“My daughter is making a game of trying to embarrass me in public, something she’s been working on since she was ten. I don’t embarrass easy.”
“Why should you be embarrassed? You’d have to care what other people think of you in order to be embarrassed. You don’t, so you aren’t.”
Hubert, Etc felt embarrassed for them, felt like he should say something, if only so that Seth didn’t get all the mindshare. “I bet he cares what you think of him,” he risked.
They both grinned and the family resemblance was uncanny, down to the identical double dimple on the right side. “That’s why I do it. I’m proxy for every human beneath his notice. It’s not fun, either, despite what he thinks.”
“I don’t see you rejecting the privilege, Natty,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She let him keep it there for a measured moment, then shrugged it off.
“Not yet,” she said.
His silence was eloquently skeptical. He moved her plate over to his place setting, tapped the table’s NO SHARING message and waved a contact on his sleeve over it, tapped out a pattern with his thumb and forefinger. He polished off the last of the corned beef hash and then reached for her shake. She stopped him and said, “Mine.” He settled for the dregs of her coffium.
“Are you going to invite your little friends over for a playdate, then?” He wiped his mouth and loaded the plates on the robot that re-docked with the table.
“You guys want a shower?”
Seth pounded the table, making the menu dance as it tried to interpret his instructions. “Come on, brother, we eat tonight!”
Hubert, Etc gave him an elbow jab. “Better count the spoons,” he said.
“They count themselves,” Jacob said. He did something with his sleeve and said, “The car’ll be around in a sec.”
[iii]
It wasn’t a carshare car, of course. The Redwaters were one of the big names—there’d been a Redwater mayor, Redwater MPs, a Redwater Finance Minister, any number of Redwater CEOs. The car was still small, not a stretch, but it was indefinably solid, skirted with matte rubber that covered the wheels. Hubert, Etc thought that there was something interesting underneath it. There were intriguing somethings about this car, and an inconspicuous Longines logo worked into the corner of the window glass. The suspension did something clever to compensate for his weight, actively dampening it, not like stone-age springs. He sat in a rear-facing jump seat, saw the windows weren’t windows at all. They were thick armor, coated with hi-rez screens. Jacob took the other jump seat and said, “Home.” The car waited until they were all seated securely and buckled in before it leapt into traffic. From his vantage the cars around them were melting out of their way.
“I don’t think I’ve ever traveled this fast in city traffic,” he said.
Jacob gave him a fatherly wink.
Natalie reached across the large internal compartment and gave her dad a sock in the thigh. “He’s showing off. There’s custom firmware in these, lets them cut the clearance envelope in half, which makes the other cars back off because we’re driving like unpredictable assholes.”
“Is that legal?” Hubert, Etc said.
“It’s a civil offense,” Jacob said. “The fines are paid by direct-debit.”
“What if you kill someone?” Seth got to the point.
“That’s a criminal matter, more serious. Won’t happen, though. There’s a lot of game theory stuff going on in the car’s lookahead, modeling likely outs and defectors and injecting a huge margin of safety. Really, we’re playing it safer than the stock firmware, but only because the car itself has got much better braking and acceleration and handling characteristics than a stock car.”
“And because you’re terrifying other cars’ systems into getting out of your way,” Seth said.
“Right,” Natalie said, before her dad could object. He shrugged and Hubert, Etc remembered what she’d said about his being “old rich,” unconcerned by the idea that anyone would resent his buying his way through traffic.
They raced through city streets. Natalie closed her eyes and reclined. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was tense, had been since her dad turned up. Hubert, Etc tried not to stare.
“Where do you live?” Seth asked.
“Eglinton Ravine, by the Parkway,” Jacob said. “I had it built about ten years ago.”
Hubert, Etc remembered school trips to the Ontario Science Centre, tried to remember the ravine, but could only recall a deep forested zone glimpsed from the window of a speeding school bus.
The food he’d had from Fran’s weighed in his gut like a cannonball. He thought about the blood on his clothes and under his fingernails, mud on his shoes, crumbling to the upholstery. The car surged, his guts complained. They braked hard, and then merged with another lane of traffic, a whisper between them and the car behind, a tiny carshare whose passenger, an elegant Arabic-looking woman in office makeup, looked at them with alarm before they skipped to the next lane.
[iv]
The house was one of three in a row overlooking the ravine’s edge, at the end of a winding, rutted road overhung with leafy trees. The garage door slid aside as they pulled into the rightmost house. It shut and locked into place with huge, shining round rods sunk deep into the floor and ceiling and walls. The car doors gasped open and he was in a vast space beneath all three houses, brightly lit and dotted with vehicles. Jacob held his hand out to Natalie and she ignored him, then stumbled a little as she twisted to avoid him taking her elbow.
“Come on,” she said to Hubert, Etc and Seth and set off for the garage’s other end.
“Thanks for the ride,” Hubert, Etc called as he quickstepped after her. Jacob leaned against the car, watching them go. Hubert, Etc couldn’t make out his expression.
She took them up a narrow staircase to a large, messy room with sofas and a panoramic window overlooking the ravine—a green, steep drop-off with the Don River below, white and frothing as it cascaded to Lake Ontario. It smelled funky, old laundry and unwashed dishes, an overlay of scented candles. One wall was finger-painted from floor to ceiling and scribbled on with Sharpies and glitter and ballpoint.
“The kids’ wing,” she said. “My sister’s away at university in Rio, so it’s mine for now. I don’t think my parents have been in here five times since the house was built.”
“The whole thing is one house?” Hubert, Etc said.
“Yeah,” she said.