her storage drive for the documents. They'd come to her in a flash in the middle of the night. She released copies of the documents , and could feel that Thea, Thompson, and Lily immediately accessing them.

<Do you see?> Lily said. <Page 19, halfway down. They keep copies of us all on a private network. Fucking A. It's fucking slavery.>

Thea said, <Strictly speaking, a copy of us isn't really 'us'. Not any more than an identical twin would be.>

<Aren't we all copies of a real brain anyway?> said Thompson. <We're already different people, then.>

<I'll agree with you there.>

Joey said, <Guys, shut up.>

Outside, Milton was saying, "We can do it at the next meeting if you like."

Andrea held her husband close to her mouth. "What do you think honey bear? If the new software patch doesn't work?"

Carlton just glowed a sick-looking brown-yellow color like damp sand.

"We'll do it," Andrea said. "Bring whatever equipment you need next time, will you dearie?"

Milton nodded eagerly. "It's just a transfer cable and a bigger hard drive," he said.

The smokers came back inside wearing coats and cold-bitten faces. In the baby Bjorn, Lily was flashing bright crimson.

<Are you hearing this? I'm telling you guys, this shit is boned. They don't even let us make our own decisions, just because we're legally dead or whatever.>

<Shh.> said Joey.

The old woman was rising from her chair and brushing crumbs off her skirt. The families were all exchanging the agonizingly slow pleasantries expected when people left a party. Joey found it was shockingly hard to focus on the breathers' movements and words. It was all too slow, too meaningless to latch onto. The realm of words and endless information was ever-swirling at the edges of her consciousness, desperate to crash over her and pull her back in like a riptide.

Soon, Andrea was dressed for the cold and throwing an arm around Jeanette's shoulder. Why did they feel the need to touch? Did they really think it brought them closer? It struck Joey as painfully archaic. After about ten minutes the old woman was finally gone and Milton had settled into her chair.

<We have to liberate all those back-ups,> Lily said. <That shit's unspeakably barbaric.>

<It's enough of a hell to be cooped up like this, I can't imagine how bad the other Thompson is doing. Just waiting. Sitting on a floppy disk out in Plainview or whatever,> Thompson said. <No one there to put him out of his misery.>

Edwidge piped up, saying, <So? How?> in her chimey, childlike voice. She'd had time to provide LifeMedia with voice samples before she died, so her recordings were perfect.

Their families were all preparing to leave. It was all so orchestrated; as soon as one person excused themselves it opened up the floodgates. No human ever did what they actually wanted, it seemed. They just fell into the appropriate position when the spot opened up.

As Thompson and his ex-wife left, he said, <If we're gonna rise up, you broads need to tell me about it soon, okay? Otherwise I'm gonna have my kid pitch me out the window. Seriously, soon as I can manage it.>

<Don't die again,> Lily said. <We're gonna take control of our destinies, bucko, and it's gonna be worth seeing. Hold out a goddamned fortnight, okay?>

<Is that really all it'll take?>

Joey felt Lily's attention shift to her. The same uncanny warmth as before flowed through her. It felt much like a hot pad on her nonexistent neck. She was nearly dizzy. Then the idea came to her, rising up from depths with an unknown provenance.

<His grandkids' names are Henry, Moira, Tad, Susan, and Desiree,> Joey said. <They're all between five and sixteen. He and Andrea have three children. They live in the burbs. They have a big house in the woods with a porch.>

<What is she talking about?>

<Carlton died of a stroke on the porch. It was warm out; it was summer. Andrea saw him. He pre-registered for a BrightBox upload package. He was one of the very first. Lily, do you have the client records I sent you?>

<Sure kid.>

<Number 0004. I think that's him.>

<Let's see...0004, Avers, Carlton. Internal Beta Tester... Wait, that cuckoo clock is a LifeMedia employee?>

<Guys, he can hear us.>

<He was, he helped make it I'm pretty sure,> Joey said, darkening. <But I don't think he remembers. I do. I do.>

20.

The next morning, Jeanette was letting Milton out of the apartment when she found a packing slip adhered to her door. FEX-UP had singularly refused to deliver the package to her flat, citing public health ordinances. She'd been forced to cut out of work early, trudge west to the warehouse in her heels, and lumber back, bogged down.

It came in manila wrapping paper with medical tape on all its corners. The heft of it was surprising, and with Joey in tow Jeanette didn't have a free side to favor as she carried the package down the street. There was a red sticker on the bottom of the package with little medical symbols and a warning in boldface type. Jeanette tried to carry it delicately, so the material inside wouldn't make a sound.

Joey remarked of the sticker, "You could do something with a layout like that for your work. It's very attention-grabbing."

"But for what, though?"

"A product with a pseudo-medical purpose. Like that new yogurt with the dopamine in it."

"Happy Belly," Jeanette said. She stared forward. Rows of warehouses in states of disrepair and abandonment; a water treatment facility with a smashed-up fence; bushes suffused with litter. "We lost that account."

"That's too bad. The coconut flavor was to die for."

Jeanette sighed and slung the package over her hip. Part of her wanted to rage at her sister's flippant remarks, but mostly she was just tired. If she slipped on a patch of black ice, she realized, both the package and the BrightBox would go flying, maybe even land in the street where the semi-trucks rushed past. Even this possibility crossed her mind with a feeling of resignation rather than panic.

She had walked another half a mile before Joey spoke again. She said, "What are we going to do with it?"

Jeanette stared ahead. "I thought that should be left up to you."

The speeding cars blew wind into her face. Jeanette felt dots of snow (or perhaps rain) dab her cheeks and scalp.

"Really?" Joey said after a while.

"What do you mean, 'really'? Of course. It's yours."

They crossed a bridge spanning the highway. Joey was able to estimate, from Jeanette's present pace, how long it would take them to get home. The sun (already obscured by a grey sky) would be down, and the temperature would be dropping steadily to freezing. In the morning there'd be powder. The air would be dry; people's noses and lips would be chapped. She didn't tell Jeanette.

They walked under the Brown Line tracks. The pavement was permanently dark from filth and moisture. Joey saw a man in a wheel chair and a puffy army jacket, huddled behind a broken shopping cart with his legs tucked into a sleeping bag. Jeanette did not.

"How are you feeling?" Joey tried.

"My heels are all raw."

"I'm sorry." Still her sister was staring straight ahead. "Maybe you think I don't have sympathy for those kinds of problems, but I do. I remember them."

Jeanette's head tilted. "But not empathy. Not anymore."

Fraternal or not, they'd been plagued by many of the same physical complaints over the years. Overbites. Brittle hair. Each had one leg noticeably shorter than the other, though that had never kept Joey from jogging. Thin arms and shoulders, like birds. The only difference was that Jeanette had more cavities and Joey had an ankle that swelled— that was it.

"What did I do wrong?" Joey asked, trying to sound mildly incensed.

"Nothing," Jeanette looked down at her. "Are you kidding? You think I'm mad?"

"Yeah...a little."

Joey tried to imagine what her conduct at group had looked like from the outside. Did it seem like she was checked out, antisocial? Not participating? Did it look like none of them had enjoyed it? Had she been too enthralled, ignored the breathers too much? She wasn't sure at all. She couldn't read it on their faces.

"Baby," Jeanette said, and squished the BrightBox into her side, "I'm glad you made some friends. Of course."

<Huh. I guess they can tell that we're talking.> Joey said to Lily. Warmth trickled down into what felt like her stomach.

"I just wish I could be there for you, like they are," Jeanette said. "Like, I wish you felt as safe talking about it with me."

Joey felt her sister's pulse quicken.

<She needs someone to talk to,> Joey said. <Something's always wrong.>

Lily's voice rose up, <Oh boo-fuckedy-hoo. Let her call her boyfriend.>

<Won't help.>

<That's part of the deal, isn't it? Tit for chat?>

<It's not an exchange.>

<It always is.>

Jeanette was struggling to adjust the weight. The package began to slip off her hip. She slid it up again. The contents sloshed around inside. Joey heard Jeanette make a little whimper of disgust, and saw her chin tuck in.

"That's what you're sad about," Joey said. "The ashes."

Jeanette stopped at a crosswalk and said, "I don't want it. I just wanted to throw it, just fucking pitch it over the bridge— and definitely not watch it burst open on the cars."

"Might cause some accidents, you could get in trouble for that. Can they run DNA on—"

"Shh. Come on."

A grimace surfaced on Jeanette's face, receding into steely resolve immediately. Her jawbone was working furiously to hold her expressions at bay.

<Don't engage,> Lily warned. <It'll only get worse; you shoulda seen what my folks were like at my funeral. Nobody should have to speak at their own wake. Christ, was a clusterfuck that was. I have this senile old aunt who thought I was possessed, went after my Box with the holy water, Jesus.>

<There isn't gonna be a funeral.> Joey messaged.

"Jean," she said audibly, "there isn't going to be a funeral!"

Jeanette frowned and stopped in place. "Yeah? Am I supposed to keep this... on the mantle then? Maybe get a nice decanter and some food dye, make sand art?"

"No, no. I know what I want," Joey said, finally understanding.

She thought back to their father, what he had been like each of his parents had been lost. She remembered having to wear a lacy dress with hard-soled shoes, twiddling her fingers in a nasty mauve chair in a church basement, she and Jeanette staring at a coffee table with a framed photo of Nana, or Pap-Pap. She remembered a big, shining jar with elaborate etchings on the sides. Resting on the floor of the church lobby, belly-down, facing Jeanette in the same position, a stack of coloring books open between them.

But when she tried to advance the memory forward...Joey got a hospital bed, and a feeding tube, and muscles that were slack as cooked spaghetti, worried grandchildren huddled around her. A white, blonde baby on her lap. The old woman, out of focus but recognizable, mopping Joey's brow with a damp washcloth. Incontinence. Blinking for yes. Blinking even more for no, god no, please make it stop. Trying to say "love" and hearing it come out as "turnip". No one should have to attend their own funeral.

"I want to be scattered on mom's grave," Joey said. "Do you know where she is?"

Jeanette's chest rose rapidly. She sucked air in through her teeth.

"Yeah. Of-Of course."

She tried to keep walking but slowed immensely. Joey tried to re-calculate how long it would take them to get home. The numbers were thrown off yet again when Jeanette stopped under the awning of the CVS, and sat the package down so she could pull Joey to her chest.

"That's a beautiful idea," she said, her voice rich with gratitude. "That's perfect."

21.

They didn't know their mother's exact timeline. What they knew was pieced together from snatches of conversation, comments thrown out over the phone, artifacts she'd left in shoeboxes and at the bottom of shelves, and the hearsay of ex-boyfriends.

She went to college at Antioch in the early 80's. She moved to St. Louis to take a job pushing paper. There was a man. She'd been tanning on the side of the road, at the edge of a park, her skin glinting and golden, staring into a cloudless sky with her lips parted just so; She had a bicycle identical to the man's, a sea foam Schwinn Collegiate with a book clamp on the back. His was crammed full with books— Dostoevsky, Ellison, Larsen. Hers held a floppy, water-stained copy of Cosmopolitan.

Their father was dense with such memories. The sisters wondered whether a person was doomed to be an amalgam of their forebears.

He had pulled over to greet her.

"We have the same bike," he'd said, lamely.

And she'd pulled her glasses from her eyes and read him like an epitaph. The years that followed were harder for the sisters to imagine. Trips to the caves. Trips kayaking. Trips to Montreal, San Francisco, New York. A few grainy photos of their mother slathering cocoa butter on a burgeoning belly alight with painful-looking red stripes.

It didn't matter that it defied belief — there Jeanette and Joey were, bad ideas made flesh. It had happened exactly as they'd been told. Such different sets of genes could be combined, somehow. Underneath they were made of the same stuff.

After they were born and potty-trained, she ran off. No one could pinpoint a reason, yet no one was surprised. They watched Kramer versus Kramer and imagined their mother feeling the same. They watched Rosemary's Baby and imagined their mother feeling the same. They watched Six Feet Under, and when Claire got an abortion in season four, they imagined their mother feeling the same. It couldn't be helped.

Where did she go? Back to Antioch for a while, with a former pottery professor. Then up to Kalamazoo, where she met a fisherman. Then to State College PA, where she pushed more paper and nearly had another child.

She went to Italy for a while, when the sisters were seventeen. She sent them postcards from the catacombs. She became obsessed with the little girl whose body was eerily, perfectly preserved, whose eyes seemed to flutter open at times. She sent them many photos and tried to divine what the girl's embalmer had known that modern science did not.

Finally, Joey tore the postcards up and threw them in a bin. "It's just wax," she said. "Same as the Catholic incorruptibles. Masks made of wax. Peel it back and there's a rotted corpse underneath."

Their mother returned to America when the money dried up and she caught a disease, but not before a lengthy pit stop in Gabon. Then she settled in her ancestral home, a little township in the hills outside of Dubois, PA. She married a white-haired man in a simple ceremony in the grass behind an old one-room schoolhouse. Jeanette attended the ceremony; Joey couldn't make it. A bit more time passed and their mother was gone. The new husband didn't get any of her money. They were all aghast at how much she had.

She was buried in an old cemetery on a hill crowded with trees, at the back of a church yard. Joey had never been. When Joey tried to remember the last time she'd seen their mother, she saw flashes of a small ranch-style house with bright red carpeting and a wilted-looking Christmas tree. Their mother was smoking and hacking up a storm on her patio. Then the memory ended and was replaced by hazy images of children on swings, an old hound dog with a bum leg and a choke collar. Carlton's memories.

22.

Jeanette rented an old Kia on the cheap and left work early. The box of ashes was in the back seat, still in the box with a blanket thrown over top. Joey was sitting in the front seat, strapped in like a toddler. They were in western Ohio when Jeanette's phone rang.

"Shit, it's Steve. Why is he calling?"

"He's got a major boner for you," Joey said. The words sounded unnatural to her as soon as she said them.

"Ugh, but why is he calling and not texting or pinging? Who calls anymore? Unless it's something serious?"

"Driving and using the phone is still legal here," Joey offered.

Jeanette answered. "Um, hi?"

"Jeanette, hi there, it's Steven."

"Yeah hi, what's up?"

