running and could be browsed on what had replaced it, which was too ubiquitous even to have a name. In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”
“You can’t possibly remember … Patricia … or John,” Julian ventured, “but you must remember Alice.”
“Grandma Alice died when I was twelve,” Sophia confirmed.
“And she and John and Patricia are all buried …”
“Where we are going,” Sophia said. “Yeah.”
At last they had reached the entrance of the Walmart—or to be precise, one of its entrances, since it had been hacked up into a number of quasi-distinct storefronts. They got inside and just stood there for a few moments, allowing their bodies to recalibrate in the air-conditioning. Then they split up. Sophia and Anne-Solenne figured out how to buy flowers. Phil and Julian ransacked the snack aisle. Somewhere along the line Phil also picked up a tactical camo baseball cap, Levitican compliant. Having paid for their stuff, they went out and got back in the car. Tom and Kevin had peeled off and checked into a motel across the street and so they drove the last few miles into town without an escort.
Anne-Solenne shifted the flowers in her lap. “As long as we’re talking about dead Forthrasts,” she said, “where’d you-know-who end up? His fate is shrouded in mystery.”
“No it isn’t,” Julian said, in the somewhat halting and breathy tone indicative of browsing and talking at the same time, “he died in—”
“I know when he died,” Anne-Solenne said. “But because Sophia’s from the weirdest family in the whole universe, that’s different from his fate.”
“We’re breathing him,” Sophia announced. That silenced the Land Cruiser for a little, and even caused Phil to push his glasses up on his head.
“His molecules, you mean?” Phil guessed.
“Atoms, more like,” said Julian, getting the drift.
“So he was finally cremated?” Anne-Solenne guessed.
“He was cremated one ion at a time, by a particle beam scanning his cryogenically preserved remains.”
“Probably a good thing,” Phil mused, “otherwise the data—”
“Could be anywhere,” Sophia said with a nod and a glance back in the mirror. “Yeah. I guess sometimes it’s better to wait.”
Anne-Solenne was still stuck on We’re breathing him. “I never thought of it like that,” she said, “but I guess the scanning process would generate—I don’t know—”
“Exhaust,” Sophia said. “Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium. Theoretically you could capture the solids and hand it to the family in a baggie, but why?”
“So they just—”
“Blow it out a pipe into the sky,” Sophia confirmed. “Given that it was Seattle, it was probably mixed with rain five minutes later, running through the storm sewers into Puget Sound.”
“Which is no different from cremation,” Julian hastened to add, in his ponderous East Coast way. “Crematoria have smokestacks. We just prefer not to think about the implications.”
This venture into the New Eschatology was cut short by their arrival in the small northwest Iowa town that the Forthrasts came from. And for people accustomed to the gradual penetration of vast cities, from the airport inward, arriving in that sort of town was jarringly abrupt. Suddenly they were just there—as there as they were ever going to get. The town had a central square: a single block planted in grass, with a vaguely medieval stone tower rising from the middle, and, flanking it, a statue each for veterans of the Civil and the Great Wars. A couple of huge deciduous trees cast shade over roughly circular areas, but the scattering of moms who had convened here to let their kids run around preferred to hang out under a shelter where they could sit at picnic tables. Across the street on one side was a courthouse and police station in rustic Victorian sandstone, with a broken clock in its central tower. Two sides formed an L-shaped district of indolent businesses. The fourth side was residential. Thirty seconds earlier they had been driving through cornfields, and if Sophia hadn’t piloted the Land Cruiser into one of the angle-parking spaces along the square, they’d have been back in the corn thirty seconds later. “Leg stretch,” she announced, “and I’m gonna turn off my cloaking device just so these people know what to make of us.”
They had drawn curious looks from the moms in the park and some old-timers in a barbershop near their parking space. But, at a rough guess, half of the locals were wearing glasses, not merely to correct their vision but to fortify everything with data. Grandma Alice had liked to repeat an old joke that in a town like this, you didn’t need to use your turn signals because everyone knew where you were going. It had become less and more true since she had died. Less because cars now made up their own minds as to when the blinkers should be put on, and more because you really could know everyone’s business now, in a way that the small-town busybodies of Alice’s generation could only have aspired to. The open and trusting culture of communities such as this one had carried over to the digital age. If you had a ten A.M. appointment with the physical therapist, everyone in town could know as much by checking your calendar, which could be accomplished just by looking hard enough at a widget floating above the car that was driving you there. Consequently, cars in a town like this, when seen through glasses, looked somewhat like old-timey sailing ships festooned with signal flags and aflutter with banners.
This all had to do with editors. If you were the kind of person who was enrolled at Princeton, you tended to speak of them as if they were individual human beings. The Toms and Kevins of the world, and most of the population of this town, were more likely to club together and subscribe to collective edit streams. Between those extremes was a sliding scale. Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information. For way less money you could buy into a fractional scheme, which was still very much a rich-person thing to do but worked okay for the 1 percent as opposed to the 0.001 percent. That was about where Sophia, Phil, and Anne-Solenne sat. Julian was stuck with his family’s editor until such time as he went out and made a pile of money. Had he been unable to afford even that—had he been a full-ride financial-aid student—Princeton would have supplied him with a fairly decent editor as part of the same package that gave him room, board, and a library card. It paid off for the university in the long run not to have its less well-heeled students disgorging flumes of sensitive data into the public eye.
Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates—who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.
The more important and high-judgment role played by her editor was to look at any data coming the other way—sound and imagery captured by her glasses, for example—and make sure it never found its way into the wrong hands. Which basically meant it never went anywhere at all.
Maybe a few times a year, Sophia actually talked to her editor. This was one of those times. “I authorize you to put me in Family Reunion Mode for twenty-four hours,” she said.
“Okay,” replied her editor with an It’s your funeral