Gene sat beside Sammi’s bed in a curtained-off section of a shared hospital room, watching her sleep. Some part of his brain was trying to cope with the fact that Sammi had been pregnant, especially since she hadn’t even hinted she was seeing someone. The rest of his brain grappled with the knowledge that his daughter was a criminal, a digital vigilante who, even though she probably didn’t realize it, was helping start a war.
Sammi should wake soon, according to what Gene had been told. Will had wanted to stay by Sammi’s bed, but Gene couldn’t have him there when Sammi woke up and he confronted her, so Will was in the waiting room—and not pleased about it.
Unfortunately, there still was no real privacy: at any moment, the sleeping woman in the other hospital bed could wake or some member of the hospital staff could appear.
Sammi’s bed was by the window, separated from her roommate by a tall curtain patterned in sage green and muted blue. The room was paneled in blond wood, with a painting on the wall of a field of sunflowers. A unit beside the bed the size of a small filing cabinet held monitoring equipment and displays, one of which was unfolded and displayed Sammi’s vital signs. A small table by the bed held a cup of water with a straw for Sammi and another cup without a straw for Gene, but he had forgotten his was there.
Gene could hear the heavy exhalations of the sleeping woman on the other side of the curtain as well as distant voices, both human and synthesized, intermixed with chirps, electronic hums, and the sounds of air moving through vents. The room smelled like lemons and chlorine. Outside the window, the hospital grounds were only dimly lit, but in the distance, Gene could see the shifting lights of vehicles on the highway.
There was no expression on Sammi’s sleeping face. Gene remembered years ago, when the kids were young, how he and Edison would sit together watching Mark or Samantha sleep. Sammi’s sleeping face had always looked peaceful, but with a hint of surprise, as though she were walking in a quiet wood and had unexpectedly found herself back where she’d started.
He couldn’t look at her sleeping there without love welling up inside him, yet that love was clouded with worry, anger, dismay ... Thoughts and emotions churned and circled back in on themselves, not coming to rest and not resolving, as he watched over her and waited.
Sammi made a noise of surprise as she woke, a “huh” sound that she repeated a couple of times before her eyelids slowly lifted. She looked over at Gene, her eyes barely tracking, then blinked and cleared her throat.
“It doesn’t hurt a lot now,” she said hoarsely. “Am I OK?”
Gene nodded, barely moving his head. He’d been given access to the bed interface, and he brought it up in his lenses and gestured to gently lift Sammi’s upper body as he held out her water. She clamped her lips onto the straw and drank intently for a few long seconds. Then she laid her head back and sighed. Gene wanted to ask her about the pregnancy, about the Louvre, about whoever the father was, but the questions tangled in his throat. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Suddenly, Sammi seemed to remember something, and she glanced at Gene warily. “Did I remember to close out my AI homework?” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to leave that simulation running.”
Gene looked into her eyes. Sammi looked away.
“No,” he said. “I closed it for you.”
“Did ... ?” she began, but she didn’t seem to be able to find more words.
“I saw what you were working on,” he said. He wouldn’t have sounded angry to most people, but he knew Sammi could hear it. “Is that where you met the father? With those people?”
“The ... what?” she said. “What did—what happened to me?”
Of course she didn’t know about the pregnancy, Gene reminded himself: she’d been unconscious by the time they had a diagnosis. They would have taken out her lenses, too, before the procedure. Right now, those lense were in a white plastic case on the table by the bed.
“You had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy,” Gene said, keeping his voice low. He had known nothing about ectopic pregnancies before, but the term had now burned itself into his memory. “It means the fetus started to develop on the outside of your fallopian tube, and it ruptured. You’ll be fine. The baby—the fetus ... isn’t viable. Wasn’t viable.”
“Oh, shit,” said Sammi. Gene frowned. “Sorry, dad,” she said. “I mean about the swearing. And the ... the guy ...”
Belatedly, Gene realized the conversation was starting to focus on the less important thing. “Let’s talk about the guy later,” he said. “First, I want to hear about what you had on your display. I know what that was.”
“It wasn’t—” Sammi started, but she stopped herself. “That’s none of your business,” she said.
“None of my business?” said Gene. “You could be—” He reached for a word that wouldn’t make too strong an impression, in case anyone could overhear them. “... expelled—or worse, if your ‘research subjects’ knew what—”
“Do you really think I figured it was safe?” Sammi said, heatedly. “You think I don’t know?”
Gene glanced at the curtain. It shifted in the faint movement of ventilated air.