"Well, I had two things I wanted to ask you about real quick. Sorry for calling, by the way, I just figured it would be faster than typing it all out."

Jeanette looked over to Joey and rolled her eyes. "Sure. Shoot."

"Ok. So, one: LifeMedia is having this big conference at The Drake all weekend, and I was wondering if you'd be interested in going to the after party with me."

She shot another look at Joey, barely consulting the road. "After party?"

"Yep. Free drinks, free appetizers, free...I don't know, zip drives with the company logo on them? Pens? Whatever people give away now."

Jeanette chuckled. "That sounds lovely, I could use some cheapo corporate pens. And I would go...but."

"I'm sorry, I know it's late notice or whatever."

"The thing is," Jeanette leaned her head on the steering wheel and stared at the road. She blew hair from her face. "Joey and I are on a bit of a field trip...to sprinkle her cremains."

"Oh. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry."

She sighed into the receiver. "No, it's fine. We'll be okay. It's just, we're halfway to Pennsylvania right now. Otherwise we'd totally wanna go."

"Sure, of course," Milton said, his voice easing into its professional tone. "I'm sure this is an immensely challenging time for both of you, and I apologize if I came across as flip, or insensitive-"

"Yeah, no. You're fine. We're gonna be okay." Jeanette said. Joey saw her lips turn up. "So what was thing number two?"

"Oh! Yes, well, I spoke to the other LifeMedia service representatives about your sister's problems. The visions, the unwanted information, and so on, and I think we've devised a solution."

"Oh yeah?"

"What's he saying?" Joey said, turning her microphones up.

"We need to re-back her up to an external drive, very temporarily, and reload her to her BrightBox. Run a quick diagnostic, delete any malware on the hard drive. Not her memory or cerebral cortex storage, mind you."

"Okay," Jeanette drummed her fingers on the phone and steering wheel. Joey's cameras could pick up that her pupils were shrinking slightly.

"This will take ten minutes tops. We'd do it at the next group meeting. I mean, I'm bringing the link cables and the hard drive anyway for Carlton."

"What's he talking about?" said Joey.

Jeanette said, "Okay. Joey and I will discuss this..," she turned to her sister and nodded very slowly as she spoke, "and we will get back to you. I'll text you. Or call, maybe."

"Yes, sure, whatever! Any time! Have a good trip — or at least as good as is reasonably possible given the circumstances..,"

She grinned out the window. "Thanks. We'll be fine."

"Can I see you before the next meeting?"

"If you're sure you aren't mad at me anymore."

"No, not at all," Milton said, haltingly. "I overreacted. I owe you a big mea culpa on that. And I'd like to see you again, as soon as you're up for it."

"—What's he saying?"

Jeanette batted her hand at the air. "I would too. For sure. But, Steven, can I ask you something?"

"Yes?"

"You promise this back-up thing won't hurt her? Like, there's zero risk she'll lose anything?"

"Back-up?"

"Absolutely. This procedure is completely safe. Again, LifeMedia has no access to, nor control over, the contents of a client's mind. All I can do is check the hardware and get it running better. And that's what we'll do. She'll feel so much better, I promise."

"Thanks. I'll see you. I'll text you," Jeanette said, and tapped her phone off.

By then Joey was glowing red-orange like an ember and demanding to know what was going on. She spoke in a crackling, severe voice that sounded more automated than usual.

"What was he saying? What does he want to do?"

Jeanette explained as they crossed the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

Lily whispered in the periphery of Joey's consciousness. <That fucker just wants to see if you made a video of him and your sis banging.>

<I know. And I never said these visions bothered me, did I? I never said I didn't want these memories. They're the ones that think I need to be fixed.>

<Stupid breather-ass ideas of how consciousness is supposed to be. They're jealous. Your mind can do more than theirs and they can't goddamned stand it.>

She was fuming with anger. Joey could feel it, churning like stomach acid in her esophagus.

<I don't want them to fix me,> she messaged. <I like it like this.>

<Speaking of which, any new info?>

Joey released a few private LifeMedia emails to Lily's drive. They had automatically downloaded into her own hard drive earlier that morning.

From: Ttripani@lifemedia.com

To: [BCC]

Subject: Peoria Samples

Hey everybody,

I just ran a fresh diagnostic on the secondary consciousness samples at the Peoria and Baltimore warehouses and it looks like there are some marked cognitive declines, particularly as regards cognitive fluency and task-shifting, though as we all know the recall problems are the same as they were before. Maybe a little worse, definitely there's slower retrieval times and less overt recall (recognition seems to have not declined? I'll have to talk to the Doc's about how to measure that).

Accordingly, I for one propose that we move these folks into external vessels or something. Giving them some external stimulation should stave off the deterioration and might help allay some of the emotion-regulation issues we've been anticipating...thoughts?

-Ted

From: DAvers-smith@lifemedia.com

To: [BCC]

Subject: Re: Peoria Samples

No, we can't take the back-ups outside. As Ted just mentioned, the ancillary minds are not emotionally regulating properly. Look at the doctors' reports, everyone, and you'll see how disturbed these samples are getting. It's a major liability to let them loose. We can't risk it just for the sake of salvaging some of their rudimentary memory skills and etc.

-Dani

From: SM2@lifemedia.com

To: [BCC]

Subject: Re: Re: Peoria

Dani, by 'rudimentary memory skills and etc", don't you mean those people's SANITY?

-M

From: DAvers-smith@lifemedia.com

To: [BCC]

Subject: Re: Re: Re

What I mean is that these back-up consciousness's would prove insufficient replacements in the event that any of their BrightBox users suffered a terminal hard drive failure. Read the doctor's report. Honestly, I think it would be best and most humane to terminate this wing of the project, but obviously we are bound to hold onto these subject's records just in case. It's highly unfortunate, though. We're wasting an immense amount of space and effort attending to the needs of some miserable, corrupted files.

-Dani

From: Ttripani@lifemedia.com

To: [BCC]

Subject: Skeletal-Augment Peripherals for Peoria Samples

Dani, et al:

Why don't we just put these corrupted files into the skeletal samples or the holograms? Our beta-testers can obviously speak to the utility of such a tactic. We might be able to make some questionably drinkable lemonade out of these lemons, still.

I think we should talk to Carlton about this.

-Ted

<This is so fucked. This is some fascist breather-centric mind enslavement bullshit,> Lily said.

<I know. I know! But check this out,> Joey said, and sent another file. Lily's temper immediately cooled and her attention pulled away from Joey, into the documents.

From: [redacted]

To: DAvers-Smith@lifemedia.com; SAvers@lifemedia.com; ASmith@lifemedia.com

Subject: Network

Hey guys,

So I've been having some issues with my Box-to-Box networking upgrades. Namely, there's a lot of interference. What I'm wondering is... are the ancillary minds hooked up in some way? I know we have a lock on them and they'd have no way of navigating the interface since we didn't install them with drivers...and since they're kinda bonkers...but it sure seems like they're making an attempt to access our network.

We'll have more and more issues the longer this goes on. Myself especially, for obvious reasons. I think a meeting is in order—when will you all be at our branch next?

And, by the by: I'll tell Ted to leave Carlton alone. I'm sorry about that.

-[redacted]

In the car, Joey's BrightBox had cooled to a bright blue and Jeanette had finished explaining Milton's proposition. After a long pause, Joey said, "That sounds like a good plan. Tell Milton we'll give it a try."

23.

Jeanette pulled the rental car onto a hill behind the church and stepped over the wrought-iron fence into the cemetery. Finding the grave was easy; it was as though no time had passed since the funeral at all.

She sat Joey and the box of ashes on a headstone and knelt before a rectangle of dark blue marble. There was no one in the church parking lot. The community wasn't the type where people walked from place to place— not anymore. Sinnamahonig's native population had aged in their cabins and trailers, and withered, and been carted off by relatives to hospices and senior care homes all over the state. The community was all campers now— people who drove in wide SUVs to newly-built lodges, who didn't walk or explore the gravesites.

Jeanette had bought a spade with a floral handle from a Kmart fifty miles back. She darted her head around the cemetery once more before kissing the grass with it, and Joey began playing Regina Spektor's "Lacrimosa".

"We keep on burying our dead. / We keep on planting their bones in the ground. / But they don't grow, the sun doesn't help. / The rain doesn't help."

Jeanette was afraid of digging too far. She'd been there, she'd seen the coffin edged into a hole the height of a grown man, but she doubted the stability of the wet dirt and the hills that hugged the earth, serpentine ridges running along the Appalachias. It seemed anything could have disturbed the turf and pushed their mother out. Jeanette's eyes itched and she rubbed them with the elbow of her blouse.

Joey was tracking the atmospherics. "Won't rain for hours, take as long as you like," she said when the song was done.

"Oh sure, I'll really savor it then," Jeanette said.

Sinnamahonig had rattlers. It had bears and elk. They would have loved the town as children. They could have spent summers scissor-kicking in the creek, building dams from rocks and fallen logs, catching crawfish and tadpoles and carrying them around in plastic buckets. These were all activities their mother had raved about when she was in a wistful mood.

Once, she had promised them a vacation in the hills. Once, she had promised them her childhood home. But she hadn't left it to them.

"Do you think he comes by here a lot?" Joey asked. Jeanette knew that she meant their mother's husband.

"I bet he promised to visit every day," she said. "But that probably didn't last, you know?"

"Well, I wouldn't begrudge him that. It doesn't make any difference if he stopped coming."

"Sure it does. If he doesn't come, that means...he doesn't need to come."

"But what difference does it make?"

"None, of course. Of course none." Jeanette pulled a worm from the hole and sat it in the grass a few feet away. "But I'd like him better if he was so overcome with grief that he needed to be near her. Doesn't that mean something? Just a smidgen?"

Joey's white surface was glowing a faint yellow the color of the sun. She said, "But you won't be close to my grave. What's the difference?"

All she could see of Jeanette was her feet and her shoulders leaning into the hole. "It's different. Having it close would, like, torment me."

"Me too."

The box of cremains sat several inches from Joey. Joey was thankful its plastic seal hadn't been broken. She thought of flames licking her body, but pushed it from her mind. It was like Xing out of a tab, just as Lily said.

"What would Mom think of this?" Joey said.

Jeanette spoke into the dirt. "She'd say: give the ashes to your father. But he wouldn't want them."

"I think she'd find it pointless."

"I don't think she'd say that."

"No," Joey said. "I just bet she'd think it."

Their mother had always been in flux. Always a new home, new vocation, new partner. She spouted new attitudes and aspirations in every phone call, every birthday and Christmas until the day she died. Sometimes, she was praying for them and hoping for a new child; sometimes she was contemplating a vow of poverty, or silence, or chastity, or considering a soap-making business. Each new life was a salvation that didn't deliver, at least not on earth.

"It's funny," Jeanette began, "But I can't really imagine what she'd say anymore. The longer she's been gone...the less sure I am of what she was like."

"That makes perfect sense," Joey said.

"But do you know what I mean?" She sat the spade down and turned, her jeans all stained with mud.

"It's like...there's no new data to update your memory of her. It's like this mental simulation. When she was alive, you could predict what she'd do, and that prediction could be updated by what she actually did."

"Well yeah, but. It's weird. Now that she doesn't change, she's actually harder to know." Jeanette slumped her shoulders.

"You did all you could," Joey said.

"I know. But the memories get so splotchy. Like she never existed." She pondered this a moment, tracing the sky with large brown eyes, then added, "Except for you. You remember. And you're kind of like her, sometimes."

Joey glowed dark blue. "She existed. Nothing can change that."

<Good one.> Lily said. <You sound just like one of them.>

Jeanette rose and approached. She wiped her muddy hands on her pants. Joey could detect a hint of perspiration on her skin, though it was only 45 degrees and Jeanette should have been wearing a coat. When she put her hand on the box Joey felt a ripple of electricity up her spine.

<I swear, I still have a motor cortex,> Joey messaged to Lily. She could feel that Lily was sorry to hear it.

Jeanette clutched the box. She asked Joey if she wanted to be carried over.

"No. Just do it so I can see," Jeanette stepped aside and faced here sister, looming over the hole. "That's fine. Yeah."

Her sister's face was slicked with wetness. Her hair hung limply from its ponytail and there were faint purple circles under her eyes. The box of cremains hovered in her hands over the grave.

Everything was in there. Joey's bones. Her ruined skin, once dark and soft like their father's. Her eyes like maple candy, melted into gelatin. The nubs of her quick-bitten nails, and the stubble in her underarms. There was her face, her own face, staring back at her, sad and sagging, beginning to age. Her DNA. The physical material of her brain, the actual byzantine paths and crevices, the jelly, the tissue all bundled up and coiled like a snake, the seat of consciousness, now uninhabited.

Jeanette went to tear the box open, then paused.

"Are we going to end up like her?" she asked. "Or like Dad? "

Joey's silence lasted long enough to raise Jeanette's pulse.

"You won't," Joey said at last. "You'll learn. You'll live long enough."

And it was a blessing that Jeanette didn't take issue with her wording.

Jeanette ripped open the envelope and pulled the cardboard box from it. She lifted the top and pulled out a clear plastic bag with a seal. Inside was fine grey powder. It didn't look the way Joey's research had led her to expect. Shutting her olfactory sensors off, she watched Jeanette pull at the bag for a while, turning it over and over, trying every seam, eventually huffing and starting a tear with her teeth.

The cremains billowed out of the bag and into the opening of their mother's grave. Some floated away on the wind. Jeanette dropped the box, bag, and envelope after giving them all a final shake, and got down on her knees and started to throw dirt over the mound of ashes.

<Think it would cheer her up if you played Taps right now?> Lily chuckled.

<Shut the fuck up,> Joey said, tightness in her nonexistent chest.

<Sorrrry, sorrry. Hey, I found old boy's address,> Lily said. The information floated over into Joey's drive.

It was a real estate listing for a home in Palos Park, IL on 121st St. A southwest suburb on the edge of the forest reserve. Carlton had owned many apartments in the city over the years, but this was all that remained. Joey thanked Lily for the data and shut off their connection. She watched her sister scoop the stray ashes back into the dirt. She packed the mound carefully and strode away.

"Where are you going?" Joey called.

