Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson
The gaffers in the barbershop and the moms in the picnic shelter had seen the Land Cruiser as just an old-school SUV, with no identifying markings save an escutcheon of dead bugs on the grille proving that it had covered much ground since its last wash. At this moment, however, it was lighting up, letting them all know who had just pulled into town and giving them limited, temporary access to Sophia’s social media contrail. But all of that data was being exhibited with the color scheme, texture palette, typeface, UI conventions, and auditory cues—in sum, the art direction—of her personal brand. Before she opened the door of the car to reveal hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and accessories marking her as Not from Around Here, the same had been preannounced, to anyone wearing glasses, by the digital penumbra of Family Reunion Mode.
“Let’s check out the park,” she proposed, “this won’t take long.”
“Yeah—it’s tiny,” Phil said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Sophia chuckled. “I mean, my rellies will be here before you have time to get bored.”
Crossing the street to the park, the foursome would have drawn stares from curious locals, had the curious locals not advanced to more sophisticated technology that enabled them to stare differently, by scanning all that Sophia had just made public. Without discussing it they went straight to the tower in the middle. This was made of the same buff sandstone as the nearby courthouse. It was just a folly, not a real fortification—only two stories high, with an upper deck surrounded by a crenellated parapet. A windowless steel door, painted Parks Department green, bore testimony to generations of bored teens’ fruitless efforts to kick their way in—or, failing that, to attest to who sucked. A plaque next to the door supplied information they’d already seen in their glasses, which was that the tower had been erected by otherwise idle laborers during the Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. This seemed like the kind of historical/political minutia that Princeton kids ought to have heard of, so they all followed the inevitable hyperlink and spent a minute standing there reading about it. It was the sort of basically dead and inert topic that Wikipedia had actually been pretty good at covering, and enough time had passed that AIs had gone over all of this material and vetted it for mistakes.
Once they had got the gist, their attention drifted back to the here and now. Julian and Phil took turns reading the graffiti on the door, a palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation that Sophia’s expensive training had given her all the tools to perceive and to analyze but no weapons to change.
“What is the agenda?” Anne-Solenne asked loudly enough to silence the boys.
“Flowers on graves,” Sophia answered.
“Let’s go then,” Phil said. “Because this place sucks.” It was an index of his social deftness that he managed to announce this in a dry and almost stately manner that nonetheless made it understood that he was channeling the ancestral voices of all the boys who had stood where he was standing scratching imprecations into the green paint with pickup-truck keys.
“It’s of the essence,” Sophia said, “that I be seen doing it.”
“Because, you know,” Anne-Solenne added, completing the thought, “the people in those graves—”
“Are dead,” Julian said, pushing his glasses up on his forehead. “They’re not going to know.”
Something flickered in Sophia’s peripheral vision. She turned her head to see a sport-utility vehicle of the largest class, authentically bug spattered and road dusted, easing into a span of eighty-seven consecutive empty parking spaces. Visual stigmas pasted on it and hovering above it let her know that its sole occupant was Pete Borglund, fifty-six years of age, the second and current husband of Karen Forthrast Borglund, Alice’s eldest daughter.
“One of your rellies?” Phil inquired. Just making polite conversation since the new arrival’s privacy settings were so tatterdemalion that Phil could have traced Pete Borglund’s mitochondrial DNA back to the Rift Valley with a few gestures.
“Yup,” Sophia said.
“Uncle? Cousin?” Julian asked. Not currently using glasses.
“That is the billion-dollar question,” Sophia said.
Phil made the faintest hint of a snicker. Not in any way a mean snicker. More of a preverbal marker to indicate, I have familiarized myself with your tangled family history.
“On the advice of my mother’s attorneys,” Sophia said, “I will not address him as Uncle but as Cousin.”
The others turned their heads to study her face and see whether she might be speaking in jest. She did not give them any clues. Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.
“Sophia!” Pete called as he approached, tactfully avoiding the use of any loaded terms. Pete was a lawyer who had finally succumbed to the inevitable and folded his practice in Sioux City to move here and look after the affairs of John and Alice’s estate—a full-time job given that Alice had died a billionaire.
“Peeet!” Sophia called back, drawing it out in a way that implied more familiarity than was really the case. She had not seen him in five years. She began walking toward him, steeling herself for the awkwardness of the to-hug-or-not-to-hug dance. But some combination of Midwestern stiffness and lawyerly formality carried the day; when they were still ten paces apart, he extended his right hand to shake. He was silver-blond, ruddy, portly, wearing a suit and tie even though he worked alone in a farmhouse. “How’s Princeton treating you?” he inquired. Which could have passed for a perfectly routine conversation starter, but she heard it as his saying, Look, kid, in spite of all that happened, you’re on easy street.
“Well,” she answered, shaking his hand, “and how’s the estate treating you?” A slightly barbed response that he accepted with a forced smile.
“It is a never-ending source of tasks. Comparable to being a farmer in that way, I guess.”
They let go of each other’s hands and took a moment to regard each other. She found it impossible to hate him. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said. “Some of your … cousins and whatnot could take some pointers from you in how to better protect their privacy. I worry over them when they go off to college and people find out who they are.”
Sophia let it pass with a nod. “My friends and I decided to see the country on our way out to the coast. I thought the least I could do was place some flowers on my grandmother’s grave—and on Alice’s.”
There. She’d said it. Her mother’s attorney in Seattle could not have phrased it better.
Pete nodded. “It would be my privilege to drive you there. Or you and your friends can follow me. It’s only about a mile—”
“One point two.”
Pete glanced away, a bit sheepishly.
“I’d love it if you would drive us there,” Sophia said.
Pete heaved a quiet sigh. It was a sigh of relief.
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