A Woman Alone Read online

  “It’s standard. They already do it in condo buildings.”

  Clearly, I’m not getting through. “Scott,” I say, “the house is weirding me out.”

  “Oh, the glitches?” He has had time to turn his attention back to the Netflix show, and now he’s reluctant to turn back to me. Light from the screen flickers on his face. “You should just report those.”

  “I did. And it’s not just the glitches. It called me the wrong name.”

  Even that, it turns out, isn’t enough to make him look me straight in the eye. “And that’s why you think someone else used to live here? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous,” I echo. “Yeah, sure. Like so many other things. If I remember correctly, you thought changing the locks was ridiculous too.”

  In spite of the TV, droning at low volume, I feel the awkward tension in the room. At least now my husband turns to me. “You don’t have to go there. I was wrong. I admit it.”

  “How generous.” My voice drips with sarcasm. He ignores it.

  “And I like to think I righted the wrong. I found this place, I got us in, and now we’re living in a million-dollar home with security features straight out of a sci-fi movie. What more do you want?”

  “You know what?” I say. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  With that, I get up from the couch. At once, little lights flicker on, guiding me to the door so I can avoid any lurking furniture corners.

  “Cece,” I hear Scott say behind me as I leave, “why don’t you do what I ask and—” but whatever he says next is cut off by the soundproof door sealing off the hum of the TV.

  “Saya,” I say, “please warm the sheets. And set the alarm a half hour later than usual.”

  The electronic voice doesn’t make me wait. “Of course, Cecelia.”

  * * *

  I know what he was going to say. Why don’t you do what I ask and go get help? We discussed it several times but it never went beyond the five appointments of PTSD-preventive psychological counseling. And now I’m wondering if I made a mistake stopping. Scott certainly seems to think so. And I’m not blind, I can see that it’s damaging my marriage, and soon enough it’ll bleed into my interactions with Taryn, if it hasn’t already.

  This morning, my little ruse worked. Scott was pissed at me for oversleeping. I’m not proud of myself. What I did was childish. And now I’m driving Taryn to day care and wondering if I should give therapy another go.

  Here, they probably have a nice, white-walled clinic with smiling, white-clad staff for all my needs. And all of it logged into my file, wherever it might be on some cloud up on a satellite, from which I’ll never be able to erase it.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweetie?” The descent back to reality takes me by surprise. I hurriedly glance in the mirror above the windshield to see Taryn in her seat, looking anxious.

  “We passed the day care.”

  Wait, what? Disoriented, I glance sideways, only to see that she’s right—the bright-colored building is receding in the rearview mirror. The GPS, that traitor, stayed silent.

  “We’re not going?” Taryn asks. I can’t tell if she’s happy or not at the prospect. “We’re not going!”

  I give it some thought. It’s not like it’s high school or they have homework. Maybe we can skip a day. Have some mother-daughter time, maybe hit a museum. But as I wonder which street to turn onto, Taryn gets more and more agitated in her seat.

  The first street I pass is one-way. So is the second. Feeling powerless, I glance at the GPS for help but the red dot that’s supposed to be my car doesn’t even show up at the right place. Bad connection?

  Here, in this place, where the air itself is made of Wi-Fi? Yeah, right. Annoyed, I tap the screen. “Saya?”

  No answer. What the hell?

  “Taryn, honey,” I say, glancing in the mirror at my daughter. Her face is red and scrunched up, a sure sign of upcoming tears. “How about we don’t go?”

  “Go!” she shrieks.

  “We can go somewhere else. Just the two of us. We could go for ice cream.”

  “Day care!” Taryn yells, her voice rising in pitch.

  “We could go to the park, to ride the carousels. And pizza for lunch!”

  Her face becomes redder, until it’s almost purple. What kind of kid doesn’t want to skip day care and go ride the carousel instead? “No!”

  “Taryn,” I say, “please behave yourself, or…”

  Or what? Mommy will leave you at day care forever, which seems to be what she wants anyway?

