Zombie in The Machine (eBook)

Chapter 2

Family Reflections

“Green!”

Lucy exhaled with relief after seeing the Traffic Light App show her restored status. Generic acetaminophen had brought her lingering fever down, which was being tracked by the smart ring on her right hand, bringing her TLA’s red-yellow-green status back in the right direction. The smart mirror joined in the celebration by drawing up a colorful graph with her R-Y-G temperature history over the past few days, ending in this morning’s lovely green. It had gone red at one point in the night, perhaps at the height of Lucy’s nightmare.

Her youngest, always asking questions, had once asked, “Why can’t someone get rid of the red by dipping the finger with the ring in some ice water? How would the sensors know?”

Lucy’s oldest daughter, Isabella, rolled her eyes in response, “What, Gabi? Are you going to walk into a restaurant while dunking your scrawny fingers in a glass? You’ll look like an idiot.” A freshly minted lawyer, Isabella had gotten a tiny computer chip implanted under her skin instead of relying on external sensors. It made getting in and out of courthouses, and restaurants, easier.

“What, Izzy? Are you going to try to walk into that concert while holding an ice pack against the back of your hand? You’ll actually prove you’re an idiot.” Gabi retaliated a few weeks later with supreme relish, not letting a then feverish, red TLA’d Izzy live it down.

“It worked, didn’t it?” was Isabella’s face-saving response after she returned from partying in Downtown Miami, right before another outbreak mini-scare, a “mini-demic,” back in 2040.

Lucy’s reflection in the smart mirror smirked back at her with the memories. The incessant fighting between the girls kept the house lively and alive ever since Lucy’s husband had passed. Bickering had an odd way of bringing Izzy and Gabi closer rather than separating them, although perhaps not in the way a parent might prefer. It too often thrust Lucy into the referee role of the late Ryan, whom many assumed had died like so many others in “The Big One,” the Great Pandemic of ‘33. Recalling, even for a fleeting moment, the accident that had taken his life wiped any pleasantness off Lucy’s face. Her train of thought drifted to another back-and-forth discussion with the girls on the subject.

“Are you never going to use the word ‘widow’ no matter what?” Gabi had innocently asked.

“Not unless I absolutely have to. It makes me sound . . . vieja,” Lucy replied.

Izzy had then asked, “Instead of sounding old, what’s wrong with being a ‘single mom’ then? I can tell the A.I. to use the phrase ‘raised by a single mom’ on my college entrance essays, you know.”

“True, but I just don’t quite think of myself as ‘single,’ mi amor,” Lucy had replied. She still kept her wedding ring on.

If modern mirrors’ memories were stored in silicon, the woman looking back at Lucy in it wondered if human memories were stored in the tiny, relentless lines that people fought so hard to erase. If only there were a cream to erase the traumatic events of the past two decades, ranging from the personal to the global, in the way that some of these new products zapped crow’s feet, people would lather the stuff on by the bucketload. Gabi loved to repeat New Age, semi-spiritual talk of how people slipped and slid into alternate historical timelines depending on their thoughts, but for now, Lucy, stuck in this one, was just thinking about the skin around her eyes. If she had anything to say about which of many different futures she might live in, she wanted to be in a timeline that featured her keeping youthful looks well past the point when some grandkids finally show up.

She unscrewed the cap of an anti-aging cream she had been trying out for the past two weeks, and the mirror automatically pulled up a video that showed how to properly apply the bag-reducing product. Lucy had seen the video before, so she ignored it in favor of glancing up at a news headline that popped up onto the screen, with a slight breaking news–alert chime, at the precise moment she applied a dollop under her left eye.

The results of an election-year presidential poll pushed the oldest text messages from her daughter off the top of the glass. So-and-so was now leading what’s-her-name. Whatevs, as the kids would say.

