It didn’t sting though. She waited for it to—maybe later it would. But in the moment all she felt was a twisted sort of gratitude. She wanted to get help for her father, and she wanted Byron to win on a technicality instead of on a feat that was entirely his own, if he had to win. He was pretty smart, so he probably did.
She had her consolation prizes. She could return with her head held high after having enjoyed a good time: She’d slept with an outlaw! She’d only used a phone twice in several days! If she didn’t take Byron up on the offer, no part of her life that came afterward would feel victorious—she’d always remember how she valued her freedom over her father’s life, and that it had been a lame, neutered freedom anyway because Byron could still see and hear everything she did. He’d know the guilt and regret that she felt, and that alone would be a victory for him.
But her sitting at his side in silent protest, with him knowing the reason she’d come home was a sense of paternal fidelity? That didn’t seem like a total victory for Byron. It felt closer to breaking even. Probably as close to it as she could ever hope to get with him.
“So you’ll want me to move back to The Hub. Right?”
“That would make the most sense. If we’re together then your father is my family and I’d do anything possible to help him.”
“I see. But the father of your estranged wife whose brain you microchipped . . .” Hazel knew she shouldn’t push it. She should give in without protest, recite a canned statement of thanks about how much she appreciated his willingness to help.
“Now you’re describing a situation where it sounds like I’m unwanted,” he said. “And that elderly man, in that case, I would not feel duty bound to assist, no.”
“I’ll come back home, Byron. Let me go talk to him. I’ll call you tonight?”
“Until then.”
Hazel started to turn back around, but stopped. She was crying, but the reasons behind the tears seemed like the wrong ones—she was sad about her father, yes, but she was also thinking about all the petty, weird things about living at The Hub that she hated, like how the purified air in their house smelled like pencil lead.
She turned the Rascal’s lever full throttle and decided to complete the mission before heading back to her father’s. She could still get the experience of pawning Byron’s goods. It could be a memory for her to cherish in her older years when she was sitting in a Gogol edema-reducing Masostimulation Recliner.
There were two young children outside the store, facing each other and standing about three feet apart. Each held a water gun, and each was using it to soak the crotch of the other’s pants.
“Are you two the owners of this fine establishment?” Hazel asked. “Could one of you please open the door for me?”
“Are you handi-crapped?” the farther one yelled. The nearer one did agree to hold the door for her; in exchange for his humanity he was rewarded with the other heartily soaking the anal area of his shorts while his back was turned.
“Quit giving me butt water,” he protested.
Hazel scooted inside to the nearest associate. She pulled the beach towel off the Rascal’s basket to reveal the safe and handed over the plastic bag of goods. The clerk let out a long whistle. “You’ve got some top-of-the-line stuff here.” His eyes did a once-over on her DROPOUT sweatpants. “Is it stolen?”
“They were gifts.” The boys’ parents were on the other side of the store, their faces adult versions of their sons’. The couple was looking at sound systems. “I want something where, like, if a house is getting shot up on TV, it sounds like my house is getting shot up,” the father explained.
Byron always focused on the ways that nature was unpredictable, but often it wasn’t. In Byron’s world, deviation, mutation, and evolution were all negatives; anything unexpected was unwanted. With technology too—this is what he felt, how his brain worked—even happy tech accidents, ones with results that were ultimately beneficial, still implied that the programmers had failed to make an adequate prediction. Having a product respond in a way it wasn’t asked to hinted toward powerlessness.
This was part of why Byron would never abide her leaving him.
“Gifts, wow. Assuming the serial numbers don’t come back hot, you can trade this up for some really primo product. What can I interest you in? You might have enough here for a virtual-reality pod. We don’t get those in here often but I’ve got one in the back today. Seriously exquisite. Have you ever tried it? You lie down like you’re in a tanning bed, except when the door closes over you all your simulated dreams come true. No UV rays either.”
“No thanks. I just want money.”
The clerk gave Hazel a confused frown. “But what for? Any electronic device you’d spend it on we can get you here. If we don’t have it in stock, we’ll order it.”
“I need it to pay legal fees,” Hazel lied. “I’m kind of in a hurry. Can we just do this and be done?”
“Ah. Are you familiar with our strategist software? A lot of people use it as a mid-range option for legal defense. You give it the details of your case, and it searches a comprehensive database of similar cases where the defendant achieved a desirable outcome. Then it generates a report on how to make their arguments work for you. It’s cheaper than a traditional attorney, so you can get a public defender and use the printouts. Or if there’s something specific on which you keep encountering problems with the law, perhaps I could interest you in one of our antidetect products?”
He held a scanner to the first item she was selling and let out a giddy yell. “Man!” he exclaimed. “You said these were gifts? Does the person who gave them to you, like, work for Gogol? Pretty high up I mean? These are embargoed. That is so cool.”
Hazel removed her hands from the Rascal’s controls; she could feel a hot wash of anger beginning to move through her and didn’t want to be tempted to drive through the storefront’s glass window. “You mean he made it so I can’t even sell them?”
“No, we can totally buy them—in fact, they’re worth a lot more than they would be otherwise. Embargoed stuff is, like, customized. Either it has features on it that the general models don’t . . . features that haven’t been released yet? Or it has information that might be sensitive. If it’s embargoed, then when it’s returned to Gogol, we get, like, three times as much money because they don’t want it circulating on the street.”
Hazel shuddered to think what surveillance “enhancements” had been made to the gifts Byron had given her. The safe of tech goodies was an egg-shaped Trojan horse.
She emerged from the store with a brick of cash she stowed inside the band of her sweatpants. She didn’t know what treatments Gogol was going to give her father. But she was picturing the following Thanksgiving at The Hub’s expansive stainless-steel dining table: her father bald, Diane without a wig, Hazel with a shaved head, all three of them in chemo-treatment solidarity, and Byron in front of a screen at the other end of the table doing remote work on a million things as he ate and they all ignored him.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
12