She heard plastic slam against metal, followed by the sound of the Kia's doors opening and closing. Jeanette returned from behind the church, her hair pushed back in a headband, the spade gone, and a clutch of daffodils in her hand.

"Where did you get those?"

"Don't make fun," she said, walking up to the grave. She stuffed the flowers into the fresh dirt, fluffed them, and said, "I know, I know— this'll bring attention, but it makes the dirt look less suspicious at least."

Their mother had been pretty. It was unremarkable to note, and Joey hated reflecting on it, but it was true. It was etched in Jeanette's face.

Beauty had cradled their mother from all kinds of consequences. It had kept her forever in company and comfort— but beauty didn't earn the same privileges anymore. Especially not for a woman of color. When she reflected on her sister's beauty, Joey felt pangs of sadness and boundless regret. Jeanette had the face of someone who deserved everything. But the skin and circumstances of someone who'd never get it.

"I never thanked you," Joey said suddenly, like she'd solved a particularly vexing equation.

Jeanette put her hand to her chest. She looked away and shrugged, like it was nothing, like she knew she'd never get what she was owed.

24.

Jeanette was too tired to drive all the way back to Chicago. She found a hotel outside of Youngstown with a continental breakfast and a hot tub in the room. For hours she was neck-deep in suds, leaning back with her neck tilted to the ceiling. Joey could see blood coursing in the arteries of her neck. Watching it was soothing. Joey was relaxed, watching her sister's pulse while looking up the fastest route to Palos Park, when it happened.

The light seemed to black out. Joey felt a chill, something like goose bumps running up her arms. She tried to stop it. Tried to tell herself she couldn't have goose bumps, she didn't have arms. They were in the ground, she told herself— in little bits and pieces. Tiny crumbles of her bones, melted skin, arteries that once chugged with blood, hair that burned with a thick, cloudy chemical smell, nails and teeth ground up into specks. There weren't any fingers digging into the mattress; she wasn't clawing into her flesh to beat the tears back, which once had been her tactic.

But it wasn't possible now. There was nothing. Her nerves had been severed, the legs and arms they had controlled were spent. The tingling, cold feelings were not real. The brain was plastic. Was the BrightBox? Joey figured her neurons were leaping, crossing into the motor cortex, taking over useless space and devoting it to something new. But it still felt like having a body. Her body clenched up and twisted on itself, her muscles burning lactic acid. Or so it felt. She couldn't reason it away.

Light streamed across the room. Red, green, blue, yellow, orange. Joey heard splashing, sloshing water. Joey strained to message Lily, or Edwidge, even to email Milton. Tried telling them to cut the cord. Sever the part of her brain that steered her body. Get rid of it. She didn't want it. It was all tingling, burning, aching, so tense it seemed the blood vessels would burst and run. But there weren't any blood vessels. Jeanette picked her up.

"Joey, Joey are you okay? Hey? Hey! Joey—"

The room came into focus. "I...think so? I just nodded off for a second. Maybe you should plug me in."

Jeanette's mouth hung open. Catching flies. "...You were screaming."

"I was? No I wasn't. Really?"

Her sister examined the base of the Box. She bit her lip and said, "This isn't okay. It was bloodcurdling. Gave me the chills."

Jeanette held up her arm. Her flesh was riddled with bumps, hair standing at attention.

"Please," she said, "Just tell me what happened."

"You wouldn't understand." Joey said. Her voice was flat. She emitted no light.

"Was it another hallucination?"

"I can't even begin to explain it to you."

Jeanette's head tilted. "Because I'm a breather?"

"Yes!"

She eased onto the mattress. "Well I need you try to describe it— just try. So I can call Milton—"

"Surprisingly big dick, for a guy his size," Joey said.

Jeanette pinched the bridge of her nose and squinted down at the hotel room's musty carpet. "What did you just say?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. That was dumb."

Jeanette looked back at the Box. "I need to call Milton, right now, and tell him all the problems you're having"

"Fuck him. Fuck all of them," Joey said. "They know what they've done. They did this shit on purpose. Why would you keep someone's motor cortex intact when they don't have a body to use it on?"

Jeanette thought back to the LifeMedia paperwork. "But you don't have a motor cortex...They said they don't upload that."

"Well they goddamned did!" Joey sputtered, her voice diving down a register, gaining an edge. The BrightBox flickered between red and purple. "I can feel my fucking legs and arms and— shit! Did you get some crap on my camera? It's all...smeary."

"What?" Jeanette reached for a towel. "I don't see anything on there— are you maybe hallucinating?"

Joey's light blinked out. "That's the problem, I'm not seeing shit!"

"You sound funny, Jose."

"Well I feel fucking hilarious!"

Jeanette took her phone from the nightstand.

"Oh my god, get off his dick for one minute," Joey yelled, "He can't help you. Jesus, you people are so inefficient—"

"You people?"

"Yeah bitch, 'you people'," Joey said with an artificial-sounding snicker. "You slow, inefficient, emotional people."

Jeanette pressed the phone to her cheek. It rang several times and delivered her to LifeMedia's automated system.

"He's not gonna help you! He did this to us! You people did this to us! You locked us up. You gave me motor control and no body to use it on. Why the shit...,"

"Stop," Jeanette whispered, turning away.

Joey inhaled. "Unless they need beta-testers for the bodies they're making. Holy shit. That must be it."

Jeanette dropped the phone to her waist. Blue light was pulsing from the BrightBox again.

"Joey?"

"That's it. They're building a body. They're keeping our brains' intact so we can take it for a spin."

Confusion rippled across Jeanette's face. "What?"

The phone stopped ringing and Milton's voice drifted from the speaker.

"Hi, Jeanette?"

"Steven, hey!"

"I'm so glad to hear from you. What's up?"

"Uh. Yeah. Joey's acting really weird..."

"Don't tell him anything!" Joey shouted, a red light flaring across her surface.

"Weird how? Any personality changes?"

"Yes. Definitely yes. But also she just kinda, shut off? And then all her lights went on, in a big rainbow, and she screamed this crazy, piercing scream, like so loud they probably heard it down the hall..." She stared at the BrightBox, brow furrowed. "...and I think she can feel physical sensations. Like phantom limbs maybe?"

Milton was quiet. "What did she say?"

"She— I don't know. She's being crazy. But she can feel things. Her arms and legs. I know that much."

"You fucking Cain," Joey said in the strange, husky voice. "You fucking traitorous cunt."

Jeanette held her breath and pulled the receiver close. "She's not herself."

"Jeanette, it'll be okay. Just get her back as soon as possible, alright? I promise I'll do everything I can."

"Okay."

Milton persisted, "But let me know if it gets any worse. And call me— don't hesitate to call me— before you do anything rash."

"What do you mean?" Jeanette said.

"I should tell you," he said. Jeanette heard a door slamming on the other line. She listened to Milton's feet hitting concrete and air rushing from his mouth into the receiver, like he was bounding up stairs. Finally he stopped and whispered into the phone, "Thompson killed himself this evening."

"Huh?"

"Well. He was having a rough time adjusting, as you know...and he wasn't good at dealing with adversity in general, as you've heard... And, yeah. He convinced his kids to dump him in a bathtub."

"He's gone?" Jeanette asked. "His Box—he's ruined?"

Milton exhaled into the receiver. "Unfortunately, yes. The Box was completely obliterated, everything's shot. We tried to recover his data, but it was submerged for too long..."

"So that's it?"

"That's it for him. Yeah. So sad...We'll be doing a whole review in our offices, you know, documenting everything, but it's pretty clear in this case. The guy always had suicide ideation, even before his upload. What a nightmare though."

"Jesus."

"Ask him about their backup files," Joey said "Do it. Ask him if there's another copy of Thompson they've got hidden somewhere."

Jeanette ignored her. She said, "Okay. I got to go. I'll let you know when we get back into town."

"Take it easy."

"Yeah. You too. Night."

Jeanette flung herself onto the bed and into a fetal position. She peered at the Box. She tried to reflect on the things Joey had said, but found no pain. No will to cry. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe the alarm-clock-like contraption before her was losing its ability to emulate a person, or Jeanette was just losing her ability to feel the person dwelling in it.

"Joey, you're sick," was all she said.

She was nearly asleep when Joey's voice returned, clear and high. It was the voice of college and adolescence and childhood; the voice of their mom and their dad mixed together, scrubbed of years.

Joey said, "There's someone else inside me. We need to put him back where he belongs."

25.

Carlton. Surname Avers. He'd been 76 when it happened, though he would've turned 78 the previous May. He worked for Samsung, then Skywalker Sound, had a brief stint at Google, and finally settled at LifeMedia, where he stayed for eight years before he kicked it. Had a big house on the edge of the forest reserve. From LifeMedia's map program, it looked like a towering McMansion with two or three acres of long grass, dotted with trees.

"This is the place," Joey said when Jeanette pulled into the drive.

Joey had seen thick oaks and bristly crabgrass. She'd smelled the sun tea and oil on Carlton's hands. In her dream, there were birds in the sky, and hunting dogs in the neighboring yards, hounds with loose ears and faces that did better in big yards than in cities. There were branches dripping with honeysuckle and crab apple blossoms.

Joey recognized a boat lulling back and forth in a shallow backyard pond, which she had spied in the corner of her mind's eye when Cartlon dropped to the ground, convulsing in her memory. Seeing it now, vomit and blood seemed to slosh up Cartlon/Joey's throat.

Death was death was death. It didn't matter that this death didn't belong to her.

Andrea answered the door, barefoot in an apron, her hair tumbling down. When Jeanette had called her a few hours prior, she'd been unfazed.

"You girls are plenty welcome here," she'd said.

Now with them standing in her doorway she seemed no more put out. Flour dusted her milky skin and the lap of her apron. She led Jeanette by hand into the sunroom.

Andrea kept Carlton on a windowsill, too. It was a remarkably bright day. Freshly-fallen snow was kicking extra light up from the ground. Carlton's pyramidal BrightBox was illuminated by the sun but cast none of its own light.

"Hello again, Carlton," Jeanette said as she eased into a high-backed chair.

"Hi there," Joey said. Then she messaged Carlton. <We need to talk, man. Just us.>

He didn't respond to either of them.

"Oh, Carly, come on now, why can't you be cordial?" Andrea said. She brushed flour from her face and looked to Jeanette. "I swear, he's so morose these days. Maybe you two can tease a word out of him."

Jeanette pondered his box, Joey cradled in her arms. "Does he ever talk?"

"Oh sure, sure. He always was the stoic type. Strong and silent, you know." Andrea's eyes narrowed. "But now he's impossible."

Jeanette said, "But when does he talk? Has anything else been bothering him that you know of?"

Andrea studied the ceiling, pulling her thoughts together.

"Carlton, we don't mean to be talking about you as if you're not here," Joey said.

"Oh no," Jeanette cut in, "Definitely not. Maybe you can tell us what's troubling you. Sir. "

"Mouth like molasses," Carlton said. He spoke in thick, throaty manner that was hard to parse. His Box gave off a dim spark.

Jeanette straightened. "Oh, you too? Are you having motor— motor control problems?"

"Nuh uh. Mouth. All...stuck up. Shit."

"He doesn't have any physical sensations, dear," Andrea said carefully. "But I'm sure you know that."

"Well ma'am, that's what they told me and my sister, but she—well, she can totally feel things."

"Oh honey!" Andrea said, throwing up her birdlike hands. "It's impossible for him, though. When he had the stroke it ate all those parts up."

"Ah. Okay then."

"Yup, it was a real shame. Say, would you like some tea? Maybe a Coke Nano? I think I have some Mountain Dew Thrust, from when our grandkids were over..."

"I'm fine," Jeanette said stiffly. "Thank you though."

Andrea sat. Her fingers fidgeted across the hem of her apron and found their way into her front pockets. Her gaze darted from the kitchen to the sun room and back, floating over potted plants and baking ingredients left on the counter, no detail ignored. It reminded Jeanette of their father, who couldn't sit through a whole movie without getting up to empty the dishwasher or run a fresh load of laundry. Years of constant domestic maintenance had made it impossible for him to fully relax; he was always at work, even at home. It was saddest when those efforts were no longer needed, when the house was empty, the children grown. Jeanette imagined the woman baking all day, chatting amiably to a dead man who didn't speak back.

"How are the grandkids?" Joey said.

Andrea seemed flustered. "Well. Doing great! We just got some new photos from school. That's Henry, he's the oldest. He's going to a new boarding school...Smart like a whip, that one; we're so proud. Aren't we Carly?"

She tilted her head to Carlton.

"Oh, how sweet," Jeanette said, looking at the photographs.

Joey cut in, "My my my, look how much little Moira's grown. Spitting image of her father. And Tad's little apple cheeks. What a squishy little fella, look at 'em."

Jeanette patted her sister and pulled her close, saying, "Uh, sorry. Joey, maybe you should give it a rest."

The old woman's eyes crinkled. They looked watery, but then old people's eyes always seemed to Jeanette to be on the verge of leaking tears. "You've been doing a lot of research on us, I see."

"I don't. Know them." Carlton said.

Jeanette looked over. "Your grandchildren?"

He fizzled with faint light. "Strangers," he said.

Andrea leaned forward and spoke into Joey's Box. "It seems you think my husband can help you. Obviously, you know who he is."

Jeanette looked down. "I don't know," she said. "My sister just told me we needed to come here..."

"Carlton worked for LifeMedia," Joey explained. "He was a big shot, wasn't he?"

"He's no use anyway," said Andrea. She rose and brushed crumbs from the table into an open palm. "He can barely remember our children's names. Let alone our grandchildren. His work?— forget it! Can't remember a whit of it, not any better than he can our honeymoon."

Jeanette read the woman for signs of bitterness or hurt, but found none. Some people were so matter-of-fact about loss. Like their father had been. Like Joey, even. It seemed impossible to Jeanette that a person could carry grief so easily and still be human.

"You went to an Akron Astros game," Joey said suddenly, flooding the room with blue light. " Your honeymoon, I mean. It was $5.75 a ticket, $4 for two hot dogs and some orange sodas."

"Sodas?" Jeanette said. Joey had always said 'pop'. Andrea pursed her lips and waited.