The woman narrating the video cheerily pointed out that the genetic-based rejuvenation cream should be patted gently onto the skin, never rubbed. Before Lucy had to ask it to, the mirror increased the zoom two times more, doubling the size of her face again so her undereye bags were approaching the size of lemons. She did not bother to ask how the mirror read her mind again, preferring just to mute the narrator with a gesture of her hand.

Again, at the precise moment, Lucy applied the second dollop of cream, next to the first, another news item popped onto the mirror, pushing more old text off the top, perhaps to join the dust up in the attic.

The headline showed that the Spider Rash had spread to 25 states so far, not quite half the country, apparently confirmed by special Internet-enabled sensors in the sewers that could detect the presence of viral genetic material in human waste. The connecting of physical things from all over the real world to the Internet was called the “Internet of Things.” Some people referred to the IoT network of pandemic poop detectors, first used extensively in the COVID-19 pandemic of the 20s, as the Internet of Shit. How fitting.

“Now that’s freaky,” Lucy said out loud, referring not to so-and-so possibly pulling it off, nor to the crappy places they put IoT sensors in, but to the mirror’s apparent newfound playfulness. She decided to test her theory by putting another drop on her middle finger but not applying it yet, hovering it just a fraction of an inch above her skin. Nothing. The mirror seemed to be waiting on her next move.

Sure enough, at the precise instant, the cream next touched her skin, the next news item popped up with another chime.

On the spotless glass, the score of last night’s American Football game, played in London, showed the last undefeated team had finally taken a loss. That no team had ever topped the Miami Dolphins’ 1972 “perfect season” remained a point of South Florida pride, even though the 17–0 performance took place well before Lucy was born in 1995. She did not care all that much for the violent sport, preferring soccer, but there was always that special joy Floridians felt when New York fans had to squirm.

The next two drops she did fast. The two drops after that she timed randomly to see if she was imagining the whole mirror-in-sync thing. And each of the four times, the playful smart mirror dumped the next item onto the screen, along with news alert chiming sounds, precisely in sync with Lucy’s fingertip. Had someone secretly pushed out a software update behind her back? Fresh, new personality 3.0 or something?

Theory confirmed proclaimed her inner voice, a running monologue hidden away from the prying microphones of her “mirror, mirror on the wall.”

“Herpes Gene Therapies Effective in Slowing, but Not Reversing, ‘Spider Rash,’ Experts Say.” Hmmm.

“Air taxi noise abatement ordinance passes Broward County Commission.” About time. The Regional Transportation folks will probably override it, though.

“Home PCR test for ‘Spider Rash’ virus expected to be available for drone delivery in two weeks, according to Regional Health authorities.” About damn time.

“Judges declare Lynn University’s ‘Synthetic Presidential Candidate’ winner of primary debate.” Sure. Just what we need. More A.I. fake politicians.

The final step in her pre-work beauty routine this morning would be for Lucy to pitter-patter in the two lines of lily-white dots, which looked like some kind of tribal decoration, under her eyes, just like the cheerful “pat-pat-pat” video lady was showing. Given that applying each dot had generated a simple news item, would patting them together quickly all at once make something really crazy appear? What freakish news would show if she defied the instructions and rubbed instead of patted?

“Careless #FloridaWoman causes airliner to crash into the Everglades.”

Hang on, hang on . . . that wasn’t me . . .

After her rich imagination began drifting down other pathways, Lucy grandiosely commanded, “Hey, mirror, pause the damn world” while reflecting approvingly on how three simple letters had become so powerful.

“H-e-y”

The three-lettered “wake” word wielded far more power in people’s lives than any four-lettered word ever could, to be sure. Devices of all kinds dutifully responded to it. She remembered how the personality-overflowing Gabi had demanded a butler’s name, something snooty-sounding like “hey, Jeeves” or “hey, Alfred,” to wake up the smart home’s various user interfaces to commands. “‘Hey, Oliver’ sounds so much better than ‘hey, toaster,’” she proclaimed with a stomp of her foot. Her oldest sibling, Romeo, Isabella’s twin, had then escalated the resulting...