“Jesus. Is that what kids are up to nowadays? I’m glad I’m near the grand exit. Brain melds. Not for me. Your mother and I didn’t even trust French kissing.”
“No, Dad. It’s not what anyone is doing. It has never been done. He wanted me to offer up my still-living brain for research and development, essentially.” She hadn’t consented, but of course her consent wasn’t going to stand in his way. Nothing ever did. Plus, Hazel was convinced he was in the process of making her sick so that she’d go, of her own volition, to their private medical facility and check herself in, which would be the beginning of the end. For the past few weeks, she’d been having increasingly severe headaches; this morning she’d gotten a nosebleed in the shower. It was the first nosebleed of her lifetime. The blood had gone down the drain and was detected by their SmartFilter, which did in fact even know the blood was from her nose, which did in fact set off an alert, which caused Byron’s video-calling face to appear on the screen-wall of their bathroom. It was nearly a purr the way he said it, his stony-blue eyes radiant with cold power: Hazel, don’t you think you should go see the doctor?
“Yikes,” her father said. “Sounds like things took a turn. Did you at least get to spend a lot of his money?”
Yes and no, Hazel thought. Totally, yet not as much as most would. Plus, she’d increasingly stopped leaving the compound, or bringing things in. It was hard to explain, but buying something and taking it home, or having it shipped there, wasn’t the same as encountering it in the actual world. It was like a King Midas situation, except instead of turning to gold everything that entered Byron’s house became wildly uninteresting. “You know, when I realized I was going to leave eventually, I thought it might be fun to try overindulging on richness before I went out. Spend so much money I got sick of spending money. I figured I could order really strange things that would be funny to leave behind. Like hundreds of thousands of cans of soup? But I got so scared that I stopped caring about anything besides leaving as fast as I could.” His house was intentionally in the middle of nowhere, as were Gogol’s most important ancillary buildings and the microcity that served its worker elite. Without a job or an appointment, there was no reason to come across its parameters. Most regular employees worked in one of its city branches, but cities made Byron paranoid. Nearly everything made Byron paranoid.
Hazel began rubbing her face in thorough circles with both of her hands. “And did I ever tell you he liked using the phrase ‘global domination’? He did. Heavily. Who, besides crazed sociopathic dictators, comes home to his partner after a meeting and says, ‘I love the taste of global domination! Want to taste it? Give me a kiss!’ I felt like I lived with a cartoon villain. Worst of all, since I had no idea how to respond, I’d go along with it like I was proud of him. ‘Cheers to you, global dominator!’ I can’t count the number of times I raised a water glass in his direction and said that.”
“All right, well. Sorry your marriage was a shit show, kid. Sounds like you need another drink even more than I thought.” He returned his face to the sanctuary of Diane’s hair and began mashing around in it, lifting up individual pieces and almost polishing his cheeks and chin with them. “Scram for now and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Hazel felt a deep sigh building inside. She wanted it to be her father’s fault if she walked out the door and got kidnapped or worse by Gogol thugs, but it wouldn’t be, and her father knew it wouldn’t be, and he would therefore fail to feel the inordinate amount of guilt she’d like to think he’d feel for sending her out of his home when she really didn’t want to leave. “Sure, Dad. I’ll go to the bar. Words every father longs to hear his daughter say: I’m off to the tavern until way past your bedtime.”
“You have to actually go,” he specified. “No pretending to leave and sitting on the steps for a few minutes and coming right back in.” The Rascal beeped its loud message of backward motion; he performed a turnaround maneuver and the new couple sped off to the bedroom. “I know,” Hazel could hear him whispering to Diane, “I’d say she’s lost it too.”
Hazel grabbed her father’s house key from the wooden dachshund key holder that hung by the front door. The keys dangling from the dog’s belly made them look like oversize metal udder caps were milking the creature to death. The dog’s wide glued-on eyes were begging Hazel to rescue it from a life sentence of indentured lactation.
Hazel liked the feel of her father’s key in her hand, the way its teeth hurt her palm if she gripped too tightly. Entry to The Hub, Byron’s special name for their domestic compound, was controlled through a combination of voice and retinal detection. Certain rooms required a fingerprint and a keypad code; their cars were controlled via remote.
Little things like physical keys made Hazel feel as if she were going back in time, which she realized was exactly what she wanted to do. Get away from the futureworld she’d lived in with Byron, away even from the technological present. From now on she wanted no part of what Byron and his cohorts liked to call the Bionic Revolution, though they frequently slipped—was it a slip?—and said Byronic.
The more she could live a strictly manual and basic life, the more distant she’d be from him, and that was a hopeful thought: there was a way to feel like she was reclaiming herself.
She was having less hopeful thoughts too. It was a humid night and she was sweaty and anxious and really did not look her best. This somehow made the thought of a stranger coming to kill her even sadder than it had to be.
HAZEL SUPPOSED SHE COULD TRACE THE BEGINNINGS OF HER father’s desire for companionship post-widowerhood back to an excited midnight phone call she’d gotten from him several years ago.
It was nearly 2 AM when she received it. “Hazel!” he’d repeated into the phone. “Hazel! Hazel! Hazel!” Like her name was a word he’d just managed to learn.
Coming out of a dead sleep, her brain hadn’t been awake enough to distinguish alarm from enthusiasm. She’d been convinced her father was having a stroke.