  “No!” Taryn shrieks. “Day care! Day care! Saya, take us to day care!”

  Excuse me? “Saya doesn’t decide where we go, Taryn,” I say. I’m starting to sweat. Finally, a street that goes the right way. I turn onto it, a little too abruptly. I’m sure a million sensors and cameras and detectors record it all and send it to my file somewhere. Bad driver, minus ten points.

  Taryn rages in the back seat but I manage to tune her out, circling around until I’m back on the main street and the colorful building looms ahead. Taryn has never talked to Saya before, although of course she’s seen us do it a million times. Saya isn’t programmed to answer to her. Even when choosing her cartoons or games on her personal tablet, Taryn only has an illusion of choice—everything is pre-vetted not just by me but by the software that selects things that might suit her based on a bunch of different factors.

  Just who does she think Saya is? Someone who can override her mother’s authority, apparently.

  As soon as we pull into the parking lot of the day care, Taryn calms down as if by magic. By the time I go around to get her out of her seat and help her down, her face has magically returned to its normal color, and the only indication that she was having a tantrum just moments earlier is her light sniffing and two damp trails down her cheeks. She’s adorable in her blue dress with a bow at the collar, her light brown curls escaping from her ponytail. A little angel where the little demon was just a second ago.

  She skips ahead to join her friends in the day care’s yard as I awkwardly nod hello to the teacher in charge today. It’s the same one who told me, at the last parents’ meeting, how great Taryn was, a quick learner ahead of the entire class, not to mention a natural leader. Taryn has a great future ahead of her, she’d told me, beaming.

  But now she barely acknowledges me, quickly turning her attention to one of the other children. After I make sure the gate closes after Taryn, I head back to the car.

  Once the door has closed and the AC kicks in, my shirt sticks to my sweaty back, and I start to shiver so I adjust the temperature settings. Yet it seems to have no effect: The vents keep pumping out arctic-cold air. I poke and prod at the frozen GPS. “Saya?” I ask. No answer.

  I roll my eyes. Another report to make when I get home. I start the car and pull out of the parking lot. Home is ten minutes away, and I don’t need a map.

  The hum of the vents is the only sound. This car, like all vehicles residents are allowed to have, is fully electric. It feels eerie. Some music would be nice. “Saya, play the driving playlist,” I say before I remember Saya’s playing hooky. But just as I reach for the control panel to start the music by hand, sound blasts from the speakers at full volume, exploding into my eardrums.

  My hands jump on the steering wheel, and the car swerves right into the wrong lane.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It all happens so fast that I don’t have time to get scared. Instead of pulling gently into my lane like I intended, the car turns too far, and the bumper collides with that of another car that has just been pulling up to the day care.

  Mechanisms activate in the car’s computer core, faster than any human reflex. My seat belt pulls in sharply, cutting into my shoulder, and pins me to my seat, which instantly pulls back. I’m frozen in shock, my heart hammering as the music continues to blare.

  The driver’s side door of the other car opens, and a woman climbs out, a tall, thin redhead, dressed in a sh
arp and expensive suit. She slams her palms on my car’s hood. I can’t hear a thing through the music but I can see her lips move as her face distorts with rage. I can read what she’s yelling clear as day: What the hell is wrong with you, you crazy bitch?

  With shaking hands, I feel around the control panel but everything seems to have frozen. I don’t know how to turn off the music, or open the windows, or do anything for that matter.

  And then silence falls like a rock. In it, Saya’s calm, pleasant voice: “Collision detected. Calling for assistance. Sending report.”

  “Let me out!” I bellow. The window slides down, and, with a click, the doors unlock. The redhead descends on me like a bird of prey.

  “My child is in the car! Watch where the hell you’re going! Are you drunk?”

  Her face creases in spite of what must be abundant Botox and turns the same shade of raspberry-red as Taryn’s before a tantrum. In the face of all that fury, my own fades, and I find myself trembling and helpless, raking my brain for words.