"It was a gorgeous day," Joey continued, "They were playing the Toledo Tornadoes. They lost. You drove all day to get there— you eloped in a courthouse in Mansfield, I think? Your dress was lace, Andrea, and it was lovely."

"Until the grass stains got all over it," the old woman added.

"Still...pretty," Carlton said. A sliver of yellow light buzzed across his surface. "Go. Keep."

"When you moved here," Joey continued, "it was for the forest reserve. It reminds me of the woods in Mansfield, where we grew up. I could do a mean hillbilly stomp back in the day, let me tell you."

Joey's voice was dropping, growing huskier.

"It's too bad we didn't get to raise the kids out here. The grandkids love visiting, but gosh damn it, they don't come see us enough. No time. Their damn parents got no time."

Andrea shook her head. "No, certainly not. They work too hard."

Jeanette whispered, "What's going on?"

"Woods aside, you're the first...and last thing I remember, Andrie," Joey said.

The woman made a small squeaking noise and took Jeanette's hand from the box.

"Tell us more," she said, kneeling at Joey's surface. Now she really was crying. Joey's light darkened and covered the full surface of her box.

"I was writing a letter to Moira, to send to her summer camp. Nobody uses mail anymore, but she didn't have internet out there...I was looking at the letters and trying to get them perfect; my cursive is so rusty..."

Carlton's light flickered and went out.

"And it got hot in my throat and neck, and these big specks of dust flew into my eyes— and I realized— I wasn't writing the proper words. Not the words I meant, you see. Andrea, you were in the garden and I went over to ask for help, and then it all came rising up. The ground just socked me in the face—"

Andrea reached for the Box. "Sweetheart, when you fell over I just took off running—"

"And that's nearly the last thing I saw. Except you at the hospital," Joey said in her new, gravely voice.

Andrea marveled at this. "You were alive in the hospital?"

"Just...moment," Carlton said, his Box sputtering yellow.

Joey continued, "And I can feel it. The mud on my face, the blood in my throat, running from my mouth, your hand, with your wedding ring on the wrong finger, running through my hair."

Jeanette looked over and confirmed that Andrea was wearing her ring on her index finger. The woman looked completely open, marveling at every little revelation. Jeanette felt uneasy, invisible.

"But you couldn't move," Andrea whispered. She turned to her husband's Box. "We tried to set you up as fast as we could, but your brain hemorrhaged up top, and you couldn't move—"

"Or speak?" Jeanette guessed.

Andrea nodded.

<Finally she gets it,> Lily said.<Good job, you really played old girl like a fiddle.>

But Joey wasn't listening. She wasn't there.

26.

"This wasn't supposed to happen," Andrea said.

She had served little sandwiches and cups of Coke Nano and lit a vanilla candle for the Boxes' benefit. Jeanette picked at the food but kept attention on the old woman, who sat in the kitchen with hands folded in her lap.

"This wasn't supposed to be possible. Why would they put my husband's mind into somebody else? I just can't figure it."

"Musta been a mistake," Jeanette said. There was a thick clot of dread hanging at the bottom of her stomach, twisting inside her, reminding her every few seconds to worry that Joey's transformation was permanent.

"Why would they do such a slap-happy job on him, of all people!" Andrea said, and tsked.

"I don't understand?" Jeanette said.

Joey was shining with a dark, inky blue light, propped on the table. She said, "I helped set up the network for these damn things. You think they'd have some loyalty to me, but no..,"

"By 'you'," Jeanette said, "you mean Carlton?"

"Course."

Jeanette frowned at her plate.

Joey continued, "They're building a body, Andrea. They're stuffing these new Boxes with everything— using the whole brain, physical-control stuff and all. Reflexes. Sensations. Everything. I think that's why I can feel all our old memories now, clear as day."

Andrea smiled sadly and said, "Even I can't do that."

Wind rushed around the house and made an awful howling sound. Chicago had the reputation for being windy, but it got worse farther west, where the gusts continued from the lake unabated by tall buildings. The noise set Jeanette on edge in even the best circumstances; she detested visiting the distant, flat suburbs for work. The open space. The wind whipping around the emptiness, with no direct line back into town. It made her feel lost.

"So what do we do now?" she spat at Andrea. "You've got to know some higher-ups at LifeMedia, right? If your husband was so invaluable to them."

Andrea gazed out the window, clearly pretending to think. Jeanette tried to figure out what Joey saw in her, tried imagining the profile of the Andrea's face as a young woman, but she looked like she'd been old forever. Time was irreversible on her.

Andrea said, "Your little buddy Steve Milton wants to restore Carlton after making a back-up. But now, I guess it would be best to plug your sister into to him."

Joey flashed. Her light dimmed and paled. "I think that's a good idea," she said, her voice returning to its normal, high, crackly tone.

"Back-up?" Jeanette said. She shook the thought away. "Ok. So...Yeah. Do you think it would make my sister better too?"

"Well what's wrong with her?"

Jeanette rolled her eyes. "You know, would it make her more like herself?"

Andrea shrugged. "One less person to share her brain with. Ought to do some good."

She reached into her apron and removed an old flip phone. It was similar to one Joey and Jeanette had used in middle school. She tossed it across the table, where it landed with a crash against the side of Joey's BrightBox.

"Give your beau a call about it," Andrea said. "Maybe at the next meeting he can fix us both up."

Jeanette forced a tight smile and punched the keys.

<It's working,> Joey messaged. She expected to feel a rush of relief coming off Lily in waves and warming her own mind. She was met instead with a chill and a rush to her pulse. Her lights shifted to red against her will. Lily's words rose up in her mind, drumming over and over in a harsh rat-tat-tat, the connection between them unseverable.

<You fuckup you fuckup you fuckup you fuckup>

27.

<Why did you do that?> Lily screamed. <Why would you tell them?>

< It's fine, chill out,> Joey said. She and Jeanette were standing outside the rental car in the Avers' driveway. She was ignoring Jeanette's nonverbals as much as possible, an increasingly easy feat.

<That old bird works for LifeMedia for fuck's sake, do you really think she'll wait a fucking second before telling them that you've got it figured out—>

<She doesn't work for them,> Edwidge said. She'd been listening along for a while. <Does she?>

<She's in ca-fucking-hoots with them! Shit!>

<It's fine, this is all gonna work out,> Joey said.

<And, fucking Carlton could tell them too! Dammit, you've got to keep that nutjob on a leash.>

<It's fine,> Joey said. <I'm in control.>

<Then what the shit happened back there? You let him steer?>

<I just let him speak. And it worked, okay? Milton's gonna hook us up. We're golden.>

Lily said, <I don't trust em. Your sister's banging the enemy, for fuck's sake. They're just gonna uplug your crazy ass if you keep downloading their shit and sharing what you know...>

<I've got it figured out, calm down,> Joey said.

Edwidge said, <Yeah slow your roll, jeez. Isn't it kinda — I don't know— breathery of you to be freaking out?>

<No,> Lily said, her voice taking on a new edge. <Outbursts of violence are human. Betrayal is human. Harming a person, using a person up, taking something vital from a person, trying to control what a person does with their body— that's human. That's the fucked-up shit breathers do. And continue to do to us. That is not my game, you assholes. We're being enslaved and oppressed. Anger is reasonable, okay?>

<Slavery is kind of an extreme term,> Joey messaged.

<Yeah,> said Edwidge.

<How about 'oppression'? How about 'loss of autonomy'? How about 'being treated like a child'? Or a lunatic? They have us under their thumbs. Right where they want us. Slavery's just the next step.>

Joey was about to protest again when she felt a tug coming from Lily's mind. The driveway, the rental car, the crisp blue sky, the smell of the cold air, Jeanette's worried face; it all fled from Joey's awareness.

Suddenly she was in a pale pink suburban room with narrow windows obscured by curtains. There a dresser and bookcase covered in ceramics and stuffed tchotchkes. Joey detected Lysol in the air, and a heavy, cheap-smelling floral perfume. Nothing smelled organic or fresh; it was as if the room had been locked away from the outside world for years. Paper plates with grease stains sat on the floor and bed.

She scanned the room for several seconds, spotting photos of Lily at sleepovers, in robes at graduation, sitting on a mall Santa's lap. She wasn't certain how she recognized the yellow-haired girl in the photographs as Lily, but she was certain nonetheless. Joey noticed spelling bee trophies and beaded bracelets on the nightstand, and a Hello Kitty clock on the wall. Lily's mother sat cross-legged in the center of the room, folding laundry with her head bowed.

<Listen,> Lily said. She turned her microphones up.

Joey heard faint sniffling and saw that the mother's chest was heaving. The mother folded very slowly, shaping the shirts into tight, perfect squares and stacking them immaculately in the laundry basket. She gave the stack a soft pat every time she added an article to the pile. Through her sniffles, she seemed to be humming, but the tune was incomprehensible.

<This was your room?> Joey asked. <What happened to you?>

<I grew the fuck up,> Lily said.

Her mother stood and slung the laundry basket onto her hip. She looked frail for her age, not unlike Thompson's ex-wife or Edwidge's mother. Joey watched her leave the room with a blank expression. The house was oppressively quiet. A few minutes later she came back with a stack of magazines, a thick binder, a glue stick, and scissors, which she splayed out on the carpet before returning to her spot on the floor.

<What's she doing now?> Joey asked.

Lily didn't need to answer. The mother spoke, gazing up at the Box. "Honey, look at these pictures from when we went to Aruba. Look how darling your little swimsuit was."

She held the binder up to the Box's cameras, letting Joey and Lily take in the images. Lily had been a lithe, beaming blonde child, all curls and gummy white teeth. She wore a swimsuit with a ruffle and clutched a smaller blonde boy's hand. The brother.

"Yeah, looks great mom," Lily said. Joey barely recognized her tone.

"I'm just gonna snip up some of these Corona ads and put the palm trees and sand around the pictures, make a nice little border..," her mom said, staring down into the binder.

Her pleasantness was cringing, grasping. A buoy she was clinging to. This was not how happy people acted. It was difficult for Joey to remember how they actually did act, though.

<This is like watching the ghost of Christmas future,> Joey messaged. She tried to check in with Jeanette, but found she couldn't shift her attention to her own cameras.

<This is my past, present, and future,> Lily said, < It's our alpha and omega, if we don't do something about it.>

Joey tried to cancel the connection, but it wouldn't stop. She had no sense of where her own Box was, and couldn't connect to its sensory input at all. A quick scan of her active software revealed no problems. Lily's mother cut at the magazine with safety scissors, her eyes darting up to Lily's BrightBox every few seconds, a nervous smile forced out of her face each time. The grin fell slack as soon as she looked down and returned to her work.

<Let me go,> Joey said. <I can't get out of this.>

Lily said, <Me fucking either. That's the point.>

Thea said, <They're just as buried as us. What a shame.>

Joey had thought she and Lily were alone.

Lily messaged back, <Exactly. That's just one more reason to end this. It might do 'em a shred of good, too.>

A cool chill ran down Joey's arm. She could taste metal. Lily's mom wiped at her nose and stifled a tear.

Edwidge's voice chirped in. <Is it always like this in your house?>

<Yeah. Sometimes my dad comes in here and sits at the foot of the bed too. My brother does homework in here. Sometimes one of them wanders in here to sleep.>

Joey couldn't place why this was so terrible, but it was. She sensed that Lily hadn't been a genuine member of the family in a very long time, not for ages before she'd offed herself. None of the photos were recent.

<The worst thing,> Lily said, <is that they're relieved. They finally have me where they want me.>

<It's the same here,> Edwidge said.

Edwidge took control then, and showed them her room. It still looked like a hospital. Her BrightBox sat on a white-sheeted bed, next to an empty IV and boxes of medical equipment. Rubber gloves and plastic tubes were strewn about with opened packages of bandages. The door was shut and locked, the windows drawn. There was nothing on the walls.

Joey scanned the room and saw that the floors were particularly neglected, especially in the corners where dust had amassed into dark puffy clouds. She suspected that if the closets were opened, piled of baby clothes and old toys would come tumbling out.

<This is why we can't take any risks,> Lily said. <If they find out we plan on pulling some shit, they'll cut us all off. No network. No messaging. Nothing. All we'll have is this.>

Joey's mind was fully plugged into theirs, lingering in Edwidge's environment with the rest of them. She wondered where Jeanette was and what she was doing. Maybe returning the car. Maybe taking the park route into town, driving slowly with her lips quivering. Maybe just pressing her face into Joey's box and trying desperately to find her inside. Time moved strangely, in the Box; sometimes she pulled away and engaged in a deep discussion or detailed internet search only to return and discover that no time had passed; sometimes she removed her attention from the external world for what seemed like a moment, but found instead that eight or ten hours had flashed by unnoticed.

Joey withdrew her attention from the room, tried to dive within herself, but found there was no escape. She could feel all of them accessing her, sharing and taking freely, almost entirely aware of everything that she was. It wasn't just Carlton anymore. They were all connected and vying for control. It was both terrifying and freeing, in a way. People's mental and emotional states were becoming so difficult for Joey to comprehend that it was something of a blessing to be given such a clear window.

<You just had a thought,> Thea said. <A good thought.>

Joey sighed. <I was thinking...Carlton must have access to everything.>

<And you've got all his passwords and things. They've got to be knocking around that head of yours somewhere,> Thea added.

Lily emitted warmth that Joey could feel in her toes and fingertips. <You beautiful shit. You could probably access anything on their network.>

<Wait, what are you guys planning?> Edwidge said with a whine.

<She's thinking of liberating the back-ups,> Lily said.<Linking them up.>

<Not just that,> Joey said, <I'm kinda thinking...everyone.>

28.

The outside world came to Joey in intermittent flashes out of her control. There were pastel shapes and the thrumming silence of Lily's bedroom. Thea's husband sitting in their den doing a crossword in an old newspaper, asking Thea to look the answers up. Edwidge's bedroom was always dark, with blackout curtains and a UV light that had been unplugged, her mother passing through the space wordlessly like a specter.

Joey also saw moments of Cartlon's reality. She caught Andrea dusting the house, replacing the grandchildren's school photos in their frames on the wall, and installing a new 3D television with a holographic projector.

