Chapter 4
A rising scream and approaching, thudding footfalls jolted Chloe out of sleep, and her bed shook under the weight of a small but extremely energetic little monster. “Oh my gosh, Kleio, don’t do that!” she said, sitting up. “You’re gonna give Mommy a heart attack.”
Kleio bounced on her hands and knees, making her unkempt curls bob around her face. “Today is fene park day!”
“Today is what?”
“‘Theme Park Day,’” Marcus translated sleepily from the other side of the bed. “You promised her last night.”
“I did?”
Marcus rolled over. His dark eyes were tight with concern. “Yeah. Remember?”
The previous evening came back to Chloe in a single, deflating moment. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”
She and Marcus had talked for hours after she’d gotten home.
She’d wanted to resign. “The Chloe I know is anything but a quitter,” Marcus had told her.
Which was nice of him to say, considering she’d once quit their marriage.
But the thought of going back into the office as a laughingstock, sitting there alone with little to do day after day for almost two more years, was suffocating.
They’d been too intent talking to get Kleio ready for bed.
She’d been unusually quiet, sensing Mommy’s unhappiness and climbing into her lap.
And that had been good. Marcus’s arms around her, Kleio’s squirmy little body in her own arms .
. . those things were real, and still good, even if Chloe’s dreams had been shattered.
So when Kleio had excitedly asked if Mommy’s talk about staying home meant they could finally have the long-promised Theme Park Day trip, Chloe had agreed.
It would be healthy to take one day off, at least, to root herself in the realness of her family, to remind herself of what she still had.
“Okay,” she told Kleio now. “Go get dressed!”
With another ear-piercing shriek of joy, Kleio rolled off the bed and thumped away down the hallway.
“My gosh,” Chloe groaned, falling backward into her pillows. “What time is it?”
“It’s actually past nine,” Marcus said. “She let us sleep. Nice of her, since we were up until almost two in the morning.”
“She went to bed when we did,” Chloe said. Though Kleio had first fallen asleep on Chloe’s lap. “How does she always have the energy to be such a little troublemaker?”
“Takes after her mother,” Marcus said, rolling over to give her a kiss, then rolling the other way out of bed.
As Chloe brushed her teeth, she wondered again if she would have picked Kleio.
If they’d planned the pregnancy and had the usual dozen dossiers prepared based on the DNA of a dozen viable embryos, would Kleio have been the one who drew her attention, the one whose potential she decided to actualize?
She doubted it. When she’d learned she was pregnant, she’d commissioned the dossier, a fifteen-page, glossy, image-filled AI analysis of the baby’s DNA that extrapolated her likely temperament and her looks at different ages.
It had described an “adventurous” child, and though the terminology had been uniformly positive, Chloe had felt trepidation, reading confident, spontaneous, and determined but thinking bossy, impulsive, and stubborn.
She’d wondered where this child had come from.
Surely not from her, but not from steady, laid-back Marcus either.
But when she’d expressed this thought to him, he’d laughed and said, “Sounds like the kind of girl who might do something like, oh, spontaneously decide to take on the world to fight AI injustice.”
Now that Kleio was here, she did look very much like the four-year-old picture from the dossier, and she was confident, spontaneous, and determined, and bossy, impulsive, and stubborn.
And, yes, very much a little version of Chloe, though she looked more like Marcus.
That snub nose was goofy-sweet on him and positively adorable on her.
Chloe might not have picked her, but she wouldn’t give her up for the world.
So yes, Chloe was a fortunate woman. Even if she didn’t feel like it this morning.
As she put her lenses in, she was tempted to take her phone off Do Not Disturb and check NewsNet to see how awful the coverage of her impromptu speech was.
But Marcus had advised against it last night, and he was doubly correct today.
Today, she wouldn’t give Andrew Norman a single moment of undeserved attention.
