AFTER he finished reading her article, “I remember that kid,” was all Rodney would say to Ally for the rest of the afternoon. She found her own way back down the hill while he smoked.
“Good morning, madame.”
The voice came from the doorway, and when Mercedes slipped out of her room and into the hallway, she could see that the person on the other side of their threshold was wearing a mask and a yellow protective suit. Her voice sounded filtered, like it was coming through broken speakers. Nobody had come to their door since the start of hurricane season brought red dust up from the mid-Atlantic and the coastal South through their corner of New England and poisoned the water and coated everything not already covered in splashes of copper.
Abuela had on a mask when she opened the door and the other person, a woman, had in her hands a tablet. Instantly, the music in the apartment shut off. Abuela hadn’t moved. With a start, Mercedes realized the other woman must have done it.
“I’m from the community residents’ association,” the woman said in Castilian Spanish. “I’m delivering a notice that someone from Unit 112 in Residence Court returned from outside the city limits yesterday and will be quarantined for fourteen days. The committee is requesting that you and everyone in your household not walk around in the community if you can afford not to. For all essential travel, please take precautions, bring your pass, and register your travel with the association. We’ll take your temperature upon your return.” When she said that last part, Mercedes saw her smiling kindly behind her face shield.
“Poor thing,” Mami said from behind Mercedes. “Her throat sounds so dry.” Before Cedes could suggest they get her something to drink, her mother said, “It’s probably been a while since she’s been oiled.” She put her hand to the back of Mercedes’s head and turned her away from the door, just as the woman in the protective suit considered her tablet and read through all of the family’s data: names and ID numbers of each family member, mobile numbers for each comms device and who they belonged to, even the landlord’s details.
“Has anyone in this household been in contact with anyone from Hartford County? Has anyone in this household returned to New Haven from a county other than New Haven County?”
“What if someone lies?” Mercedes asked her mother.
“You can’t lie to them.” She shook her head with knowledge that Mercedes could only guess at. “You can’t hide. Not from them. Come, let’s go talk to your uncles.”
IT took no time for Mercedes to trick out her Friends app to show her the health status codes of her Close Friends. Everybody in her school who was smart enough did it and with the semester fucked up the way it was, there was nothing to do but mess around with all these apps the government was already using to track your info.
Her back on the rug in her room, Abuela’s Bad Bunny blasting through the walls of her sound-dimmed room, she swiped through the holos her friends had uploaded of custom-made masks and shutdown memes. For each username that showed, a notification of their health status slipped across her screen. Green for “nothing abnormal here,” orange for “home quarantine,” and red for “quarantined at approved facility.”
“Yeah, it was so stupid,” Mercedes said to the holo of Angelica hovering in front of her face. “Tasha was literally just going on a jog for training, and she was still in the dome. But you know how her family lives right on the border with—yeah, so she was just jogging. Didn’t see anyone, didn’t touch anyone. And she said the route had been decontaminated literally a day ago. But when she got back to the apartment, the machine at the entrance said”—she changed her voice to sound like a droid—“‘Your record shows you left New Haven today; please quarantine for fourteen days.’ Like, what kind of bullshit is that? Her health code went yellow just like that. And now she can’t even come over to visit anymore.”
“You think your mom would let her over?”
“Mami’s not the problem. And Grandma wouldn’t tell or anything, but there’s security everywhere, you know? Ugh, this is what happens when your building’s full of white people. All of a sudden, everyone cares about your health.”
Angelica’s voice lowered. “They started doing door-to-doors in our building too. And there are Augies all over. Like patrols. It’s like police everywhere. Fucking Boston Dynamics logos everywhere. I swear to God, if I see another one, I’m gonna scream.”
Mercedes thought about what that must be like, all that activity in and around one’s building. Even if it was mostly machines, it would’ve been something. It might’ve meant hearing new voices or unfamiliar footfalls outside or even just seeing anyone who wasn’t trapped indoors with you. Here, it was quiet. So much quiet, except whenever Abuela would play her reggaeton records. She used to be like this even when they were doing in-person schooling before the campus got shut down for the storm. And Mami said that Abuela would leave the player running on purpose even when she was out with her friends, and when Mercedes had asked why, Mami had said Abuela did it to feel like there was someone other than her in the house when she got back. And Mercedes remembered feeling lonely, hearing that.
There was shouting in another room. Mercedes turned her head lazily.
“What is it?” Angelica asked.
Mercedes sighed. “A kid who went to school in Westport came back to New Haven, and Abuela and all of her friend group get into this daily shouting match about that boy bringing la monga into the building.”
