Refreshed and Ready

Harold

Four nights after the news alert, the evening news ran a short video message from Noah Fiatt, relaxing on his rest. Halfway through, he froze and said a fair deal for every family four times in a row, like a skipping record, until the network cut away to a commercial for Proxy Helpers.

Toshi watched it with his face very still. "That's v2," he said quietly. "The one they built to replace mine. All scripts and handlers. No mind in it at all." He shook his head. "That's what happens when a puppet trips on its strings."

It was the first time he'd told me there was a second one. I lay awake half that night, thinking about two men with the same face, and wondering which one the country thought it was going to vote for.

The next night, the message came.

It came through the robot.

That's the only way I can describe it. Toshi had me connected, practicing. I was walking Noah in slow circles around the storage unit like a new colt, learning how long his legs were, how his weight sat. And in the middle of a turn, a voice spoke inside his head.

Not mine. Not a voice, really. More like a line of text sliding across the bottom of a television, except the television was the inside of a skull I was borrowing.

Continuity Office. Car arrives Unit 114, 06:00 Thursday. Youngstown Local 1462 union hall, 10:00. Welcome back, Mr. Fiatt.

I stopped walking. "Toshi," I said, in Noah's voice. "Somebody just texted my brain."

He was at the laptop in two seconds. He scrolled, and his face went pale in the blue light.

"It's the handler channel," he said. "Every Understudy unit has one. It's how Proxy tells them where to be." He scrolled again. "But this unit should be dark. Nobody at Proxy should know where it is. And they have v2. Why would they want mine?"

"Somebody does."

"Somebody knows the unit number, Harold. Our unit. Here." He was typing fast now. "The message didn't come through Proxy's servers. It came through something I don't recognize. Routed like, fourteen times."

"So who's the Continuity Office?"

"I don't know." He looked up at Noah, and I looked down at him out of Noah's eyes, and for a second it felt like we were both waiting for the robot to answer. It didn't.

"It says welcome back," I said.

"Yeah."

"Is it a trap?"

Toshi thought about it longer than I liked. "If they knew where we were and wanted us gone," he said slowly, "they wouldn't send a car. They'd send the other kind of car."

That was the most comforting terrible thing anyone had ever said to me.

* * *

The car came at six on the dot. A black sedan, nothing flashy, with a driver in a gray suit who didn't get out and didn't look at anything but the road. Noah walked out of the storage unit in his navy suit with his flag pin, folded himself into the back seat, and put on his seatbelt, just as he had the night he left Proxy.

I didn't go with him. I didn't have to. That was the part my brain still refused to believe. My body stayed right where it was, in the green camping chair, bundled in two blankets, with a thermos of coffee in the cup holder and Toshi on the next chair with the laptop. And the rest of me rode to Youngstown.

"Signal's clean," Toshi said. His voice came from very far away, like someone talking in the next room while you're watching a movie. "You've got about two seconds of lag. Don't do anything fast."

"I'm seventy years old, Toshi. I haven't done anything fast since Reagan."

"Then you're a natural."

* * *

The campaign manager's name was Marcy Wakefield, and she met the car at the back door of the union hall with a phone in each hand and the expression of a woman who hadn't slept since the Clinton administration.

"There he is," she said. "Refreshed and ready. God, you look good. The Caymans agree with you."

I had never been to the Caymans. I had never been anywhere with a beach that didn't have a sign about medical waste. But Noah had, and his tan was flawless, because Proxy had designed it to be.

"It was very refreshing," I said.

"Great. Great. Okay." She fell into step beside me down a cinderblock hallway that smelled like floor wax and old coffee. "So you're on in twelve. Same stump, same beats. Fair deal, family table, the three-part plan, then pivot to the ports bill, then the story about your dad's hardware store. Tearjerker. Prompter's loaded. Wave, hug the lady in the wheelchair, out by 10:40. Any questions?"

"What was my dad's hardware store called?"

She stopped walking and stared at me.

"Kidding," I said.

She laughed, too loudly, and started walking again, and I saw her glance back at me once with a little crease between her eyebrows. I would learn to watch for that crease. Marcy Wakefield was a professional, and professionals notice things, even when they've decided not to.

* * *

The hall was full. Four hundred people in folding chairs, most of them older than they wanted to be, in union jackets and church sweaters and the kind of good shoes you save for weddings and funerals. There were signs: A FAIR DEAL FOR EVERY FAMILY. NOAH FOR US. One homemade one near the front, in glitter pen: MY GRANDKIDS DESERVE BETTER.

I stood behind the curtain and looked out at them through Noah's eyes, and I realized something I should have realized a long time ago.

These were my people. These were the same people who came to my students' art shows in the Paperton Central cafeteria, and said oh, isn't that nice about macaroni collages, and meant it. These were people who'd done everything they were told. They'd worked the shift, paid the dues, saved in the jar. And the jar had been quietly emptied by men in rooms they'd never see.

And they'd come here, on a Thursday morning, to be lied to by a robot.

