David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“When I said you aren’t supposed to have that in here,” said Roxana, “I meant you aren’t supposed to be able to get transmitting electronics — any type or kind of transmitting electronic device — past the sally port in the lobby. This is a hardened, unwired facility.”

“Well, they didn’t look between the chicken salad sandwiches, okay?” said Leila, waggling the phone.

“Let me see that.”

Leila handed the phone to Roxana. Usually — all their lives — this had meant that the object would pass from Leila’s hands to Roxana’s feet. But since she was wearing the tester prosthetic, Roxana put out her graspy-whisk-on-a-desk-lamp thing. Leila, who had never once expressed discomfort with Roxana’s armlessness, shuddered a little as she handed the phone into her sister’s bionic prosthetic.

“Yeah, I know, it looks weird,” said Roxana. “The final product will be covered in fake skin or whatever. This is the mechanics.”

Leila was embarrassed to have been caught shuddering, and she saw now that the whisk thing was more like an ingenious paddle, with nesting, Teflon-coated wires forming a sort of cupped paw. Roxana could hold the little phone securely and even manipulate it more precisely than a human hand might.

But after a minute of close scrutiny, Roxana dropped the phone from her bionic paw and caught it with her feet. She felt the phone with her naked feet, the way you might feel a piece of fruit before eating it.

“I think I see how this phone got in the building,” she said. “It’s not electronic. There’s no signature. You sure this isn’t just, like, a gum dispenser?”

Despite the crack, Leila could see that Roxana was intrigued by the Nokia, and she kept it before her on her tall desk as she started back in on her screens.

“Okay, all I’m seeing is a strange deficit in the frequency that the words Dear Diary appear in Speechwave.”

“What’s speech wave?”

“Cool new software we got with foundation money. It samples daily human speech from all over the world, in real time.”

In real time? “Samples it from whom, Rox?”

“Everybody. You and me, probably. Whenever we pass through a collection point.”

Leila’s mouth must have dropped open a bit, because Roxana continued, “Oh, no. It’s not like that, Leila. There’s no risk to privacy. It’s deeply blinded; the data is completely severed from its source.”

Wow, and you’re supposed to be the genius in this family? thought Leila. But she said only, “So what’s so strange about the deficit?”

“It’s just strange. Statistically significant. Why are those and related words being used less frequently in the last five days? There’s also been less crying and more laughing. That’s correlated with anticipation.”

Wait. Since when are astronomy facilities in hardened, unwired buildings? thought Leila, suddenly looking around Roxana’s office. The door was four inches thick.

Then Roxana was consulting another screen. “Let me ask you this, sis,” she said. “Did these Dear Diary people do anything to you? Like, did they administer a test, or a substance? Were you disoriented at any point?”

“What are you working on here, Roxana?” asked Leila, partly to dodge the question, but also because it suddenly seemed germane. “I mean, in the LA County Large Array Facility? I thought you were working on something about content-free static grammars. You’re not an astronomer now, are you?”

“No. But I don’t think there’s even a telescope left in this building. Most of it’s leased to New Solutions. That’s who has the money for these nice computers. I get to use the computers to work on my thing, and I’m just expected to put in a few hours a week on one of their projects.”

“What’s that project?”

“Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell you.”

Leila made a really? face.

“I’m not. I signed papers about this.”

“What’s New Solutions?”

“They’re a pretty big IT contractor. I think they used to be called Blu Solutions/Logistics.”

“That’s a defense contractor, Roxana.” Leila was scolding her sister and had grounds to do so. Roxana had always kept on the other side of that line. She had turned down lots of money before. She wouldn’t work for the hackers either, though. She used to say it had to be real research; it had to be public. Everything she did, she wanted to go right in the public library.

“Okay, maybe,” conceded Roxana, suddenly defensive. “There is a lot of that around here. And you’re right — it’s not my scene. I don’t like not being able to talk about what I do. But it’s not like anyone ever understood me before. Of course I liked SNARC better. I’ll probably go back there. I was at SNARC, not PARC, by the way. PARC is in Palo Alto, not Pasadena. And my thing, the thing I’m working on like forty hours a week, is context-free stochastic grammars. You never pay attention to my career either.”

Fair point, thought Leila. SNARC, the I am Jim’s sandwich place.

Roxana was doing more justifying and rationalizing: “This is a one-year fellowship. The money is…good. I can pull more data here than I can anywhere else. Anyway, the thing they want me to help them with is totally good.”

“The thing you can’t talk about?”

“Well, the software is classified. But the application, Leila…”

Leila waited. She just knew her sister was going to blab.

“It’s a gaze-capture device,” said Roxana proudly. “A screen you work with your eyes.”

“You’ve been typing on one of those for years.”

“Yeah. Typing . Big whoop. This thing helps thoughts come out .”

Leila looked blankly at her sister.

“Leila, I may be like this”—she straightened up in her chair, to display her disability—“but I feel lucky when I think of the people locked in. Cord injury, Parkinson’s, the myelin-sheath disorders. This machine could give those people a new way out.”

“There are other things that machine could do, Roxana,” said Leila. “How far along are you guys?”

“We’re there, pretty much. We’ve built one. But it draws a ridiculous amount of energy. I think maybe that’s why the fifty-tesla magnet on the third floor, actually. But the people working on that part say they may have found a way. They have a device they’ve been trying to reverse-engineer for months. They want my help with that too, but they’re super-cloak-and-dagger about it — like, I would have to sign still more papers. I told them to find someone else.”

Then both women jumped in their chairs, because the Dear Diary phone rang, loudly, with one of those skeuomorphic old-timey rings, and vibrated too, and scattled across the broad laminate surface of Roxana’s desk. Roxana picked up the phone with her foot.

“Who is it?” asked Leila.

Roxana brought the phone to her face, squinted at the little screen. “Sarah Tonin?” she said.

Leila grabbed the phone from her sister’s left foot, pressed ACCEPT.

“Sarah?” she said into it.

“Yes. Lola?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you talk?”

Annoying to be asked that when you’ve been trying to get in touch with them for days.

“Um, yes. Hold on.” She put the phone to her chest. “Roxana, do you mind?”

It took Roxana a moment to understand. “You want me to leave my own office?”

“Do you mind? Five minutes. Please.”

Roxana got up and left, huffily.

When she’d gone, Leila said, “What the fuck, Sarah? Why’d you guys go quiet on me. I have a lot of questions.”

“It’s not just on you, Lola. When the network can’t carry signals securely, it won’t carry them. That’s just protocol. You’re in LA. It’s pretty wired up there. Not a lot of green space. Sometimes you get only about an hour a day of secure transmission out there, usually late at night. The equipment we use…it cycles, you know? Like breezes do; like tides. What happened with Crane in Portland?”