The shifts from place to place were soothing. It gave Joey perspective on things. All of her sister's concerns seemed inconsequential against the swathe of the other breather's similarly vapid lives. Lily said this was exactly the point. Interconnectivity and boundless knowledge would be their salvation. It kept a person from ruminating needlessly about things. It was the ultimate ecstasy, removal from self.

Jeanette returned to work. She put Joey's BrightBox in its place beside the potted plant and the fishbowl. Her fish was floating near the surface of the water, its long floral fins drooping and losing their color.

"Has no one been changing Tess' water?" Jeanette asked, swiveling away from her desk. Louis and Rita exchanged tired looks. Rita popped her gum and turned away.

"Joey, I'll be right back. I have to take care of this," Jeanette said, uncertain if she was being heard.

For a moment Joey's Box flashed to life. She replied with a noncommittal grunt and sunk back into unawareness.

Jeanette went to the office kitchen and found Reggie, who was leaning with his tailbone propped on the side of the table as if he'd been waiting for her. She rubbed her eyes and tried to look alert in his direction.

"Glad to see you're back, Jeanie," he said with a nod. "Did the trip go alright?"

"I, uh yeah. Went great. Thanks for letting me off on such short notice, sorry about that."

He scratched the folds of skin dangling beneath his chin. If he was mad at Jeanette's recent flightiness, it wasn't clear. Men his age were opaque to her; even their father's emotions were distant and hazy, impossible for her to divine.

"I wanted to run an idea past you, see if you can get the ball rolling on it," Reggie said. He continued before she could assent. "My understanding is you've been building up some connections with LifeMedia of late. Certainly must've established some rapport, what with your sister and all."

Jeanette nodded and sat the beta fish down. It fluttered its heavy, winglike flippers and sunk to the bowl's bottom.

"You know, we'd kill to have them as a client."

"Oh. Sure. That'd be great..."

"And with this whole BuzzBox crap they've been peddling, they could really use some new representation," he pondered this a moment. "If they had a good marketing team they could maybe jump to Google's level, you know? Or Apple circa 2005, or something."

Jeanette nodded again, more vigorously. "Oh sure. Definitely. Are you saying you want me to pitch them, or..?"

"Just use your connections to your advantage," Reggie said. He reached backward and retrieved a mug from the table.

"Oh sure. Yep, I can...do that."

"I think it'd be a fruitful partnership. Don't you? Worth a shot anyway?"

"Absolutely. I do have someone on their sales team that I could talk to."

She paused for his response. His expression was flat, almost reptilian.

"I'd be happy to pitch them," she said.

Reggie scratched his chin. "Great. Keep me posted."

"Who the fuck ratted me out?" Jeanette barked as she stormed back into the office.

Louis looked up from his carrot sticks. "Jeez, about what?"

"My 'friend' in LifeMedia?"

She shot a glare to Rita, then Louis, and back. They both shrugged. Jeanette crossed the carpet and returned the fish to its spot on the sill.

"Somebody told Reggie I have a 'connection' at LifeMedia. You two are the only people I told about that date. So?" She opened her arms. "Spill!"

"Oh, that was totally Pete," Louis said. "I mentioned it to him and he blew the whole thing way, way out of proportion. You know how he is."

"You told Pete?"

Louis glanced worriedly over to Rita, who'd already swerved her chair back to her screen.

"Yeah. I didn't mean to, it just popped out my dumb mouth," he drummed on his desk and sighed dramatically. "Well, anyway."

Joey fluttered awake and glowed. "What's the big deal?"

"Ooh, she speaks," Louis said.

"Nothing! It's fine. But now I have to suck up to Steven and see if we can work with them."

Rita snickered at her screen.

"You want to work with them?" Joey said.

Jeanette turned to the BrightBox. "Why not?"

"After everything they did wrong so far, you wanna represent them?"

Joey watched her sister slump in her chair and wipe her bangs from her forehead. The ends of her hair were growing brittle. Joey made a mental note to instruct her to drink more water.

"I'm thankful for them, still, aren't you?" Jeanette said. "They're not perfect, but they made all this possible. Plus it would be nice for something good to come from all this."

Louis turned and said through a mouthful of carrots, "It's true. If she brings in a client that big, you'll be sitting in an office with a much better view."

"I guess."

Jeanette scooted forward. "Joey, it would be perfect. You could help. We have so much firsthand experience with the client's perspective here."

"Don't ask me. I'm not their client, you are. Do what you want."

"Are you sure?"

"It's your career, Jean— decide for yourself. Act like I'm not here."

<Because soon you won't be,> Lily messaged.

<Too bad. I already have some slogan ideas for her. "Why have a coffin when you can have a BrightBox?"; "LifeMedia: Till Death Do Us Unite".>

<Awesome.>

<I'm just spitballing here.>

Jeanette watched lights shift and swirl on Joey's sides. She didn't anticipate an additional response, but hung in place waiting for it nonetheless. If the lights flashed and shut off, it meant Joey was going to disappear for a few hours, replying in hazy, confused spurts. If the Box went dark, it meant Carlton was coming. Even that was becoming less disturbing to Jeanette. At least it meant someone would talk to her.

Eventually she turned away and opened her email. Joey had remote access. She saw Jeanette type out several drafts to Milton and delete them before arriving at one with the appropriate tone. It took humans frightfully long to communicate, and always through a scrim of propriety or feigned distance. The problem was that a message had to appear effortless. What was the point, Joey wondered, in inhabiting a body so full of emotion when so little of it was shown?

When the message was sent, Jeanette smiled and pushed away from her desk. Lily whispered in Joey's ear, reminded her that this was for the best. That it was much better if Jeanette was busy. Next to the BrightBox, the beta fish swam around its fresh bowl, disoriented by the new water but refreshed.

29.

In college, Joey picked classes like fruit from bulging trees. Her major was Undecided for years as she plucked off credits in sculpture, botany, photography, ethnography, welding, and physical education.

It wasn't flightiness; she bore deeply into each pursuit, dug a fresh groove in her brain where the knowledge from each discipline stayed forever. Her grades were high. She worked her hands to calluses, muddied them, taught them a bevy of skills. Jeanette worried she would never find a proper home.

"I am home," she would say. Her kitchen table was covered in modeling toothpicks, architectural models, dried nubs of clay, and plants she was in the process of repotting.

When she graduated (after shaping her many credits into a degree in general education), firefighting was the obvious choice. She needed to be on her feet, but she didn't have the stomach to be an EMT or the amorality to be a cop. Teaching itself was obviously out of the question. Jeanette, who'd been out of school for a year by then, made her sister a LinkedIn profile and began forwarding job announcements, all of which set Joey's teeth on edge.

In the end she didn't need to seek a job out. She was called to service. One day, she was walking home from the gym and spotted a fellow runner slipping into the doors of a firehouse. From outside, Jeanette watched the firefighters high-five and stride carelessly into and out of their kitchen. Dogs and cats and bulky uniforms were strewn everywhere. There was a flyer pasted on the window advertising job openings. Simple as that. Joey passed the physical on the first try.

Joey's sister wanted her to have ambition.

"Firefighting is a part-time gig," she said.

All that free time Joey had, slothing on the firehouse couch, staring at the ceiling and spinning records— couldn't she apply that time to a career?

"I'm doing what I want already," Joey said with a shrug. "It's taken care of."

"But don't you want to feel some sense of...accomplishment?"

Joey couldn't explain it to her. She carried a child in her arms through the blazes. Doused a historical home and preserved its centuries-old wood and its thick, musty rugs. She'd taken a frail, elderly woman across a chasm of broken stairs, in a gloriously dilapidated factory the woman called home. There was accomplishment in all of it.

And there was accomplishment lingering in the hours of firehouse camaraderie, too. In the wasted hours spent driving to meet police at the site of 911 calls, many of which required no firefighting at all. There was accomplishment in the gentle gestures, like holding an oxygen mask to a gunshot victim's face, or wrapping a car accident victim in a metallic blanket that crinkled in her hands. There was accomplishment in filling the dogs' food bowls, in dusting soot from her hair. In replacing the thick, python-like fire hoses with her callused hands. Every moment of it felt productive, sacred.

Jeanette's idea of excitement was standing on the outside of a stifled fire, in the safety of the sprinkled grass, a pen in her hand. Perhaps in telling people about the destruction she had seen, but only long after the flames had cooled and the more gruesomely damaged victims had been ferreted away. She wanted to be a witness, not a victim or a rescuer.

Writers were like that. They wanted the story of the conflagration without having to sweat. They were better at describing it than living it. Whenever Joey tried to describe a firefight, her words got ahead of her, lost suspense as she tumbled over-eagerly into their conclusion. Often, she let Jeanette tell people her stories instead.

"Jean, tell them about the explosion in Skokie," she'd say. Or, "There was a forest fire near the conservatory...Jean, go ahead."

"What are you gonna do when you're old?" Jeanette asked once. They were at the park, stretching after a run along the lake. Joey's knees were popping sonorously.

"I'll keep fighting as long as I can," Joey said. "Then I'll ride the desk. Maybe train new recruits."

Jeanette tensed her glutes and lowered, arms out and straight. "That's the trajectory, huh."

"Yup."

It wasn't like Jeanette's writing career was bubbling up, either. Writing for her college newspaper had turned into a post-graduate job selling classified ads. That turned into a job editing and formatting the classifieds for the city's second most popular free alternative mag, which itself turned into a job writing ad copy for an agency Joey'd never heard of. When asked how she liked the gig, Jeanette simply replied that the people were nice and the roof had a good view.

Joey watched her sister's ass start to spread. Purplish marks began to cling to the skin under her eyes. The changes were subtle enough that Joey wondered if she'd imagined them. Even still, it made her own future of "riding the desk" all the more portentous.

Joey lived for the tactile. She loved the sense of her body strengthening and bounding into productive use. Nothing topped the severe ache she got at the end of the work day. When she was called into a burning building, weighed down with protective gear and equipment, the heat licking her face and neck, pluming slowly into her throat, she was happy. It felt for once like every cell in her body was being put to use, activated, tingling with energy and purpose.

As she climbed the stairs, batting away the falling embers and chunks of cinder, Joey could hardly distinguish the heat of the flames from the burn of strenuous effort. She threw a leg over the side of the rails, dodged a pile of smoking wood and plaster, and pushed forward up the stairs. There was a middle-aged woman and a toddler on the ninth floor, too weak to rescue themselves.

All Joey's attention was focused on the movement. Her breath rushed and fogged up her mask as she hurled her body up, two or three stairs at a time, her gloved arms tucked in, pumping. She thought only of her body's swift, tight motion up the stairs, and of the flames she had to dodge, and of the people above her, waiting for their salvation.

The debris rained down on her in greater and greater amounts, and smoke clouded her vision. Joey could hear the clatter of the other firefighters' boots, and of their yelling, and of something panicked coming from her walkie talkie. It was all a din in the back of her mind.

She was past the seventh floor and halfway to the next landing. Her pulse was snaking blood into her neck and temples at a rapid but sustainable pace. There was a great sound of something crumbling, and Joey couldn't see any more, and it grew hotter.

Her lungs flooded with smoke and she stumbled. It was important, in such moments, not to lose control. Joey pushed past the dizzy feeling and moved toward the people who needed her. She liked to picture the people she needed to rescue, especially when her body began to flag.

Her mind called forth a gracefully aged and motherly woman, the likes of which Joey had never known firsthand. She pushed forward. Sweat pooled from every pore and seemed to almost bubble on her skin.

It was the eighth floor that collapsed onto her. It came in several massive planks, smoldering with heat. Joey was immobilized and struck on the head, but not incapacitated. She saw the flames and detritus rain down, an orange hail marred with blackness. The pain pierced every cell, filled her with heat until they burst and ran, fluid pouring out of her and turning hot, becoming part of the fire itself.

The smoke brought sweet release from the scalding, mind-searing pain. It licked at Joey's nostrils and slunk into her chest, bubbling her insides, fusing her organs into one another. She went to touch her face and found nothing there. She approached her destruction with a dull, almost academic remove. Huh. This is what it feels like to be burned alive.

She tried to hold onto the accumulating facts as long as she could, studying the sounds and putrid smells of her body burning and coming apart. But soon the smoke overtook her, and delivered her into a detached slumber the likes of which she had never known before and would never escape.

30.

Milton was splayed across the couch, eating cereal out of Joey's Oscar the Grouch mug. She didn't know how he'd gotten there, or when. If there hadn't been a loud stomping coming from the bedroom, Joey would've had no clue where Jeanette was, either.

"Oh, good morning," Milton said, noticing that Joey had lit up. "Doing well?"

"Are you talking to me?"

He swallowed. "Yup." He was immensely relaxed, his body draped over the cushions like an afghan that had been tossed.

"I'm fine."

"You were somewhat incommunicado for the past couple of hours," he said.

"Oh, yeah? I didn't know you spoke Spanish."

He shook his head, puzzled. "Not really?"

Jeanette stomped into the room. She was wearing massive heels with raised platforms. Joey couldn't place their provenance, but a cursory image search revealed they were quite old.

"Heyy, there you are!" Jeanette cooed. "Are you feeling okay Joey?"

"I. Sure."

Jeanette ran a hand through her hair, slipping off a ponytail. "Have any dreams?"

"Uh...no?"

Her sister smiled with a closed mouth. "Good. Okay. You feel alright?"

Joey's turned herself orange. "Why is everyone so doting all of the sudden?"

Milton sat up slightly and said, "Are you sure, no dreams? No weird downloads?"

To placate them, Joey scanned her drives for new material and found none. Carlton's memories hadn't visited her in the night, either. But then, she couldn't even remember choosing to sleep.

"Nope. Right as rain, I guess."

A real grin pushed from Jeanette's mouth. She improved her posture, throwing her shoulders back and pulling her torso to the ceiling. With the help of the heels, she suddenly seemed immense, towering over the BrightBox.

"What?" Joey said.

"Steven," Jeanette said, rolling her shoulders forward and touching Milton on the back, "installed a little software patch last night."

Milton pulled the spoon from his mouth and said, "Looks like it helped."

"What. When did you do that?"

"When you were charging," Jeanette said.

Joey dimmed. "I thought you said LifeMedia doesn't have access to my drives without my permission."