She stepped into the living room to find Marcus still in his PJs, being chased by a shrieking Kleio. “Oh, no, hon-bun!” she said. “Not your princess dress! It’s not that kind of theme park. Go put on some play clothes.”
“This,” Marcus told Chloe, panting, “is no mere princess, but Princesszilla, ruler of the living room, stomper of bad guys.”
“Raaaawr!” Kleio shouted, raising one foot to show Chloe a neon-green monster slipper under the pink princess frills. She stomped the foot down on Marcus’s bare toes, making him wince. He swept her up and tickled her, while she squealed and kicked her monster feet.
Chloe didn’t know how Marcus managed to be so interactive before caffeine.
She went to the kitchen to grab a Bomb Bar.
The artificially flavored, artificially caffeinated energy bar wasn’t her first choice of morning ritual, but since the Cybercrash had shattered the global economy, America had lost access to 90 percent of its coffee supply.
When she’d lived in California, she’d been able to get beans locally at a price that was .
. . not reasonable, but at least tolerable.
But here in DC, it was only for the rich, who were willing to pay more than Chloe could for their daily fix.
So she munched her Bomb—breakfast and coffee all in one—and leaned against the counter to watch as Marcus let Kleio turn the tables and begin chasing him again.
The Cybercrash: Everything came back to that. That was why Norman was so revered, so trusted, so politically invulnerable even when he announced something unhinged like an AGI.
Chloe had been only six years old, only a little older than Kleio was now, far too young to understand what was happening.
Her memories of that day were filled with a nameless dread, like one of those nightmares where the familiar day-to-day world becomes twisted with malevolent portent.
Her first-grade teacher looking at her phone while the class got rowdier and rowdier, then shocking them all by bursting into tears.
Parents showing up at the classroom door, ushering their kids out.
Her dad instead of Yai waiting to pick her up, giving her a too-tight, wordless hug that made her scared because of a feeling she couldn’t name.
The TV at Yai’s house flickering without sound.
Images of charts and downward-pointing arrows that she couldn’t understand but that terrified her because they terrified the adults; then images of crowds, fire, people falling over, newscasters weeping, all cascading by in eerie silence.
Her dad sprawled on the couch, staring vacantly into his smartglasses, grunting when Yai talked to him and then suddenly erupting in curses, throwing his glasses at the TV and barely missing Chloe (she thought for years he’d been aiming at her), storming out of the house, slamming the door.
And then Yai holding her, humming soothingly while she bawled in bewilderment.
And again and again on the TV screen, a picture of the message she didn’t understand, the message every social media account had, simultaneously and without the knowledge of their owners, posted: Hello, World. You’ve been phreaked.
In the wider country, riots broke out, and sudden viral conspiracy theories took root in fertile soil, turning neighborhoods into war zones.
Swaths of DC erupted in flames. Channels of communication failed, never to be resurrected.
Fiber lines were severed, firewalls raised.
Countries turtled inward for protection.
Small wars broke out. The UN folded as nation after nation pulled out.
It was the end of the global economy and the beginning of a decade of global depression.
Kleio had succeeded in catching Marcus’s legs and was now making him march her around the living room backward, her small monster-clad feet laid atop his size 13 ones, their legs mirrored in awkward, reverse lockstep while she clung and laughed up at him. Chloe felt a familiar bittersweet pang.
It was nice, in a way, to think that when everything had gone to hell, when he lost his savings and knew he’d lose his job, her father’s chosen method to salvage his self-worth was to go to Chloe, to try to become the archetypal good dad.
But he’d never been a good dad before that.
Chloe’s mother had died of cancer when she was three, and her dad had been unable to cope both with grief and with a spunky toddler who kept complaining that he wasn’t doing it like Mommy did.
So he’d left his daughter unofficially but increasingly in the care of his wife’s quiet, uncomplaining mother.
Chloe didn’t blame him, not anymore, not after having her own child and learning what it meant to have a tiny human be entirely reliant on you.
Her dad didn’t know how to handle that. He’d never learned.
