“Is there a place for patients to get online?” If she could use a public computer, she could set up a new anonymous email account, type up her notes, and send them to herself.
The woman directed her down a long hallway into the main hospital, where an alcove off the cafeteria had three small workstations, each with a computer and monitor. The far desk was occupied by a too-skinny teenage boy with a shaved head wearing a medical bracelet, sweats, slippers, and enormous headphones. He was engrossed in what appeared to be an elaborate role-playing game. June sat with the empty chair between them and logged on to the Web. The long bandage on her arm made the familiar motions difficult.
She’d cut back on work because of the death of her mother, but she still needed to make a living. She was chasing an active story—she’d gotten a tip that a supposedly anonymous hookup app was selling user information to information brokers—and was waiting for verification from secondary sources. Leaving her phone back in the redwoods was harder than June had thought it would be.
She used her phone so much she often had to charge it three or four times a day, and it was killing her not to be able to call, text, email, or do research. Much of her professional and personal life took place on the Web. She hadn’t been online since she’d abandoned her phone that morning. It felt like forever.
When the technology arrived for permanently implanting a modem directly in her brain, June would be first in line.
Short of that, a public computer seemed like a safe place to check in. She wrote about electronic privacy, so her security protocols were pretty good. She had serious multilevel passwords on everything, and she always entered them manually. Even if they’d hacked her phone—hell, if they’d hacked her laptop—she felt confident that whoever was chasing her hadn’t made their way through those passwords into her email accounts. She clicked through, looking for signs that she had been compromised, but there was nothing obvious.
Of course, some asshole could be capturing every click and keystroke and she’d never know it. That could be true on any given day. It didn’t change the fact that she had work to do.
June thought of herself as fairly disciplined with only four email accounts. One was work only, another was purely personal. A third was the account she used when buying things online—she thought of it as her spam account. The fourth was her college email address, somehow still live, which some of her climbing friends and other goofballs from the old days still used.
No answers yet to the emails she’d sent from her work account that morning, before Peter had shown up in the tree. Although it sure seemed like much longer ago than that. She’d set an autoreply on her work account saying she’d had a death in the family but that she would check email daily. Her personal email was full of further condolences from friends in the Bay Area and Seattle, and kind invitations to coffee or drinks or dinner when she was up for it. The spam account had the usual useless promotional bullshit that she always deleted without reading unless she was waiting for a package from Title Nine or Backcountry.com.
Her old college account had an email from her mother.
Which was odd, because her mother hadn’t sent an email to that account for years.
And her mother had died exactly a week ago.
The email was dated today, at noon. There was no subject line.
June took a deep breath and put one hand on her chest, covering her heart. With the other, she clicked on the email.
There was no text, either. Just an attachment, a video window, her mother’s miniature face frozen behind the play icon. June glanced over at the bald kid in the slippers. His headphones covered his ears, and he seemed pretty absorbed in his game.
June clicked Play. Clicked again to enlarge the window.
Her mother’s face filled the monitor, big as life. She wore the emerald green blouse June had bought her for Christmas the year before, and her black-framed hipster glasses. Her hair was in its most recent style, a short steel-gray no-nonsense cut, so the video couldn’t be more than a few months old.
“Hello, June,” she said. “If you’re watching this, it’s because I’m probably dead.”
17
June hit Pause, stood up and stepped away from the computer, her heart beating fast. The kid glanced up from his game for a moment, then back to his screen.
June wasn’t prepared for a video from the grave.
Although as she thought about it, she realized that this was exactly the kind of thing her mother would do. The woman lived and breathed technology, and she had lousy interpersonal skills. She’d sent June a one-line email on her last birthday, and a text when she was nominated for the Pulitzer. June should have expected some kind of electronic communication from the other side, even if the other side was just an electronic remnant floating in a server somewhere. Her mother didn’t believe in any kind of afterlife, just the quality of the work you left behind. Everything else was worms in dirt.