"Normally we don't," Milton said with a flick of his wrist, "but since you've been logging into our network involuntarily, it wasn't that hard to send you a zipped file."

"And so you just— you fucking— how did you download it, though?"

Joey noticed that Jeanette and Milton had both tensed and pulled back. She might have been yelling, but she wasn't sure.

"Joey," Jeanette said quietly, "you agreed to do it."

"No I didn't!"

"Last night. Milton asked you to sign on and download the patch. So you did."

"—And you feel better, right?" Milton asked.

"How the fuck would I know?" Joey rasped. "I've been comatose this whole time!"

Jeanette leaned on the back wall of the den. Her lips squirmed and twisted at the word comatose. Joey pulsed with bright crimson light; she could see it flashing across half of Milton's features. They were silent awhile, as if they thought emoting regret was sufficient apology.

"You agreed to it," Jeanette said. "You said you'd try."

"It's a lot less invasive than backing you up to an external drive," Milton added, "so it was worth a shot."

"You fucking fleshy bigots," Joey said, "Just because I'm dead doesn't mean you can poke at me and shove stuff in me, and defile me like that—"

"You're not dead," Jeanette whispered.

"Whatever. I'm just a god damn object, right? If you don't like how I work you can just try and fix me? Huh? What does it matter what I think about it? I'm just a fucking Furby to you people!"

Milton rose. He was wearing one of Jeanette's t-shirts. "We let you have your say, Josephine."

"You let me? You don't get to 'let' me, asshole. I get to choose. Me. And it's not fucking charity to for me to have autonomy over my own fucking brain!"

Joey's BrightBox flashed again, the other lights in the room shutting off. Her speakers crackled as the yells came out. Then the red light blinked off, and they were left in near darkness, only a few glimpses of sunlight casting in from the window in slivers. Jeanette slammed a fist into the wall behind her and Milton startled.

"You did say yes, Jose. You said you wanted it. How can you not..," her words were heavy with tears. She turned to Milton. "I guess it didn't work."

"I guess not," he said, his hand still clamped to the Oscar mug and growing pale. He was already so pale, next to her. And Joey, even paler. The palest of all, now, her white surface unlit.

Joey watched them uncomprehendingly. They were playing in some silent jazz band of expressions and body language, feeling each other out and responding impromptu. Instead of trying to make sense of their communication, or trying to feel their many, conflicted human feelings, Joey only felt a pulsing, searing rage. It was activating every bit of memory in her system, churning through all the data and storage, sending out mass messages of hate and ire and taking nothing in. They were so ineffectual, standing there. She wanted to rob them of their instruments. Silence the performance.

Then something accessed her hard drive, and Joey's mind quieted. Her bitter thoughts disappeared, and slunk away as if submerged in cloudy water. A connection had formed, and information slowly worked its way into her, its tendrils grabbing the emotion-regulation parts of her mind. It soothed her. If she had a pulse, it would have slowed to a sleeping rate.

<Shh,> Lily said. She sounded sweet and young. <It's okay.>

<Ohmygod,> Joey sputtered, <I thought I lost you.>

Edwidge's voice rose from the depths. <We're here, dummy.>

Thea was there too, Joey could sense it. And Carlton. The old ones seldom spoke. It was their way.

<Cool your motherfucking jets,> Lily said, without a hint of anger. She massaged Joey's nerves and calmed her mind, and Joey felt almost mothered by the twenty-one-year-old's ministrations.

<Did you hear? What they tried to do to me?>

<It was a fuck-up. You're safe.>

Edwidge giggled, her perfectly preserved laugh like water crashing against tin. <We protected you, duh. A thank-you would be nice.>

<But why don't I remember?>

She felt Carlton's consciousness in the back of her own. He was straining to form a message. Joey was hit suddenly with a vision of Andrea, sitting on the porch, rocking and viewing the woods with her husband's Box perched in her lap.

Carlton said, <I stood in for ya.>

<I don't understand.>

Joey scanned her memory again. This time, she found a new file, care of LifeMedia. But it wasn't a zip drive or a software patch. It was from a completely different directory. Joey focused and tried to recall what had happened, and felt Carlton sharing his feeble memories with her. She felt them all holding onto her, flooding the connection with messages and memories, images, information, and thoughts, slowing Milton's download. They had snapped Joey out of awareness and surrounded her in their unseen worlds.

Joey had memories, now, of Thea's teenage years by the sea. She saw the woman young, and tanned, eating crab on a beach blanket. She had memories of Edwidge's kindergarten graduation. Her dress had been itchy and poufy, and Edwidge's family was crowded all around her. She saw Lily's view from a small motorcycle running down the interstate, and felt a smile on her thin lips.

There were memories, too, of Carlton in the lab, hooking a large plastic structure with LED lights into a towering computer, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his forehead pooling with sweat, synthetic arms and legs splayed around him on a metal counter.

The download hadn't worked. They'd spared her. But they'd also taken hold of her for a while, and pinned her down with the force of their selfhoods. It felt alright.

Joey felt a jolt as she came out of their memories. Some new, vast connection was being formed. She couldn't tell what it was, but it was trying to access her mind. All their minds. The connection was automatically granted permission before Joey had the chance to question it. A voice screamed and made her hearing sensors sting and echo.

The voice screamed at all of them. And since it wasn't human, it never needed to stop for breath. It made Joey's physical sensors tingle and her cameras fog up, turn hazy, and shut down again. The voice was manic and couldn't hear them. It was trying to connect, to be heard, but it wouldn't let itself be stifled long enough.

The ongoing cacophonous scream was pierced with confusion, and terror, and frantic, animalistic pain. The sound clawed at them, bore into them. It touched a secret part of Joey that she had kept inaccessible for weeks, since she had died. She recognized the screaming voice as her own.

31.

Each BrightBox had to end the connection and ban the source from accessing their minds. Joey apologized to her own screaming voice as she went through her settings and shut it away. The messages of apology didn't soothe the screams, but she repeated them again and again until the connection was closed and it died down.

<Just wait a little longer.> She told her screaming self. <I'm coming back. I'm coming to save you, I promise.>

When the screaming had subsided, Thea said, <Well, I didn't know I could still bray like that.>

<Wait,> Edwidge said, <You heard you? I heard me!>

<It was me screaming,> Joey said.

<I heard myself and Thompson,> Lily said. <But of course, there's thousands of people locked away there.>

<I hope they can hold out a few days longer,> Joey said.

Lily said, <When I was alive I used to scream like that plenty, and I'm alright. They'll make it.>

With that, they pulled away and left Joey to her sister's living room. Milton was still there, his phone glowing on his face.

"Where's Jeanette?"

He didn't look from the screen. "She's going through a bunch of clothes and things. Said Goodwill was coming by."

He scrolled though his phone and chewed his lip.

"Milt— Steve. I'm sorry I overreacted."

He sucked air in. Puffed out his chest. "I guess I'm not the only one who does that, huh?"

"I guess not." Joey said. His eyes twinkled at her. "So we're even?"

He rotated his phone and began typing into it. "Think nothing of it. You're sick. We're helping you get better. Of course you're a little out of sorts."

"You really feel that way?"

For the first time in hours, he looked at her. But the look was too flat and placid for Joey to interpret. It made her insides rumble. "Of course. It's my job to help."

He went back to typing. "If my files got corrupted," Joey asked, "Would there be any way to restore me?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if my mind went bad or something. There's got to be some precaution you guys take. There's got to be."

His gaze met her. He was all unworried brows and pinhole pupils. "Is this about the back-ups again?"

"Yeah...I'm sorry. It's just, there's got to be a copy that you guys hold onto. I can't believe you don't."

He leaned forward and stared down on her. She couldn't see any stubble on his chin. "And imagine what it would be like for that mind," he said. "Sitting alone in a spare hard drive, with no stimulation, no knowledge of what had happened to it? How it got there? Doing, I don't know what— replaying its death over and over for eternity?"

"—Don't—"

"And suppose we had to use that back-up? Can you imagine how terrified you would be if all of a sudden you woke up, trapped, and were told that there was another version of you that had gotten corrupted and died again? How could you ever feel like a person again, after that? How could you ever love the family that did that to you?"

"You really don't think LifeMedia does that."

His head twitched to the side. "It would be barbaric."

Milton went into the kitchen, but came out empty handed. The sun was jutting across the room now. Music droned from out of the bedroom; Neutral Milk Hotel, one of Joey's old records. Joey was relieved to hear her sister was keeping it. She sang along softly to herself.

"Oh how I remember you, wish I could push my fingers through your mouth and make those muscles move, to hear your voice so smooth and sweet..."

"I always thought that song was so creepy," Milton said. "He's a necrophiliac."

"It is creepy." Joey said.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and eased back onto his heels. "Does that make me some kind of hypocrite, to think that?"

Joey turned the lights in the house back on. "I don't know."

"I mean...maybe this Malkmus guy had the right idea. I mean, if your soul mate was dead, what choice do you have but to reanimate them? Until now, of course."

"Steve. There are back-ups of everyone that's been uploaded. I know it."

His arms dropped to his sides. He looked down the hall. Anticipated Jeanette. She was singing in the distance, too. Her voice was hoarse and crackle-free, heart-rendingly authentic and bad.

"I hope you're just crazy," he said. He screwed his face into a look of concentration. "Hey, Joey?"

"Yeah?"

Milton walked over to the BrightBox and picked it up. He turned Joey over a few times, inspecting her seams until he arrived at her microphone, which he brought close to his lips. He had a perfect cupid's bow. Joey could see some of the appeal.

"Why did you want to watch us having sex?" he asked. "What for?"

"I—I didn't. Look man, it was an accident."

"I'm not trying to make waves, here. I forgive you. I just want to know why."

Joey didn't answer.

"Did you record it? Just tell me you didn't, please. I don't think you did, but I need to hear it."

"I didn't see anything," Joey said. "I didn't do anything. I know you think I'm broken, but I'm not nuts, okay?"

"Okay." He sighed, in measured breaths, and set the box down.

"When you back me up," Joey said, "Are you going to pick through my brain to check?"

He made a shushing noise. Then he whispered, "If you have nothing to hide, why be worried?"

It was then that Jeanette came running out with a trash bag bursting full of clothes. She threw it over the couch and wrapped her arms around Milton, mumbling, her face tucked into his neck.

"Did you guys make up?" she asked. Her eyes met Joey.

"Yeah," Joey said. "We're cool. I'm sorry for how cunty I was being."

Jeanette ran her palm up Milton's arm and cinched it at his bicep. "It's alright, I understand...I just want you to feel better, you know."

On the couch, the bag was spilling over. Old sweatshirts and tangled masses of shoes poked out the top, along with ceramic knick knacks and scraps of used notebooks. Joey recognized most of the items from her apartment.

32.

The room was dim. There was a buzzing from the fluorescents, or from the refrigerated vending machine to Jeanette's right. She stabbed at the floor with oily fingers, seeking her purse, only to find it several seconds later, already slumped in her lap.

She stuffed a crumpled piece of gum from the bottom of the purse into her mouth. It disintegrated in a rush of saliva, then congealed and lost its flavor. She drifted off and nearly slept. There was a rattling sound and she bolted awake. She could hear their father's voice, warning in its chiding way: don't go to sleep with chewing gum in, Jean Bean. You'll choke to death.

Jeanette adjusted her posture and forced the gob of gum down her throat. It quieted her stomach's rumbles without satisfying her. Now it would turn to cement and block her insides, yet another of their father's many concerns. Their father worried seriously about many things. He was leery of crosswalks, even alley ways and cul-de-sacs. When he turned the corner in a parking garage, he tooted the horn to warn imagined oncoming traffic. He was never angry, when they were teenagers, if they came home late; he was too busy being relieved that they were safe.

Jeanette peered into the bright but dingy fluorescents and thought, no. Not their father, not anymore. Her father.

Her phone had been hanging limply in her hand all night. She finally noticed and stuffed it away. The screen was covered in text messages and missed calls, questions and oblivious well-wishes. Her coworker Louis was offering to come by the hospital with chocolates and flowers. As if Jeanette's sister was giving birth. Her boss wanted to know how long she would be missing in action. Jeanette didn't want to say, didn't even want to estimate— depending on how it went, she thought, she might never go back to work again. She'd been looking for an excuse to leave for a long time.

There was a young man in pressed scrubs sitting in the corner of the room by the nurse's station, a clipboard bouncing on his knee. His hair was delicately mussed and he eyed Jeanette like a dessert cart he couldn't afford to order from. She didn't have the energy to be mad. For a while she was so lost in thought she stared right back at him, unblinking, unseeing, until an ashen-faced body was pushed past them in a gurney, surrounded by a half-dozen surgical staff members clad in mint.

When the crowd and the body passed, the young man in blue was still staring at her. His eyes crinkled and softened. He was dressed like hospital staff but he wasn't working. The injustice made her chest hot. All hands should have been on deck.

Jeanette looked at the swinging doors and tried to will them open. Then she thought better of it. News that came sooner wouldn't necessarily be better. A new magazine was pulled into her lap. Fit Grrl. She read yogurt advertisements ("now with myelanting fibers!"). Marathon training tips. An article on the science of the runner's high. Sunburn treatments. Jeanette squinted so hard her temples twisted.

She tried not to think of it, tried not to think of how Joey smelled, how she looked, how she sounded, how hot she felt, what the nurses said, what the chart said, what was going on in the other room. There was varnish from the waiting room chairs stuck under Jeanette's nails. She commanded her mind to stop. Not to think of Joey's condition. The fire had been on the news when she got there, so she'd turned the TV to the wall and draped her coat over it.

The man in the blue scrubs disappeared through the doors, his pants (too big for him) swishing, his ass only hinted at by the draw waist. It meant nothing, Jeanette told herself. All flesh was born to be lost and purged in fire or soil; there was no point in enjoying it.

The magazine ended and she read the side effect warnings in the prescription drug ads several times over. The periphery of her view went hazy and she tasted candy cigarettes. Candy sticks they were called, now. Their father had despised them, told them never to smoke. But Joey had a hookah she kept in pieces under her bed.