“He’s white?”
“You already know,” Mercedes said with her face.
“How are they the ones with all the money and all the disease? It’s like there’s not even a dome over there.”
Mercedes let her gaze wander. “Abuela says just shoot all the gringos up into space and leave the rest of us in peace.”
They talked well into the night, and all the while, Mercedes watched the health status codes of her friends and the people she followed flit through her screen: green, yellow, green, yellow, yellow, red, green.
“OKAY, so I’m totally not supposed to be here,” said the boy in the livestream, “but fuck it, I’m going in.” He moved by tiptoe, or at least, that’s what it felt like, what he was seeing transmitted via his braincase into the app Mercedes was now staring at while she forked mofongo into her mouth at the kitchen table.
He passed through a threshold into darkness, then arrived at another that had LED lights beaded in an arc over it. A glimpse of his reflection in metal revealed that he held a piece of metal in his jaw, and when he passed through the threshold, a number beeped with a reading in Fahrenheit. Something thrilled in Mercedes watching this boy fake his own body temperature with what must be an implant. Whatever it was also seemed to coat him in permissions from the surveillance orbs embedded as hemispheres in the corridor ceiling.
“We’re getting closer. It’s wild chill in here. There’s, like, no one. It’s totally empty, but there’s probably a couple Crabs, and I got something for them.” He looked down at his waist, where a small EMP hanging from his belt let out a theatrical sizzle.
“The fuck is he doing?” Mercedes murmured around her plantains. If that thing were to go off and not be calibrated properly, it would likely shut down the entire room, which definitely looked like somewhere important.
Then he got to the space, which seemed like it was too big to fit inside whatever building he’d been walking through. It was clear just from his quick panorama that it was some sort of control room. Like he somehow predicted, the room was empty, but the hum of machines operating could be heard even through her phone. Monitors blanketed the walls like wallpaper, each showing a different slice of domestic life: grocery delivery, an argument, watering plants, untangling wires behind an old TV set, head nodding to music, someone with their head in their hands at a kitchen counter worrying over bills, someone drinking in sorrow, someone drinking in celebration.
“Whoa,” said the kid.
Then he looked down, and even Mercedes let out a gasp.
The floor he stood on was a floor plan of an apartment complex, and while the monitors on the wall seemed set to whatever the nearest terminal told them to record, his foot placement would call up a scene from the unit he’d stepped on. Whatever the camera or cameras there had recorded, and with each person that shimmered in holographic blue came an array of data in red.
“Oh my god,” breathed the kid, peering into the holographic eyes of a mother frozen in the act of balancing an infant against her shoulder while reaching for something out of frame.
The holo showed the woman’s age, her degree of cyberization, then, beside that, spilled the household data. The names, ages, jobs of everyone under that roof. Even their Flex details.
The boy took a couple steps forward and saw another projection and another, a malicious smirk on his face as he noted who lived in their apartment and who rented theirs out, which apartments had elderly people in them, whether the women in each unit had organic or fake uteruses, the dating apps the single and married people used, who, living there, was using a housing voucher.
A whooshing sound, and Mercedes slammed her phone on the table, startled. She’d had her pods in. Somebody could’ve snuck up behind her to see what she was seeing. There was no one around, but the door to their unit had slid open. Mercedes took out her pods, closed the app she’d been using, and walked to the door to find her abuelita, masked up, standing across the threshold from what Mercedes now recognized was the woman from the community residents’ association.
Behind the woman, in the building’s courtyard, a few people walked the paths around the stone gardens and kids waved their pinwheels and one of them even tried to fly a kite. Everyone wore masks, even though not a single mote of dust caught in the sun’s rays was red.
Mercedes heard Abuela joke about the protective suit the woman had worn the last time they’d seen her. Now she had on a flower-patterned romper, her legs hairless the way a mannequin’s were. She still wore a mask, though.
The woman peeked over Abuela’s shoulder to stare directly at Mercedes, as though she’d known her exact position the whole time. “Señora, could you take our picture?”
Mercedes almost whispered, “What” before she caught the vibe from her abuela that she needed to move, so she went back to the table and fetched her Flex, realizing in the moment that the woman was clocking the fact that Mercedes wasn’t taking the picture with her eyes and therefore didn’t possess a braincase. The woman had a thermometer aimed at Abuela’s wrist and made Mercedes stand close enough that she could get a shot of both of them smiling at the camera in that pose. Her fingers were sweaty on her screen, and it took her a few tries, and with each try, the woman retook Abuela’s temperature.