So when he tried, driving halfway across the state to prove his solidity to himself by becoming a rock for his daughter, he lasted a few hours and then crumpled like papier-maché.
Now that she was an adult, Chloe could articulate the feeling she’d had when he’d hugged her that day. He was holding her not to protect her but to prop himself up. It was a stark contrast to Yai’s arms around her that evening—stringy, bony, weak, but somehow strong as steel.
A month later her dad had given Yai full custody. Chloe hadn’t seen him again until she was fifteen, and only sporadically since.
Maybe the real reason Andrew Norman was so revered was because the country as a whole, scared and hurting, had wanted a father as badly as Chloe, wanted someone to protect them, reassure them, come up with a plan, lead the way forward, get things done, make it better.
And maybe the reason Chloe didn’t imitate the adulation was because she distrusted father figures and distrusted her own lingering wish for one.
She’d done just fine without, thank you very much.
But when she’d reconciled with Marcus and they’d decided to do this family thing together, that ache in her heart had opened all over again, because she could see he was an amazing father, and it brought home to her what she’d never had.
It was healing to see Kleio open like a flower under his attention.
Chloe could acknowledge her loss, face it without denial, because it was a loss, because there were good, even great, fathers out there, and every little girl deserved one.
She just wasn’t convinced that Norman was one.
Her phone rang, out loud, a harsh chime in her smartbuds echoed by the phone in her pocket. The caller’s name appeared in her smartspace: Andrew Norman.
Chloe made a strangled sound and waved frantically at Marcus and Kleio to be quiet. When they had frozen, staring at her, she subvocalized, Answer, audio only.
Norman’s face appeared in a window before her.
It was a computer-generated re-creation and so not, strictly speaking, his real face, but it was accurate enough to read even the most micro of expressions.
That wasn’t necessary, because his expression was decidedly macro.
He was furious. “Dr. Dunne-Carr,” he snapped.
Chloe opened her mouth and a squeak came out.
She cleared her throat, glad she was connected only over voice.
Her smartbud’s muscle sensors could drive a perfectly coiffed re-creation of her face such that it wouldn’t matter that her hair was performing experiments with static electricity.
But right now she’d be a perfectly coiffed Chloe with eyes bugged out in surprise and trepidation. “Yes?” she managed.
“Where are you?” Norman demanded.
“At home?” Chloe said.
“At home? Why the hell—” Norman stopped. “Have you checked your messages this morning?”
“No?” Chloe couldn’t seem to keep her voice from rising into uncertain uptalk, like Kleio’s when she wasn’t sure if she was in trouble.
“You’ve been on Do Not Disturb this whole morning?”
Chloe nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said. Not that that had stopped Norman’s call from coming through.
Norman’s face relaxed into something almost friendly. “Check your messages. Then get over here to the Tower ASAP. We have a lot of work to do.” He disappeared.
Chloe let her arms go slack.
“Who,” Marcus demanded, “was that?” He was still comically frozen, one foot half raised, with Kleio hanging on, stifling laughter.
“Only the most important man in the world,” Chloe said.
“Ah.” Marcus swung Kleio onto his hip. “I’ve been demoted, then?”
His tone was teasing, so Chloe wrinkled her nose at him.
“You know you’ll always be the most important man to me.
” She pulled up her messages. There were half a dozen requests for statements from NewsNet outlets.
Her speech had made a splash, as she’d expected—but maybe in a different way than she’d thought, because there was also a message from Senator Evans:
Hello Chloe, I hope this message finds you well.
Andrew Norman suggested you for Mr. Majumdar’s vacant position on the Joint Committee on National Networks.
I nominated you, and the committee confirmed it.
I hope you’ll accept the appointment, and join us tomorrow morning at 9:30, at Conference Room 1A, in the Tower.
“Holy sh—” Chloe began, then, catching sight of Kleio’s curious little face past the edge of her smartspace window, amended her astonished statement to “—smokes!”