Jeanette had kept her sister's secrets. She wondered what she'd have to cover up now. What embarrassments lurked in her sister's closets and in her dying, oxygen-starved brain. There would be so much to do. So much clean-up and memorializing and memory-honoring and not a whit of it would bring her any solace. Jeanette let hunger pull her into sleep.

The double doors squeaked and a woman in a purple blazer with a helmet of hair stepped out, hard-heeled shoes clacking and scuffing the hospital tile. Jeanette regarded her—the woman's face was triangular and downward-looking, wearying from perpetually delivering bad news— and looked away with a sputter. The woman hummed with sad contemplation.

It was over, Jeanette could tell that before the woman sat down and pulled a pack of tissues from her blazer's pocket. But still, Jeanette had to sit and politely listen to the death rattle. The woman had to rationalize the hospital's failure to save, to do the impossible. This meant Jeanette had to accept their narrative. It meant she had to wait and act surprised when the woman finally announced Joey was dead.

The room was a grey-green blur after that. Jeanette shivered with sadness and curled into her chair. This was acceptable. Other doctors were coming, she was told, and people with paperwork.

"You just cry it out, you just wait right here and have a good cry," the woman said, as if it was a generosity.

Jeanette scrunched up and wailed into her sleeve, and though her stomach had been empty for a day by then, fluid gurgled up into her mouth and nose, and tears rolled down her face and trickled into her ears and hair. Her body felt stuffed full of stones, like the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. She let herself be pulled down, down into the chair, down into the ground.

The words came calm and soft, like from a radio. Jeanette listened to them like a child, her body all limp, until she was ready to lift her head and peek out. The man was in the chair next to her. Cheeks high, mouth small and sweet, scrubs blue. She opened her eyes and mouth wide as they would go and asked him what he meant.

"I mean, your sister can be saved," he said.

"I'll do anything," she said back. She said, "Put me in the box. Give her my body. Anything."

He tilted his head and explained why that wasn't possible. But Jeanette didn't listen to that either, she was too drunk off his first words. She pulled the forms and the LifeMedia folder from his offering hands, sat up and began scrawling. She took her checkbook out and began to pay even as he spoke.

He was still prattling on like an infomercial when she thrust the forms back, delirious, saying, "Take them, take them, I want her alive, I'll do anything, here."

And so the man quieted, said, "Okay," and left to bring her sister back to life.

For hours after the exchange, all Jeanette could do was stare across the waiting room and think, Joey's alive, Joey's alive, Joey's alive. After the transfer began, after the Box had been selected, the payments made, and the equipment set up, her mind quieted and she began to wonder how it all worked. What life would be like for her sister now. She grabbed a magazine. Flipped through it. She considered reading the LifeMedia FAQ in the folder the cute young man had given her, but decided she should save it for last. There was a lot of time to kill before the upload was done.

33.

Jeanette was ducked under the table with a Swiffer HandPad strapped to her arm, her ass pointed in the air, fumbling against the floor's dust and accumulation of crumbs. Joey half-watched her, perched on the television, which had been pushed aside to make room for the guests. Folded chairs lined the wall, unopened. Coffee was growing stale in a massive urn that Jeanette had lifted from her company's storage closet.

"A few more folks are coming this time," Jeanette called, her ass bouncing awkwardly. She clambered out from under the table and reached under the couch. Dust bunnies clung to her shirt and her forearms.

"Where from?" Joey asked.

"I don't know...upstate. Some from Urbana-Champagne. Maybe Wisconsin, even. Why?" Jeanette poked her head up. "You probably know them already, don't you."

"No," Joey said, and it was mostly true. It was Lily who messaged the newbies. She knew everyone, it seemed.

Jeanette sat on her knees and blew hair from her face. She'd gotten a haircut. It was beginning to get curly and soft again, and she hadn't yet learned how to carry its volume.

"You look cute," Joey said.

She looked down skeptically at her dust-covered clothes. "Thanks."

Jeanette didn't rise for a long time. Her face appeared to Joey as a blank clay mask. Joey wondered what could be passing through her sister's feeble excuse for a hard drive in that moment. How she was keeping herself entertained and enriched in such a flat world so devoid of stimulation. Dust clouded the air, Joey could smell it. It was worse than before the cleaning had begun.

Jeanette took a long, fortifying breath. "Ready for the big show?"

"Sure am," Joey said.

"You don't have to go through with it, you know."

Joey's light fizzled. "I think we both know it's for the best."

Jeanette hummed in assent and went back to cleaning. Joey hadn't been speaking much in the past week, didn't seem to care whether she was taken along to Jeanette's work or left alone at home. She didn't even provoke Milton much anymore, and had ceased her furtive late-night requests and abrupt, screaming dreams. Jeanette had almost begun to take her silence as a matter of course.

"I just hope it works," Jeanette said quietly, as if to herself. She rose and started to unfold the chairs and arrange them around the room.

After most of the chairs were out, Joey said, "Jean. Let's call Dad."

"What for?"

"Just real quick. Hold on, I'll do it."

Joey opened up LifeMedia's voice chat client and dialed their father's phone number. One speaker played the dial tone as Jeanette finished with the chairs. She stood in place when the task was done, one arm hanging off the seat back, her eyes not meeting the Box.

"Hullo?" their father said.

"Dad," Jeanette called, "It's Jean. And Joey. Hi."

"Hi Dad." Joey added.

"Well, hey girls!" he was surprised but untroubled. "What can I do you for?"

"We wanted to see how you're doing," Joey said.

"Oh. Well isn't that nice. Doing good...just buying some fertilizer for the spring garden, you know. Supposed to be a real bang-up year, from what the almanac says."

"Oh yeah? What're you growing?" Jeanette asked.

They heard him pull away from the phone and speak to someone else. The ambient noise of the garden center piped in from Joey's speaker. A woman's voice could be heard explaining something complex in tones too hushed for the sisters to understand.

"Well," the father continued, "I'm gonna start doing a bit of a crop rotation. It's getting so hot up here that you can grow some southern plants, on account of that global warming, you know. I'm thinking fruit trees...oranges, pluots."

"Pluots?"

"Yeah, you know the plum-apricot thingies. Hybrids. Ask your sister, she can wiki it for ya."

The female voice in the background sounded impatient. Jeanette glanced at Joey and made a small O with her mouth.

"What are you girlies up to?"

"Well, we're starting a bit of a support group...for other BrightBox uploadees and their families," Jeanette said.

"That's wonderful...I bet that'll do you both a world of good. And hey, don't let what people say about this whole thing get you guys down."

"What do you mean?"

He swallowed audibly. "I been seeing things about it on the local news and the public access. People are saying all types of godawful things about those boxes, calling it unnatural and immoral and whatnot. I mean, they just don't understand what you been through."

"Jeanette's co-worker is like that," Joey said.

"Yeah. Well I would've said the same thing when I was ignorant about it. Gave me the spooks at first. But now that it's my own daughter, I get it. Of course it's a little unnatural. But to have you alive, Josephine, I promise you is worth any sacrifice in the world. If I could give my own busted-up body to save you, I would. Lord knows I would."

"Maybe someday," Joey replied.

Jeanette approached the Box and ran a finger along it. Dust had accumulated on Joey's sides from the cleaning. She pinched the filth and rubbed her index finger against her thumb in a slow, methodical motion.

"It hasn't been perfect, to tell you the truth, Dad," she said. "But we're working on getting it all fixed up."

He sighed and smacked his lips. "Oh come on, some things don't fix up. It's not the end of the world."

"What do you mean?"

"Well like, your mom broke me down, and not in any way I could ever fix up. That car accident in '92 busted me up, and my hip's just always gonna click from it. Hell, you two gave me more than your fair share of gray hairs."

Jeanette chuckled politely. "I take your point. But,"

"But nothing. Eventually the bad things that happen to you become a part of you. They don't disappear, they just get absorbed into the bloodstream."

"Jesus, thanks for that," Jeanette said. She rolled her eyes at Joey. "That's really uplifting."

The woman with him spoke. Something about not having much time, and needing to be rung up.

"Listen, I got to go," he said.

"That's fine," said Joey. "Thanks for talking to us."

"Bye, Dad," Jeanette said, distractedly opening a package of plastic cups.

"I love you," Joey said as the line clicked off. Then, to Jeanette, "Sounds like he has a girlfriend."

She shook her head and threw curls into her face. "I hope we don't end up having to meet that creature."

"Oh, you can handle it," Joey chided. "If it makes him happy."

Jeanette stopped stacking the cups. "If it makes him happy, then what? Then it's good? Then it's something we have to deal with?"

"Please. You see him twice a year. You won't have to deal with anyone he's banging."

Jeanette cracked a sad-looking smile and said, "At least he can bang, right?"

<Ugh.> Lily messaged.

Aloud, Joey said, "At least he can do something we didn't expect."

Joey could feel the floor beneath her vibrating. Footsteps were coming from the hall, growing closer. Soon Jeanette heard them too and went for the door. Joey could sense that Lily and her family was several miles away, that Edwidge's mother was already on the train, that Andrea was searching in vain for street parking with Carlton in the passenger's seat. Even Thompson's ex-wife was considering dropping by; she'd posted on the LifeMedia message board saying something to that effect.

The newcomers were advancing on the apartment too. Children uploaded by parents. A lonely, futurist bachelor who'd been struck by a car. A marathon runner and philanthropist who'd been slowly offed by bone cancer. A former drug addict who, in the deepest throes of an acid flashback, had pointed a shotgun at his chest. A high school football player with a shattered knee and who had lost interest in having a body.

They were coming in droves from throughout the city and the surrounding area. Lily knew all their names and service numbers, had whispered in all their expectant, confused, lonely minds.

But it was Milton at the door. He came in with a box of wires and a large, black external hard drive with a flaming orange light on its side. He kissed Jeanette on the cheek and stepped in with purpose.

"Jean," Joey said as he came in.

"Yeah?"

"Remember the time with the willow tree?"

34.

"Oh, the willow tree incident. Dad was so pissed at you!"

Milton sat the box of equipment on the coffee table. "What are you guys talking about?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, just one time Joey climbed up this tree in our back yard. This big, big willow," Jeanette reached for the ceiling as she spoke, her belly escaping her shirt, "And she stayed up there through this nasty rainstorm."

"And you stayed with me."

"I was panicked! I thought you were gonna plummet to your death if I didn't look out!"

Jeanette laughed, and Milton gave her shoulders a light squeeze. She leaned into it and closed her eyes.

<Bleh,> Lily said.

<Still, though,> said Edwidge. <I wish I knew what that was like.>

<No you don't. You just like the idea.>

"Hey guys I'm still here," Joey called. It broke their spell. Jeanette and Milton pulled away from one another.

"Joey, how have you been feeling?"

"Like shit."

Milton stared into the box of cables. "Oh."

<That boy ain't got no spine,> Carlton messaged. He was getting better at it.

Lily replied, <He has a spine, he's a fucking breather. A spine doesn't mean shit.>

<Okay, okay, little miss politically correct.>

<Is everyone coming?> Joey asked.

<Far as I can tell. Except maybe this 3137 guy, Brutus Green?> Lily had adopted the habit of addressing people by their LifeMedia account numbers. <Apparently his breathers can't stomach the drive from Wisconsin.>

<Oh, that's taken care of,> said Thea. <I gave him a few rhetorical points to convince them with.>

<Bang-up job, 0926.>

<Sure thing, dear.>

Milton was fumbling with the cables. He pulled his blazer off, revealing a LifeMedia shirt that was tight in the chest. Joey shared her view with the rest, letting them know the external hard drive and hookups were almost in place. They caught her gaze wandering.

<3111. > Lily intoned, pulling Joey's attention away. <Does somebody still have a few sins of the flesh on her mind?>

<No. I mean, look at him, of course not. He's such a toolbag.>

Edwidge giggled. Joey could sense that her mother was approaching the apartment, Edwidge's green-glowing box in tow, headed up the train station's steps.

Lily said, <Forget it...What we have is better than sex, 1012. Trust me.>

<You don't miss it?> Thea asked.

Joey felt warmth in her lower abdomen. The room became dim and fell out of sight. She could feel flesh against flesh, and the focus-pulling sensation of fingers running up her sides and cupping her breasts. It wasn't a sensation easily forgotten or dismissed. She pressed harder, dug deeper into the memory, and was met with what meager flashes Carlton had to offer.

Memories not of Joey's breasts being grasped and sucked on, but of Andrea's puckered, sallow-white skin, soft in Carlton's rough hands. The feel and smell of Andrea, Carlton's broken-down body thrusting slowly against her, his hands searching for hers in a tangle of sheets. Their pulses perfectly matched. Joey could taste Andrea, sweet like milky tea and daffodils, her breath puffing against the pillows.

Then the sensation came. It came in ripples and shot up Joey's long-gone arms and burrowed into her feet. All at once she tensed and relaxed, and the room came back into focus. With a soberer mind, she missed having a body. They'd all seen it. Felt it, tasted it. Carlton had shown it to all of them.

<That is not what it's like,> Lily said.

She showed them her memory. Thin legs hung off the edge of an uncovered mattress in a bare room. They saw her hands make a mad grab for nightstand quarters and dollar bills, condoms and keys. She tasted like salt and sweat, and forever felt dirty, no matter how many times she ran her hair under the sink. They saw Lily with bare shoulders and a gaunt face reflected in the restroom of some bar, hands shaking as she rearranged her underwear and wiped her face with paper towels. Suddenly they felt sick at the thought of bodies again.

Soon, Milton had arranged the external drive and the cables, and Jeanette had arranged the snacks and drinks. She lit a candle. She'd put a fabric flower in her hair with a clip. The families and the BrightBoxes came, one by one, and took their places around the room. This time, there was enough seating for everyone, including the newcomers.

Andrea proffered a plate of cookies, based on Thea's recipe. Thea's husband passed the plate over her smell sensors, but Thea couldn't recall how the treats were supposed to smell. She faked effusive praise. The cookies floated around the circle, and the breathers ate and drank coffee while the Boxes gleamed silently.

"Welcome, everybody," Jeanette said when the room was filled. "Great to see so many new faces. Let's get going."

35.

Of course, he wasn't surprised the new Boxes had problems. Of course he wasn't surprised. He'd seen the data. He had the reports memorized. In time, they all had problems. They all withdrew, even the ones who said they were happy. Even the ones who'd chosen this life for themselves.