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “They’ll be hearing about this at IntelTech. This is exactly why I moved here—so I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.”

  “You know I’m not drunk,” I say. Otherwise, my chip would have detected it and wouldn’t have let me behind the wheel in the first place.

  But I don’t think she hears me. In any event, my protestation does nothing to stop the verbal onslaught.

  “Do you realize I don’t have time for this? I have to be at work! The stupidity of some people. It’s baffling.”

  I start mumbling something about calling assistance but cut myself off. She keeps cursing, calling me all kinds of names, but it all recedes into the background. Behind her, I see the fence of the day care’s front yard, like multicolored Popsicle sticks, and all the children are now clinging to it, desperate to see what all this racket is. Curious little faces, their eyes shiny like marbles.

  And among them, I see Taryn, standing at the front, peering intently between fence posts. On her face is a look that I can only describe as utter fascination, her adorable face full of evil glee.

  * * *

  The redheaded woman is Anna Finch, this or that executive at some big company or other. Her husband is a lawyer—not just any lawyer but the kind of lawyer the firm is named after. I couldn’t have chosen a worse car to lightly dent. And that’s really all it is, a somewhat dented bumper, a bit of chipped paint. And, of course, “emotional distress.” Anna Finch must have said this phrase at least eleven times in the last five minutes.

  It turns out that Venture has its own clinic, five grocery stores, a number of pharmacies, gyms, and recreation centers but no police station. Sure, we have our very own SmartBlock Assistance but technically we’re still in the jurisdiction of the station that also serves the adjoining neighborhood, situated in the semi-industrial area on the outskirts of the big city and consisting of crumbling working-class homes and housing projects.

  The police officers probably see all kinds of devastating things day in and day out but they somehow manage to keep their cool in the face of two rich ladies and two lightly damaged $100,000 cars. I can’t help but feel uneasy around them. Guilty for existing.

  One of them tries to calm down the raging redhead while the other patiently questions me about the event. He’s old and grizzled looking, and he reminds me of the officers who came to our home—our old house—after the invasion. They were nothing but kind to me, just like these are. They have no reason to be unkind. I’m the very profile of the good victim, a woman, a white woman, well-to-do, a mother to boot. Even if we weren’t in the heart of the costly new development for the (mostly) rich, there’s no reason for them to tackle me to the ground and handcuff me. Which I should be grateful for, I guess. The redhead obviously takes it for granted.

  I try to answer the officer’s questions but I’m stammering, forgetting my words. My mouth is dry and my hands clammy. Posttraumatic shock? If one can call this minor inconvenience trauma, that is.

  Anna Finch sure thinks she can. Her offspring, tucked into a state-of-the-art security seat in the back of her car, barely felt any impact at all but started to wail its head off pretty much immediately. And for all her shrieking about her child in the car, she doesn’t seem to give a shit. Which only makes the little demon scream louder and louder.

  I never much cared for other people’s children. Having one of my own, finally, didn’t change anything. I still don’t. Whereas Taryn’s crying makes my heart clench with pain, the only thing I feel at the sound of a bawling baby at a restaurant is annoyance.

  “Ma’am,” the officer repeats, and I blink, confused.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this an autonomous vehicle?”

  “What? No, no. It’s just—connected.”

  “Connected?”

  “You see, there’s this—” I only begin to wonder how to explain, in my current state, about the SmartHome and Saya, the personal assistant uploaded into my car. But thankfully, a sleek electric car pulls up, smooth and white as a pebble polished by the ocean and bearing the unmistakable logo: a tree inside a circular green arrow with the caption underneath: live smarter. live better. live IntelTech. Speak of the devil—SmartBlock Assistance has come to the rescue.

  Within minutes, three pleasant-looking personnel in civilian clothes dispatch the police officers back to the station and arrange for the cars to be towed. Presumably, to be taken care of somewhere out of sight of the neighborhood’s population. To be restored and returned shiny and new.

