Eighth Grade
(age thirteen)
The whole Am is a dyke thing lost its novelty and the bullies mostly moved on, but it wasn’t like that gave Am the rest of her friends back. And the worst thing was that, no matter how she tried to convince herself otherwise, she was pretty sure Elaine had been right about her.
It wasn’t just that she didn’t have crushes on boys.
Being around girls her age—or better yet, a year or two older—gave her the bizarrest feelings now.
They were all maddening and alien and pretty, coming back from the shopping concourse in their pink lipstick and fashionable shirts, and she hated it but wanted to touch them.
A lot of women on television, when Am could bring herself to watch television, had started to feel like that, too.
Even Kelli felt like that. Kelli might feel like that most of all, actually, but the thought of saying so to Kelli’s face made Am want to stick her head in the reservoir and drown.
What if Kelli liked reading articles about lesbians, but not the real thing?
What if she hated her? Then Am would be out of friends completely.
She waited and stewed, and pressure grew in her head. Am wasn’t like Kelli. She couldn’t wait forever, demure in the leaves, without doing anything. She had to take a risk.
The opportunity came when her cousin Bruno—not the maintenance engineer, but the one who’d given her the book on prompt engineering—came to visit.
Am had plenty of cousins, but the ones who’d made it out of Basic Housing were special.
Their visits always came heralded with showers of gifts and exciting news.
Bruno di Pietro, by the time Am was thirteen, had graduated university and become an information technology professional.
He spent most of his time on Elara, a moon so tiny that they’d had to hollow it out to build anything there, where he had his job in IT and helped troubleshoot everything.
Sometimes he got called to Ganymede for meetings and training; or sometimes he got vacation time and flew back to Callisto to see everyone.
And ever since the incident with the robot, Bruno had always had a soft spot for Am.
If she ever settled down and focused, Bruno liked to say, she could do as well as him or better.
She was plenty clever enough to make it out.
“Am! How’s my favorite scamp?” he asked, clapping her manfully on the back as she ran up to him. “Staying in trouble?”
“Lots and lots,” said Am, and then she lowered her voice. “Can I talk to you about something later?”
It took Bruno a while to make it through the gauntlet of parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings who wanted to catch up, but Am had known it would.
She waited impatiently until the two of them had a moment alone, hunched on the gray couch in the tiny living room.
Bruno would spend his visit sleeping on that couch, since Basic Housing gave everybody exactly enough bedrooms for the people in their household and no more.
The rest of the family had politely retreated to the kitchen or their own rooms so he could unpack and set up his blankets in peace. Am felt no such obligation.
“We’re friends, right?” said Am. “You can keep a secret. You won’t tell anybody I asked you this. I get it if the answer is ‘no.’ I just need to ask.”
“Of course, pumpkin. What’s up?”
Am fidgeted. She trusted Bruno, and he was hard to offend, but she’d never asked anybody for anything quite this illegal before.
“I need you to connect me to the unregulated Web.”
She’d read about how this worked. In the distant past, all Earth’s networks had been unregulated and anybody could post content there.
Even illegal content, because Earth was such a patchwork of different governments that a clever person could just slide sideways out of the law’s jurisdiction.
Without regulation, the Web had filled up into a soup of hate and scams—and then the language models had made it worse.
All that a scammer needed was a tiny bit of prompting access to one model or another, and they could generate hundreds, thousands, billions of awful and misleading pages, each minutely different from the others, in no time at all.
Mind you, that was on Earth. Callisto’s internet—the wired infrastructure that connected the fan feeds, the phone system, and every other application that required connectivity—wasn’t directly connected to Earth’s.
But Am had heard rumors that some enterprising people—illegally, of course—had smuggled small pieces of Earth’s old Web up here, full of forbidden content and full of largely the same dangers.
It sent its unregulated packets, in disguise, through the moon’s fiber optic cables, hidden between the packets sent and received by legitimate people.
And people on Callisto could connect to it—for a price.
If you wanted to find something useful on the unregulated Web, you had to know ahead of time what it was and exactly where to get it, how to fend off the avalanche of misleading imitations and phishes and viruses that would descend upon you as soon as you logged in.
Am had heard that the unregulated Web—even Callisto’s modest version—could mess people up worse than drugs.
Even with preparation, people who ventured in came out wild-eyed, emotionally unstable, spouting conspiracy theories and special ordering questionable products.
Even Inspiration didn’t use it to train their models anymore.
But the unregulated Web would have pages about lesbians if anything did.
Bruno gave Am a concerned look. “What do you want that for?”
“I need—” Am’s voice squeaked, and a part of her courage failed her.
She rephrased a little too quickly. “I mean, my friend Kelli needs to know some stuff. She’s gotten real obsessed with it, she’s always looking it up in the encyclopedia on her mom’s workstation but it’s not legal for her to actually know anything about it on account of being underage and it’s driving her kind of crazy. It’s really important, I think.”
She didn’t realize how that sounded until she caught her breath and saw Bruno’s unamused stare. Oh, no. She’d made it sound like she was just looking for an excuse to read about sex. Bad move, Am.
“And what would be this topic that your friend needs to know about?” said Bruno. Am could literally hear air quotes around the word “friend.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Am stammered. “It’s—lesbians. She thinks she could be a lesbian. And the encyclopedia barely says anything, even on her mom’s account. Nobody will tell her anything and I want to help her—that’s all, I swear.”
“Oh,” said Bruno; at the word lesbian, his expression softened into sudden pity.
Am didn’t like that face, but it was better than the one he’d been making a second ago.
