In early 2073, Audrey sat in an orange plastic chair across from Adam, who wore jeans and a T-shirt and a painfully attentive expression. He sat in a brown armchair, leaning forward, hands clasped together, listening.
“Yes,” Audrey admitted. “There’s some danger. Some people consider me a traitor, here and in the rest of America. I mean ... technically, I am a traitor.”
Adam shook his head, opened his mouth to say something, seemed confounded, and looked down to think. The conversation had been warm and welcome, as it was every time Audrey spoke with him, but they were still awkward with each other. Adam was so grateful for his older sister to be back in his life that, at the same time that filled a deep-seated need for her, Audrey felt embarrassed.
Finally, Adam spoke. “It’s not that I think you can’t take care of yourself—but just ... Are you ... Has anybody ...”
“I have friends here,” Audrey said, “to my surprise. As many people as seem to hate the sight of me, there are just as many who see me like some kind of folk hero. I don’t know what to tell them, but they look out for me.”
“Oh, that’s definitely good,” Adam said. “I mean, it must feel strange—? But I was worried, when you got transferred—”
“It seems like it’s the same everywhere,” Audrey said. “Crazier since the new elections, though.”
“Here too!” Adam said. “I’m glad we’re living in the same country, but I wish they did things the same way over there that we do here.”
“I think it’s coming. With the Cascadian vote coming in so strong for the Progressives and all the Cascadian representatives in Washington now ...”
“It’s not Cascadia anymore.”
“Right, all of the representatives from the West Coast states ...”
Adam cocked his head, brightened, and called out “Audrey? Is that you, honey?”
It took Audrey a minute to realize he must be calling to his daughter Audrey. Adam half-rose, then stopped himself and one-quarter sat back down.
“No, go see her,” Audrey said. “I can wait.”
“Your time limit, though—” Adam said.
“It’s fine,” she said. It would be breathing room for them both. They’d been talking through virtual calls for four years now, and it was still awkward. Maybe being apart for forty-eight years had been too much to overcome, but there was still love between them, and as uncomfortable as Audrey always felt during the calls, she looked forward to them like nothing else in her week.
Adam got up and raised a finger. “I’ll be back in just one minute,” he said. “We haven’t seen her since Christmas—”
“I know.”
The reunification, now that it had actually happened, rushed in to occupy Audrey’s mind while Adam was away. It had been a rough ride. There were jubilant parades and angry protests that in a few cases turned violent. Someone had rigged an old self-driving car up with explosives and overridden its obsolete safety systems, then tried to send it racing into a park where there was a combined celebration and racial justice rally. Police AIs had identified the threat and taken over the car before it got to its destination.
U.S. Progressives were by and large thrilled at being reunited with the Pacific states, and they’d begun agitating as soon as the initial deal was worked out for universal basic income, universal health care, and some other key Cascadian programs to be adopted across the new, re-enlarged U.S. Under the agreement, Cascadia was able to keep most of its existing policies, but it would take new laws in Washington to expand any of those programs to the rest of the U.S. Those were being debated now, but the Constitutionalist party was finding itself out of favor, between an influx of mostly Progressive Pacific state voters, long-term backlash from the multiple Tyler Godbout scandals, especially the Washington wildfires and the Citizen Dividend fraud, and the tide of public opinion that condemned President Jimenez’s 2068 Cascadian invasion.
With all of this in play, it seemed likely the Progressive agenda would push through, bringing universal basic income, greater taxation of corporations and wealthy individuals, and other applecart-upsetting changes. There was even talk of extending the advertising ban to cover all of the new U.S., but no one seemed to expect that bill would pass—at least, not right away.
Like Audrey, Tyler Godbout himself was in prison. Audrey took some comfort in that.
In the face of massive setbacks, the Constitutionalist party had already begun to change, and new centrist voices were doing their best to shed some of most contentious parts of their platform.
Adam reappeared, smiling. “She says hi, and she loves you,” he said.
“Tell her I love her, too,” Audrey said awkwardly. She wasn’t used to saying things like this. Having a niece, a nonbinary niefling, and a nephew who all called her Aunt Audrey and seemed to think she was some kind of war hero felt utterly unreal to her, perhaps because she had yet to see them in person. Even so, she liked having family.
“Oh,” Adam said. “I almost forgot: I called Elena about us picking up your cat.”
“Thank you. Is she feeling any better?” Audrey said.
“She still sounded pretty weak,” Adam said, “but she said they’ve been telling her she’s responding well to the treatments, and they think there’s a good chance she’ll come out with a clean scan.”