“I’m sure you understand there’s some danger, but you don’t understand what’s at stake. You think you’re just sharing information—”
“Do you have any idea what’s happening to those people? In America?” Sammi said. “The wealthy buy robots and AIs, they lay off human beings who have no way to make a living anymore, they make more money, they buy off the politicians, and then they buy more robots and AIs, and it keeps getting worse. The wealth gap there was bad enough when you were young, but dad, people are dying—”
“It’s their country,” Gene said. “We have to think about ours first.”
“Ours is fine! We are fine!” Sammi said. “Do you think they’re choosing this? Do you think they want this?”
“You’re interfering with things you don’t understand,” he said.
“You don’t understand!” Sammi barked. She tried to sit up, groaned, and lay back, but her gaze lost none of its fierceness.
“Keep your voice down,” Gene said in a hard whisper. “Please.”
“You think I’m still a child,” Sammi said, more quietly but no less hotly. “You think I can’t comprehend what’s going on in the world because—why? Because I’m twenty-three and you’re fifty-something? At what point, exactly, do you think I’ll know enough to make my own decisions? How long do I wait before I do something worth doing?”
“If you get hurt—” Gene said.
“You mean if I fail the class?” Sammi said, glancing toward the curtain.
“If you fail the class—”
“Dad, I’m sorry,” she said, and she looked it. “I didn’t want you to have to worry. That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you what we were doing. That and—you know, your job.”
“It’s not about telling me or not telling me! It’s about you getting involved with a bunch of—”
“Gene?” someone said. It was a moment before the voice registered. It was Vi, one of Will’s moms. She was supposed to be on vacation. Gene felt disoriented. How much time had passed since he’d first heard Samantha scream?
Vi pushed the curtain aside and came in. She was a broad-shouldered woman with short, gray-blonde hair, one of a small number of non-Black people living at Zora. She went straight to Sammi and took her hand, patting Gene on the shoulder as she stepped between them.
“Are you all right?” she asked Sammi. “Where’s Will?”
Gene raked back the emotions from the argument. “I asked for us to have a little time alone while she woke up,” he said.
“Dad!” Samantha protested. “Vi, can you get him?”
Vi nodded. She made a little shorthand gesture to her lenses and looked off into space as she said. “Honey? She’s awake.”
“We actually need a few minutes,” Gene said.
“No, we don’t,” said Samantha.
“We aren’t finished talking about school. And that boy.”
“‘Man,’ dad. Not ‘boy’. They call them ‘men’ when they grow up.”
“Apparently we missed a lot in five days,” said Vi. “Who’s the man?”
“Where’s Kiara?” Samantha said.
“On her way. We left Napa as soon as Will messaged us. She’ll have flowers.”
Samantha smiled weakly. “She always has flowers.”
“We aren’t done—” Gene said.
“Please leave, dad,” Samantha said.
“We have to—”
“Just leave. OK?” She sagged back in the bed, and for a moment, Gene thought she was going to cry. “This is a lot right now.”
Vi looked sidelong at Gene. He hesitated, but then he nodded and stood. He pushed himself in next to Vi and kissed Samantha on the cheek. She didn’t move, looking up at the ceiling. Gene hugged Vi and left.
This much was clear to Gene: Samantha needed to cut off all contact with the Louvre, immediately. But Samantha didn’t seem to see it. She obviously didn’t understand the real ramifications of what she was doing.
It wasn’t that Gene didn’t see his daughter becoming an adult. It was just that since Samantha had lived under his protection for so long, she probably believed he had much more power to keep her safe than he actually had.
And that boy—or man, a term that made it worse—if he was involved with the Louvre, too, that could be another obstacle to getting Samantha to see the importance of breaking ties. It might have been something short-lived, but if she hadn’t still cared about him, whoever he was, Gene bet she wouldn’t have cared when Gene called him a “boy.”
And what if it was the kind of organization that didn’t take kindly to people leaving? Even if Samantha went overseas, maybe to stay with her brother for a while, a hacker group like the Louvre could easily reach her. On the other hand, they thought of themselves as do-gooders, from what Gene could tell. He could even sympathize, in a way, with their goals. Samantha was absolutely right about American workers getting starved out of their own country’s economy. But aggravating the Americans into war didn’t solve anything. Cascadia could do the most good to Americans by remaining Cascadia, and it was clear when looking at what happened to the Mountain Republic that if the U.S. re-annexed Cascadia, they’d throw out every bit of non-profit-producing progress Cascadia had made.