  “This is unacceptable,” shrills Anna Finch. “I demand that there be consequences. You can’t just drive around like a crazy person here.”

  They assure her that they’ll get to the bottom of it.

  “My car,” I say, finally finding my voice. “Saya malfunctioned. It blasted random music at top volume. I was startled.”

  “If Saya had been malfunctioning,” says the pleasant-looking woman from IntelTech, “it isn’t recommended to use the vehicle at all.”

  “The vehicle was fine,” I snap.

  “It’s all in the terms of service,” she says, still pleasantly. I remember her. She was there with Clarisse and us when we signed the papers. She wears her ash-blond hair in a low bun, a style that looks too conservative on someone so young, and the tag on her uniform reads JESSICA.

  “There you have it!” exclaims Anna Finch. “She ignored the TOS. Shouldn’t there be consequences?”

  “It’s a complex issue,” says the mediator.

  “I don’t see what’s so complex about it. I thought you have everyone here prescreened. Clearly it didn’t help much. You should have a zero-tolerance policy—”

  “Saya’s been malfunctioning for a week,” I snarl. “I’ve been reporting and reporting. Nobody does anything.”

  “Please be assured that all your reports reach those who are concerned,” says the woman, “and are analyzed and acted upon as the situation demands.”

  I want to grab her and shake her. This seems to be the thing Anna Finch and I have in common. The mediator is one of those flawless IntelTech employees. Neither her clothes nor her face has a single crease. You can’t quite tell her age, and her hair in its bun looks like it’s been molded from plastic. Is she an actual robot? Like Saya but also in a silicone body.

  “Ms. Finch, Ms. Holmes. Let’s regard this as what it is: a minor accident. Ms. Finch, your vehicle will be restored to its original condition and returned to you in the briefest delays. In the meantime, an identical one will be provided for your daily needs. Ms. Holmes, your concerns will be addressed—”

  “I want to speak to Clarisse,” I say.

  “Good idea,” sneers Anna Finch.

  “There’s no reason to bother Clarisse. She’s very busy, as you can imagine.”

  “First, my house nearly boiled me alive in the tub. Now, it’s calling me Lydia.” My breath catches, and the next phrase comes out not menacing, as I intended, but whi
sper-quiet. “I need to speak to Clarisse.”

  Sensing that the mediation efforts aren’t being as effective as she’d like, the woman switches gears. She addresses me with an apologetic smile.

  “Clarisse will contact you herself. Within the briefest delays.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Now, I’ll call two cars to deliver you to wherever you need to be. Will that be your office?”

  “My home.”

  “Of course. It won’t take a minute.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I would have avoided telling Scott at all but the replacement car in the garage was a dead giveaway. Even when I do tell him, I don’t get much of a reaction.

  “You got into a fender bender,” he says. “Happens to everyone.”

  “Not like that it doesn’t.”

  “I know it’s stressful but I don’t think IntelTech is making a big deal of it. And neither should you.”

  “You should have been there. That shrew from the other car looked ready to murder me. I was humiliated. Everyone was staring…” I remember Taryn, watching so calmly through the fence, and trail off.

  “The important thing is that nobody got hurt,” he says, clearly eager to move on. “They’ll fix up the car—you said so yourself.”

  “Scott,” I say, “do you think this place is having a bad influence on Taryn?”

  Now he’s paying attention to me. He looks up with some interest. “How do you mean?”

  “I wanted to take the day off day care today. But she wanted to go.”

  He shrugs. “She has friends there. She wanted to hang out with them rather than with her mom. Isn’t that kind of normal?”

  “For God’s sake, she’s three.”

  “And they grow up faster and faster.”

  “Maybe we should do something about all that screen time.”

  He chuckles again and shakes his head. “Now there’s a change of pace. Didn’t we want this place for Taryn? We knew there would be screens.”

  “Understatement of the century.”