The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“Aw, grand Dad,” she says soft and faraway and grateful. She tries to sound like it’s all covered, skin grafts etc but it can’t be covered, it can never be covered. You see she was confident, she was sussed, and I’m scared. I’m scared it will make her timid when she used to be so up front.

All I can say is, “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, you’re the Brewster. Nothing gets you down.”

“We’re going to get him for you, babe,” I promise.

I retrieve my transcoder, which is a more delicate operation than sticking it was. I get my glasses back and go to Jazza’s room because I want to use his station to hack. Never put an old hack back from the same place. I go to his room but he’s not there. I keep the lights low, and make like I’m loading my pro golf program onto his machine. Money starts flowing back into my account but from a different source this time.

After a while I ask: where is Jazza?

I go back to the bar. My crew’s not there. Neither is Jazza. Oh god, he’s wandered again.

I get worried; I turn on his terminal to trace his bracelet. It’s pumping out signals. It’s coming from the shower. But there’s no shower running.

At our age, you’re always thinking in the back of your head: who’s going to go next? And I’m thinking maybe this time it’s Jazza. I can just about see him crumpled up on the floor. So I go to that shower with everything in my chest all shrivelled shut like a fist. I turn on the light, and there’s no Jazza there.

Just his bracelet on the shower floor.

Oh fuck. I push the buzzer. It seems to take an age. They’ve done these experiments that show why we always think a second is longer than it really is. The brain is always anticipating. It starts measuring time from the thought, not the vision. So I cling on to the buzzer saying come on, come on.

I think of all those times I check Jazza’s buzzer before going to bed. Jazza nice, and secure in his bed, it shows, or Jazza happy in the shower.

Has he done this before? You see Alzheimer’s, they wander off, they try to buy ice cream in the middle of the night in a suburb or they pack a couple of telephone directories and go catch a plane. They don’t understand, they feel trapped, sometimes they get frustrated and start to punch. They disappear and leave you to worry and grieve and hope all at the same time.

“We find him, don’t worry Mr. Brewster,” says the Kid.

So I see them, on the lawn, with flashlights. A light little feather duster of a thought brushes past me: the ordnance is turned off. The lights dance around the trees. The bricks in the wall are lit from underneath like a Halloween face.

Nothing.

I haul myself off to bed, and the callipers are really doing it to the side of my knees, scraping the skin, and I’m old and I just don’t sleep. Here in the Happy Farm there aren’t even passing car lights on the ceiling to look at. There’s only walls, and what’s up ahead, closer now. At night.

When you’re old you got a few things left and one of them is your promises. You can keep a promise as slow as you like, and as fast as you can, just so long as you don’t give up. I promised Bessie. I turn on my machine and hack.

Who knows SecureIT like me? Well, it’s been a few years. I get to work through a whole new bunch of stuff, but I do get into the Human Resource files. I mean, who would want to hack personnel, right? Just everybody.

And I go through every name, every face, every voiceprint recording. I see a face, I know it, but only sort of. I know that girl, sort of. She went and got a patent out on a new polymer, then joined. Real scholarly, real pretty, real nice legs. And I realise hell, she’ll be 40 now. She left years and years ago. After I did.

I see some old guy like me, pouchy cheeks and glasses and I can’t place him at all, except there’s a weird sensation in my chest, like I’m a time traveller. I used to say hi to that face every day.

One after another after another. Who are these people, being replaced?

One guy I knew now heads up a department. What? He was nothing. He was a plodder. Guess what? That’s who becomes head of the department.

I look a skinny, hollow staring scared face and I suddenly realise, shoot, that’s Tommy. Tommy was a nice young kid who taught himself to program, he had talent. Now he’s staring out at me wide-eyed with creases round his mouth like he’s been surprised by something. Like failure, like going nowhere. It makes me want to get in there and sort it out, and tell them, no you got it wrong, this guy’s got talent, you’re supposed to use it for something!

It makes me want to show up again every day at 8:00 am, and work my butt off, and take the kids out for a drink. It makes me want to make something happen again, even if it’s just in some little job in an office.

And I look at face after face and there is no Silhouette. There just is no Silhouette.

And then I find my own record. I see my own face staring out at me. Hey, maybe that guy’s Silhouette.