That was the job Noah Fiatt was built for. I'd known that in my head. But I hadn't known it in my stomach until I saw the glitter sign.

"Harold," Toshi said from the next room of my mind. "Your heart rate's climbing. Your real one."

"I'm fine."

"Don't do anything crazy."

"I won't," I said, and I meant it, mostly.

* * *

The teleprompter speech was very good. I want to be fair about that. Somebody had worked hard on it. It had rhythm and warmth and three separate places for applause, marked in the text with a little dot. It had the family table, and the fair deal, and a three-part plan whose three parts, when you read them closely, were: listen, act, and continue listening.

I read the first page exactly as written. The crowd clapped at the first dot. They clapped at the second. The words went out of Noah's mouth in that warm gravel-and-honey voice and landed on four hundred people like a blanket, and I felt them settle, and nod, and trust.

It was the most frightening thing I've ever felt. It was like holding a loaded gun you'd been told was a hairbrush.

Then we got to the part about the economy.

Thanks to our strong economic fundamentals, said the prompter, the recent rise in prices is temporary, and relief is on the way for working families.

I opened Noah's mouth to say it. I really did.

And my eyes, his eyes, landed on the glitter sign. MY GRANDKIDS DESERVE BETTER. The woman holding it was maybe seventy-five. She had a cane hooked over the back of her chair and a coat that was too thin for March, and she was looking up at Noah Fiatt with her whole face open, the way my students used to look up when I held their drawing up to the class.

I looked at her, and I couldn't say it.

The silence went one second. Two. In the wings, I could feel Marcy Wakefield's crease deepening from forty feet away.

"Ma'am," I said. "With the sign. What's your name?"

She looked around like someone else must be ma'am. Then she said, "Dolores. Dolores Hope."

"Dolores. What'd you pay for eggs this week?"

A little laugh went through the room. But she answered. She named the price. It was more than I'd paid for a dozen eggs, and a pound of bacon, and a newspaper, and a movie ticket, combined, the year I started teaching.

"And what'd you pay five years ago?"

She told me.

"My prompter here," I said, and I tapped the glass with Noah's finger, and there was a nervous ripple of laughter, "says that's temporary. Dolores, do you think that price is ever going back down?"

She didn't laugh. She thought about it. The whole room thought about it with her.

"No," she said.

"No," I said. "Me neither."

And that was all. I didn't give a lecture. I didn't say anything about promises, or jars, or men in rooms. I just stood there with Noah's steady hands on the podium and let that one word, no, sit in the air of that union hall, where four hundred people had spent their lives being told yes.

Then, very carefully, I went back to the prompter, and finished the speech exactly as written.

Nobody clapped at the next dot. They were too quiet.

But when I got to the end, they stood up. All of them. Not the polite standing you do at the end of a school play. The other kind. Dolores was standing too, leaning on her cane, holding up her glitter sign with one shaking hand. And I stood there behind the podium in a body that wasn't mine, and I had to remind myself that robots can't cry, because for a moment it felt very much like Noah was going to.

* * *

Marcy Wakefield met me in the hallway afterward. She had both phones pressed to her chest like a shield.

"What was that?" she said.

"I got off track."

"You went off book in the econ section. You never go off book in the econ section. The econ section is legally reviewed." She held up one phone. On it was a clip, twelve seconds long. Noah Fiatt, tapping his teleprompter. My prompter here says that's temporary. Underneath it, a number that was growing while I watched. "This has two million views. It's been up for nine minutes."

"Is that bad?"

She looked at me for a long time. The crease between her eyebrows had become a canyon.

"I don't know," she said finally, very quietly. "I've been doing this for twenty-six years, and I genuinely don't know."

Then her other phone buzzed, and she looked at it, and something in her face closed like a door.

"The finance committee wants a call," she said. "Tonight."

* * *

The black sedan brought Noah back to Unit 114 at dusk. He walked in, sat down in his camping chair, folded his hands, and closed his eyes. I let go, and fell back into my own body all at once, like missing the last stair.

My knees hurt. My back hurt. My coffee had gone cold in the thermos hours ago. I felt wonderful.

Toshi was grinning at his laptop like a kid on Christmas. "Harold. Harold. It's everywhere. Fourteen million. People are making it into songs. There's a remix with a beat. My prompter here says that's temporary. There's a girl in Tulsa who got it tattooed."

"Already?"

"She says it's temporary." He laughed so hard he had to put the laptop down. "She's kidding. I think she's kidding."

I laughed too, and I was still laughing when the robot spoke inside my head. My implant was still humming faintly, the way a stovetop stays warm after you turn it off. And through it, one more line of text slid across the dark.

Continuity Office: Well done. Careful.

I stopped laughing. "Toshi," I said. "Our friend wrote again."

He checked the laptop. Routed fourteen times. No name. No origin.

"Who are they?" he said, to no one.

In the green camping chair, the next President of the United States sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded, not breathing, and didn't say a word.