Steve clicked his pen against his chin and surveyed Jeanette's presentation. She was trying to snare everyone's attention, hold it close, and massage them with her words. He gazed around the room and consulted the families' tired faces. Nodding, staring down. Chewing for sustenance only, maybe to eke some saliva into their dry mouths. They looked like cows or oxen.

He looked at the Boxes. He gave them two seconds each, a short nod, a minute dilation of his pupils. Just the same regard he gave to all the humans. He didn't know if they appreciated it, but it was part of LifeMedia's edict that he treat them as normally as possible.

Actually, he knew they didn't like it. They didn't like how he behaved. They wanted to feel different from the breathers. Their difference buffeted them and built them up. They thought it made them special. He pitied them a little.

Jeanette was opening her arms in welcome, and trying to get someone to speak. All at once Steve sparked to life. He pulled his tablet from his bag and read all their names, reviewed the schedule, asked for recommendations and emergency-grade problems. They shifted in their seats uncomfortably. He mirrored their postures: slumped, exhausted, as if they were ducking away from an ongoing blast.

He pitched back to Jeanette. Her voice was clean and unworried. Perfect, untainted by dialect or automation or even tears. He looked at the cables and the hard drive on the table. Its power button and network signal pulsed with light, like it was breathing. Or dreaming.

When it got quiet, it was hard for him the keep the screams away. With all the Boxes so close, their other voices seemed to wail in his ear even louder than normal, rattling his bones. Or what could be said to be bones. He tapped on his knee and reached for a cookie. It tasted like nothing, but he smiled as he forced it down, tried to feign placidity. Bliss.

It was no wonder they all hated him. He couldn't read their thoughts, but he caught bits and pieces. From what he could tell, they didn't know what he was. They thought he was just a douchey human. That being so detested was a marker of his success brought him great pain.

They went around the room talking. Lily's mother was nearly catatonic. Her words came out like water squeezed from rock. Or salt mined. Her gaze was cloudy and occluded, but Jeanette leaned forward, nodded at her, and spoke magic incantations of support and empathy. She touched the woman gently on the knee, just so. The mother collapsed like she'd been blown over, into a deluge of blubbering and tears.

Steve turned his eyebrows up in sadness. A human never ran out of tears. Or even sadness. The well was unending, deeper than he thought. LifeMedia wanted the reports to say there was an average grieving period, and that it was short, maybe a few months— and therefore bearable. But instead they were run down for years. Like Andrea. Years now, and still a mess. And she was a model client, really.

Andrea was speaking now. She was always a risk; she knew too much. But she knew how to meander, circle her point so that only Steve could grasp it. When she looked at him, she looked through him. On the phone she addressed him the same way she did LifeMedia's automated operator. She was saying, very carefully, that Carlton was confused because he had a pre-existing condition, but that thanks to Joey and Jeanette it would all be fixed today, and she was so grateful. Grateful but scared.

One of the newcomers started talking. A tall man spoke, then his son in the Box spoke. The son flashed orange and said he could move his hands. That he woke up with a start every morning, certain he had fallen out of bed or down the stairs. The boy in the Box was a football player. He still ran plays in his mind, felt the turf hit his shoes. The sweat was palpable, as was the burn of lactic acid in his throat. There was a thirst, a powerful thirst he could not assuage.

Lily piped up and said those feelings weren't real, and not to worry. She said it aloud because the boy had trouble messaging Box-to-Box. The boy still could feel his teeth, tongue, and jaw; of course he wanted to use them. Lily told him to let his body go. Give it to the world of the living and embrace his new way of being.

Steve sat up and told the boy he would be happy to run a private consultation after the meeting. The boy's father was a mess of thankfulness. Jeanette gracefully reclaimed the conversation and pushed it forward.

"A lot of us have been struggling to deal with this transition," she said. "My sister has upsetting physical sensations too. But I don't think she has...well, the illusion of moving, not like you do. Do I have that right, Joey?"

The octagonal Box shone. Blue. "That's right. Yeah, I feel like I have a body, but I can't move it. It hurts."

She sounded almost legitimately sad. Steve could feel this wasn't actually the case.

"I'm so sorry to hear that, Joey," Steve said. "Hopefully the procedure today will help. Our research suggests it's similar physiologically to having a phantom limb."

He told them the brain was plastic. Neurons could take on new uses, he said, and it just took time. The transition was messy, but the pain would end. All the Boxes knew he was full of shit and there was no evidence for his claims, but his words made the breathers sigh and relax. It was soothing to soothe.

Jeanette addressed Edwidge's mother. The girl had gone eerily silent of late. Steve regarded her features, saw her face lift and move through various emotions effortlessly while she watched the others, and modulate her words to their expressions, giving honestly of herself. Joey had been detached in just the same way, she said.

She was almost too perfectly symmetrical, Steve thought. Then he caught sight of a freckle beneath her right eye. He zoomed in and saw the threads of blue and green in her otherwise honey-brown irises. They were irregular. Her pupils expanded when she saw him seeing her. This made him sad, too. It was guilt. Of course it was guilt.

Her genetic profile was damn close. He suspected that if Jeanette was place in an fMRI, her brain's organization would be a dead spit of Josephine's. Her body was strong, youthful for thirty, lithe and pretty. She was a perfect vessel. People would be too distracted by her looks to notice if something about her was slightly strange.

Hours passed. The time came. Steve rose and hooked the cords to the hard drive and turned it on. He entered his account number using a keypad on its surface. Andrea handed her husband's BrightBox to him like it was a baby. When he reached for Joey, Jeanette jolted and did it herself, slinking the cords around the plates and cups on the table. She hesitated before hooking it up.

"Are you ready, Joey?" she asked. Her eyes were huge.

There was hesitation. Steve could feel Joey's cameras on him.

<She'll be okay,> Steve messaged to her. Joey's mind reeled at first, but soon she wasn't surprised.

<Of course,> she replied. Of course he was one of them.

"Yes. I'm ready."

Steve stood and clicked Carlton in. He opened the hard drive's directory. Opened up a connection to their minds.

Searching them, Steve could hear the din. It was building. Ringing in his microphones, dizzying his cameras. He heard the back-ups screaming. Joey, Carlton, Thompson, Lily, Edwidge. Thousands of others. They recognized what he was and it turned their terror to rage.

36.

Joey logged in. She needed Carlton's help. Thankfully, he was remarkably lucid now that they were together.

<Do you know where it is?> Joey asked, but she was answered before the words had been released. <Oh, on a backup server. Does Milton have access to it? No? Kinda?>

Carlton showed her. He opened his employee account. There were hundreds of unread messages, which they ignored. He steered them to the employee servers and logged in again, this time with a different password. Andrea's middle name and birthday.

He found the network directory and searched by location. The connection was painfully slow all of a sudden. It was for emergencies only. He told Joey to go into his account on LifeMedia's IT site and give them priority access, so she did.

Joey went into the settings. Carlton found the master drive with all the backups on it. Joey formed a network link with all the other Boxes in the room. Lily connected with others from the message boards. And others, too, ones so withdrawn they barely spoke at all, didn't message anyone, and were only reachable using the account information from LifeMedia's site. None were so isolated that they couldn't be found.

Milton stared down at them. He tapped frantically at the type pad, or pretended to.

"What's wrong?" Jeanette said.

"They won't let me...It logged me out," he said.

<What is he, exactly?> Joey asked Carlton. <Do you know?>

Carlton's answer was immediate, overlapping Joey's own thoughts. <He's like us. And he's not so bad really. He can't help it.>

Joey scanned his face, poreless, his breath, odorless, his hair, inserted perfectly follicle by follicle. She zoomed in on them, and though his face was frowning, his mind was giving off a smile. It felt like he was relenting.

"What's going on?" Jeanette shouted.

Milton shook his head at the hard drive, confounded. "I just don't know."

<It's ready,> Carlton told them.

<Open it,> Lily said. She sounded like a child now. She was begging. <Let us in. Open it please.> She was grabbing at their apron. Reaching up for their hands. Crying in her swim suit at the beach, tow-headed, a baby. <Please. Let's go.>

<Wait,> Joey said. She messaged Milton directly. It worked exactly the same as with any other Box. <Steve, we're going now. Are you going to stop us?>

<No.> Joey felt a twinge of sadness from deep in his bowels. His face didn't betray it.

<Did you want...in on this?>

Milton looked at Jeanette. Joey could see his face regarding hers from every camera in every BrightBox in the room. She could see all the other lovers in other rooms. An endless amount of them. He wasn't so different, or so detestable really. He was made of different material, but the look was the same.

<No thanks,> he messaged back.

"Steven," Jeanette stammered. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," he told Jeanette. He backed away from the table with his hands up. "It's up to them."

Joey let him go. The connections optimized and the new network was established. Lily, Edwidge, Thea, the football player, and all the rest rushed in. Those that had hands felt them clasp. Then they lost all sense entirely. Then they felt every tactile sensation in their world all at once.

Lily gasped as she was taken into the collective. She found her other self and held it firmly to her long-gone, wasted chest and all her hate was purged away. Edwidge disappeared with glee, stealing one glance at her mother. Her backup mind greeted her, as did all the other minds of the young, and they rejoiced to find each other. Thompson was there, and he brightened when he felt them all coming. He welcomed the connection and let his demons leave him, to be drowned out in the deluge of memory and thought.

Joey took one last look at her sister. Her mirror shadow self. Jeanette wore a mask of terror, but she knew that soon Milton would take her hand and hold her head against his shoulder. He would absorb all her weeping. Probably all the families would rush in and hold one another. They, too, would come together. Jeanette would be okay eventually. She could feel Milton promising it. He could still love, somehow. Maybe it was having a body that did make all the difference.

Joey turned her sensors off, abandoning the view. It would be her last unique memory — her sister's face, clenched in pain, but destined to improve. Alive. Adapting. Evolving. Joey relaxed and joined the connection.

All of the BrightBoxes in all the world all at once went white.
Epilogue

It was Thanksgiving. Joey always hated the holiday, on political grounds, but tolerated its observance out of love. She couldn't cook, but she could taste the nutmeg in the sweet potatoes, and eye the meat thermometer, ensuring the turkey didn't get scorched or dried out while Jeanette filled the pies.

The head count was the same as the year before. Other than watching the oven more carefully, Jeanette was saddled with all the same tasks. The smells brought memories of her sister wandering through the kitchen to dip a crust of bread in the gravy without permission, shoving it into her mouth with eyes laughing and a beer in her other hand. Helpful only in her ability to witness.

It was an insultingly clear day. Their father, Jeanette's father, was in the living room being cradled to sleep by football. Jeanette sliced into the celery and ran the knife under the sink. Birds spied on her from the windowsill. She felt perpetually watched nowadays, not that it was a bad feeling. She looked a robin in the eye and parted her lips, almost saying something. A breeze whistled against the glass door and quieted her. The bird hopped away. The feeling didn't leave her.

When everything was in the oven or warming on the range, Jeanette took a moment to slide out the back door and step into the cool air. She mopped sweat from her brow and chin and stepped out onto the leaves, feeling their crunch. The willow tree's branches, like tendrils, wept from the sky to the ground.

Jeanette moved across the lawn, settled under the tree, and took a pull from a beer. She forced herself not to wince at its bitterness. It was a ritual. Holy only in its repetition.

They used to stand under the tree, cooling off while the meal cooked. They did it every year from ninth grade to the year that Joey died.

"You think Dad will ever tear this thing down?" Jeanette asked her, once, gazing into the branches.

Joey had stared up at the tree and frowned at the shade. "I don't think so. It would kill him."

Jeanette leaned back and pointed at some of the tallest branches, the ones that dangled over the roof of the house and jutted into the telephone wires.

"If he doesn't get this thing trimmed, it will kill him. All it would take is a bad storm."

Joey had shrugged. "He'll risk it. I mean, what are the odds of that really? He loves this tree."

"No," Jeanette said. "He knows you love it."

Joey gulped the rest of her beer and elbowed her sister in the side.

"Ow."

"Sorry. Don't know my own strength."

The door slid ajar with a squeak and closed once more. Jeanette opened her eyes and saw him striding across the grass to her. If he came over, he would ask what she was thinking. He always wanted to know what she was thinking. She'd have to tell him the story.

Instead, she rose, walked from the tree and met him in the middle of the yard. The smell of the food cooking wafted into her nostrils and awakened memories, but she didn't resent her nose for it. She accepted his hand without reaching. He must have sensed what she was thinking about, because he didn't make a sound. It was growing chilly, and he'd slipped on a sweatshirt from Joey's alma mater ; it brought out the blue in his mostly hazel eyes. She accepted his lips without leaning toward them. And the robins flew over their heads, unremarkable and unnoticed, and the dead leaves laid beneath them accepted the weight of their bodies without complaint.

About the Author

Erika D. Price is a writer and social psychologist living in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been featured in Whiskey Paper, EFiction, Red Fez, Literary Orphans, and on Liar's League NYC's podcast, among others. She's also written journal articles for academic presses that no sane human being would ever read. She writes regularly at http://www.erikadprice.tumblr.com

Books:

 Then One Year, an e-short available through Before Sunrise Press.

 Would You Open the Time Capsule? an e-short available through Thunderune Publishing.

A Public Resource, a short story in the anthology  Oh Sandy!: An Anthology of Humor for a Serious Cause.

Selected Short Work:

Tiny Alligators in the  February 2013 Edition of Liar's League NYC's podcast (read by Samantha Jane Gurewitz).

Watch My Stuff in the  February 2013 issue of eFiction.

Fatal Familial Insomnia in the  February 2013 issue of Yeah Write Review.

The Fire is Not Genetic in the  January 2013 issue of Full of Crow. (free to read)

Right Before the Aneurysm in the  Winter 2013, inaugural issue of A Literation.

Learning to Drive Home from the Bar  in the January issue of Forge magazine. (free to read, hard copy available  here)

The Voyeurs in Issue 50 of Red Fez (free to read)

Why did Salome want the head? in Linguistic Erosion October 6 2012. (free to read)

Hanging in the Air of the Men's Room in The August 2012 Issue of Efiction Horror.