“Well, that’s a big thing for your friend to be thinking about.
And logging in to the encyclopedia on an adult account doesn’t clear it up for her? ”
“Not enough. I mean. . . .” This was hard to put into words.
Lesbians were girls who liked girls—right?
It should be self-explanatory, but it wasn’t.
“It doesn’t explain the really important stuff.
How lesbians lived. How they found each other.
What their relationships were like. How they dealt with it when it was against the law to be who they are and when people hated them.
You’ve never met Kelli, but stories are how she lives and breathes.
I don’t think she’ll ever be able to figure herself out until she has real stories about what it was really like, not just a page of facts.
And I don’t know where else we’d get them—but the unregulated Web has everything, right? ”
“Well, my answer is no,” Bruno said, not unkindly.
“I am not stupid enough or depraved enough to let a thirteen-year-old loose on the unregulated Web, innocently searching for the word ‘lesbians.’ But you’re wrong about one thing—it’s not your only option.
I’m not going to guarantee anything, but I think I can source you something a little more appropriate. Give me a few weeks.”
Am heaved an enormous sigh of embarrassed relief. She tried not to think about just how illegal this entire conversation already was. If Am had said half of this to a teacher, for instance, the teacher would have been required to report her. “Thanks, Bruno,” she said. “You’re the best.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You know, it was never on my radar at your age, but I have a few gay friends at work.
Nice guys. High school was hell for them, and everybody refusing to talk about it just made it worse.
I don’t know who decided it’s supposed to be like that, or who they thought they were helping. But, Am?”
“Yeah?” said Am.
He didn’t smile, but his cheek dimpled. “I hope your friend knows that we all love her just the way she is.”
Bruno didn’t return in person to give Am the data chip.
He couldn’t afford it and didn’t have a good excuse.
Instead he sent a comically large package in the mail—a digital camera in a case with all sorts of drives and compartments, labeled gift on the airmail form, along with other extravagant presents for Am’s siblings.
There was no note with the package other than an indication of which present was for whom, but Am had a feeling.
Sure enough, when she retreated to her room with her new camera and systematically opened every compartment, an ordinary-looking data chip fell out.
Not a camera chip, but the kind that could fit in an ordinary workstation’s data port.
Am picked it up and stared at it with bated breath.
She knew not to rush. Bruno had shown her before how to jailbreak a workstation, and how to read files privately, without alerting any of the logging software that Inspiration put onto its computers by default.
Am had already done all those steps. She triple- and quadruple-checked everything as she loaded the data chip onto her tablet.
The profusion of files that greeted her made her heart soar. And then, as she clicked through, it sank again. There were so many titles, and they were all like:
On Lesbian Personhood and the Limits of Femininity.
Throwing the First Brick: Speeches from the LGBTQ+ Protest Movement.
Red Planet, Lavender Soul: The Hidden Sapphic Subcultures of Early Mars.
Queer Film Classics in Critical Review.
Almost Anything Goes: Queer Refugees and Queer Resistance on Triton.
A Timeline of Lesbian and Bisexual Philosophical Thought.
And so on. All massive. All nonfiction. They were good books, probably—Am could imagine Kelli looking at the list and just drooling—but so dry and dense that Am could barely focus on a single one.
She felt like an ungrateful little brat.
It was clear Bruno had gotten someone to curate this collection just for her—and he had put himself at a lot of risk, finding this forbidden content, sending it to a minor.
But for all that Bruno liked to call Am clever, he really didn’t watch her in school, day in and day out.
He’d always overestimated the amount of text she could take in at one time, even on a topic she liked.
Am probably did have something wrong with her brain, even if her parents refused to put a label on it.
And Bruno had done this even when she was little, with the prompt engineering book.
She’d always wanted his good opinion. She’d never corrected him.
It’s not like Am wasn’t smart. She’d gotten pretty far with that prompt engineering book, skimming the examples and copying them. She’d still never read the whole thing all the way through. But she sure had hacked that robot anyway.
So, it was time for a work-around.
“You still want to know about dykes, right?” she said to Kelli abruptly, one night when they were studying in Kelli’s room.
“They’re called lesbians,” said Kelli. “You can’t just call people swear words. And I thought you never wanted to hear about them again.”
“I changed my mind,” said Am, pulling the data chip out of her pocket with a flourish. “And I got something for you. Don’t ever look at it anywhere except on a jailbroken workstation, in private, okay?”
Kelli blinked at the chip, and then slotted it into the data port in her workstation right away; Am had already showed her how to jailbreak that machine, ages ago. She stared, overawed, as a zillion scholarly nonfiction book titles about lesbians scrolled up to fill the screen.
“Where did you—?” she stammered. “How—?”
Am smiled mysteriously. “I have my ways. You don’t want to know. I really did ask for it specifically for you, though.”
Kelli looked at Am with big, misty eyes. “I could read all these and not stop for a whole year.”
“Yeah, well,” said Am, affecting an air of sophisticated superiority, like she’d already gone through the whole thing herself. “Maybe you should do that if you want. And then maybe we can talk about them.”
Maybe Kelli wasn’t really a lesbian. She was no stranger to intense interests that came on at random, eventually subsiding and giving way to the next.
Maybe her interest in lesbians was like that.
Maybe she and Am were just friends. Maybe the knotted-up feeling in Am’s stomach, when she pulled some trick like this in hopes Kelli would be impressed with her, wasn’t even a lesbian thing.
Maybe Kelli would get bored of all those nonfiction books in two minutes, and this whole thing would pass.
But Am was beginning to have certain suspicions.