Elena had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier. New treatments that had emerged in the last decade were promising, but they tended to really take it out of a person. Audrey wished she could visit to check in on her, but that wasn’t going to be possible for a while.
“But you have Matilda now?” Audrey said.
“Well, that’s the thing,” said Adam. “She didn’t have her. It turns out Noah never turned her over.”
“What do you mean? He kept her?”
“He kept her. I called him to ask. She’s doing just fine. He says she gets grumpy sometimes, and he thinks she’s looking for you.”
“Is he ...” she began, but she didn’t know how to finish the question. All this time, she’d assumed Elena had been taking care of the cat, assumed Noah had written Audrey off entirely.
“And he says to take care, and he’ll see you when you’re back out here.”
“How does he know I’ll be back out there?” she said. “Oh, I guess he knows I’ll want to see you.”
“You should come live here for a while,” Adam said. “Tansy says the same.” Adam’s wife, Tansy, was about the sweetest and most accommodating person Audrey had ever talked to, but Audrey was fairly certain that trying to live with Adam and his family would kill her. As a private and non-demonstrative person, she pictured being hugged to death. It wouldn’t even take many hugs.
“Fifteen seconds!” called the AI guard.
“All right, I have to sign off,” Audrey said. “Take care of yourself and give those kids hugs for me. And Tansy.” Hugs another person gave on your behalf were free, Audrey figured.
“Next week, same time?” Adam said.
“I’ll be here,” Audrey said. “I mean, where else would I be?”
“Just seventeen more months,” Adam said. “That’s not long.”
He smiled, still awkward, but also still warm. The VR connection snapped off, and Audrey found herself back in the featureless little cinder block room with the one plastic chair. She went to the tiny sink in the corner, washed her hands, then took out her lenses and earpiece and put them away in the case. They’d be locked up again until her next allowed virtual visit the following week.
“Please deposit your lens case in the return slot,” said the AI guard from speakers all around her. She slid the case into the slot and waited for the door to open.
On her way back to her cell, Audrey found herself thinking about Bennet Culkin. It was hard not to think of him as more of a villain that she was, but apart from following his superiors’ orders and allowing Audrey to be thrown under the bus, what had he done that was so different from what she’d done?
His consequences were certainly different, though. Apparently, Gene Ajou had spoken with him at work soon after the war broke out, and Bennet had been spooked, from what Audrey could gather. He’d made a dash for the U.S. border but got picked up trying to sneak across and had been sentenced to eight years of community service and two years of restorative justice meetings. There were few prisons left in Cascadia, and almost all crimes were handled through work assignments in and discussions with the people who had been wronged. In this case, the people wronged were all of Cascadia, so they were represented by a board of twelve volunteers. These measures were often, as with Bennet’s case, accompanied by mental health counseling.
Somewhere behind her, a door slammed. Audrey emerged from the hallway into the cubicle farm of sleeping quarters and made her way to her own corner, where she sat tiredly on her bed. In a cell nearby, two women argued heatedly about a picture.
So while Bennet got to continue living in his apartment and worked a decent, if boring, job day after day, he’d also had to sit through two years of weekly earnest discussions about the harm he’d done, why he’d done it, what he owed to his fellow citizens, and similar topics. Audrey, personally, felt she might have gotten the better end of the deal. On the other hand, she suspected that the excellent Cascadian mental health system had helped Bennet navigate to a place where he could feel some comfort and resolution. At this point, Bennet probably had the last laugh, although if all had gone well, he would have become too compassionate to take it.
It was another example of how far the two countries had to go to truly unite. Maybe they never really would, whatever the treaty said. Maybe the two perspectives had split too much to ever be reconciled into one way of seeing the world.
Audrey’s cellmate, Pamela, a forty-something white woman with graying red hair, shuffled into the cell, smiled unconvincingly at Audrey, and took out one of the scratched-up, putty-colored plastic tablets the prison supplied for reading and learning activities. She called something up on the tablet, squinting as she read it. She looked up at Audrey guardedly, and Audrey nodded to her and turned away.
The political pendulum had swung far over, which was good, as far as it went, but whether it took decades or only years, the pendulum always seemed to swing back, and if all the two sides ever did was try to undo each other’s work, it was hard to be optimistic.
Now that she thought about it, there was at least one person she knew who was working to break that cycle. There might even be a new interview posted. She reached for her own tablet to see. After all, she was going to need things to occupy her attention for quite a while yet.