Even putting the Louvre aside for the moment, Gene thought, how could Samantha have been so careless? Gene had been doing his best to pretend that Samantha wasn’t sexually active yet, and so in part this was on him for not being a more involved parent. Edison would have talked to her about it. He would have given her some relationship wisdom and laughed with her about disastrous dates. Unfortunately, those kinds of conversations weren’t in Gene’s skill set. Even so, he’d made sure both kids were clear on what safe sex meant, and Samantha wasn’t stupid or even very rash. What brought her to the point where she’d let her guard down on something so important?
He needed to think further about war preparations, he knew that, but he was emotionally exhausted and mentally dull. He’d go home, sleep for a few hours, then get up and continue work. He’d come by the hospital and talk to Samantha the next morning, before continuing on to the office.
Gene woke to his alarm at four and got himself ready for the day as quickly as possible. By 4:25, he was at his desk in his home office, drafting a message to send to his regional heads about a new initiative for evacuation routes and refugee provisions. He couldn’t mention the possibility of war, of course, but even with human greenhouse gas emissions shrinking each year, the climate would still be unleashing trouble for a long time. Wildfires and other natural disasters were enough of a pretext to ask for those plans.
After the letter, he worked through a task list, prioritizing his next steps, and he got a start on gathering the information he’d need for a country-wide plan. He had Ollie set up a separate area to store the new data, private for the time being. Soon enough, he’d begin confidentially briefing the rest of his leadership team and sharing these files with them. He’d already sent a confidential note to Tom Sato, his head of Response and Recovery, the day before.
Gene was already finishing his second cup of coffee and heading for the door before he realized he hadn’t had breakfast. Well, that could wait. Breakfast wasn’t as important a meal as people used to think, and he could eat after he saw Samantha. Sleep would have helped her, he thought. She’d be more reasonable in the light of morning, having had time to reflect. Gene himself still felt exhausted, but Samantha would probably have slept the whole night through.
He arrived at the hospital a few minutes before eight in a twenty-person DRT shuttle with a crowd of nurses and other medical personnel. He’d wait a minute or two before he went upstairs, he thought, in case Samantha wasn’t awake yet. Meanwhile, he sat on a couch in the hospital lobby to bring himself up to speed on her medical condition. They’d told him last night she would be fine, but it was difficult to feel that she was safe.
In his lenses, no medical records were displayed to him. Instead, a message appeared saying, Sorry, but you no longer have authorization to view Samantha’s medical records. Would you like to send Samantha a request for access?
She’d probably cut him off the night before, while she was angry, he thought. Disturbed, he took the elevator up to her floor and walked to her room.
Her bed was empty.
It probably wasn’t any of the things that leaped to his mind—that she had been arrested and taken into custody, that the Louvre had spirited her away, that her condition was much more dangerous than they’d thought and she’d died—but he went to the nurses’ station at just short of a run.
“Excuse me—” he said to a nurse behind the desk, a young white man with short red hair who was consulting a physical display. The nurse looked up. “I’m Samantha Ajou’s father,” Gene said. “Was she transferred? Is she in a different room?”
“Oh, no,” the nurse said, “She’s probably home by now. She checked herself out a few hours ago.”
“Checked herself out? Is that safe?”
“Her team would’ve liked to have her here a few more hours for observation, but there was no compelling reason to keep her.”
It hit Gene then that the nurse had said a few hours ago. If Samantha had gone home, she would have arrived long before Gene left. So where was she?
“Thank you,” he said to the nurse, and he retreated around the corner into a waiting area. He made the shorthand gesture to his lenses to call Samantha, but instead he got another message:
Samantha Ajou is not taking calls or messages from you at this time. Please try again later.
He was still trying to understand what had happened when an incoming call image appeared. It showed Thomas Sato, Gene’s Response and Recovery department head, and it was circled in red, which meant high priority. He wanted to wave it away, but he couldn’t responsibly ignore Sato, so he gestured for the call to start, voice only.
“Tom? What’s wrong?”
“I read the briefing you left me,” Sato said. Late the day before, with Sato still unavailable, Gene had left him a confidential summary of the potential for war as President Muñoz’s people had outlined it.
“And you have something new?”
“I do,” said Sato. “I think you’ll want to come in as soon as possible ... Gene, there’s a chance that it’s been going on already, and we just didn’t recognize it.”
“That what’s been going on already?”
“I’ve been going over some of the data, and I—well, I think the war may have already started.”